Free Republic

It’s pretty clear that both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are running neck and neck in their race for the presidency. But when it comes to asking voters about who would do a better job in the White House fixing their major concerns, Trump has a commanding lead, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows. Biden is in trouble. For January’s online national I&I/TIPP Poll, taken Jan. 3-5 from among 1,401 adults, registered voters were asked “who would you say has better policies” for each of seven key issues: “reducing taxes,” “effectively handling the immigration and border security situation,”...

The number of rental units in the Argentine capital, Buenos Aires, has doubled, and prices fell by 20 percent following President Javier Milei's historic decree deregulating Argentina's economy. “In December, after Milei's announcement, that number doubled. Today, we have a stock of more than 800 apartments, and it grows every day,” said Alejandro Bennazar, director of Institutional Relations at the CIA.The newspaper's report details that the greater supply of units, together with the possibility of freely negotiating a contract between the parties, which was impossible with the previous regulation, had a direct impact on the drop in prices.“If the update...

“Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.” — Thomas Sowell. “Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.” — Thomas Sowell Historians of the future, poaching ‘possum snouts in sorrel sauce over their campfires, will trace the fall of Western Civ in the 2020s to the dissolving hallucination that was called the financial economy. It was a phantom parasitical organism that thrived on...

House Bill 24, the Idaho Launch bill, passed the House yesterday afternoon by a razor-thin margin after more than an hour of spirited debate. Rep. Megan Blanksma is the House sponsor, but Governor Little has been the driving force behind this bill, which would expand the existing Idaho Launch Grant program, providing $8,500 per high school graduate ($102 million overall) for technical education and workforce training. Idaho Freedom Foundation strongly opposes this bill because it significantly expands a government program, subsidizes corporate training programs, and distributes money to certain industries as determined by the unelected Workforce Development Council. Opponents of...

During the 2020 “pandemic,” America learned a new concept: “essential workers.” Governments took it upon themselves to decide who was important, or at least, important enough to remain at work while other businesses were being unconstitutionally shuttered for days, for weeks, for months, and in far too many cases, forever. What we soon learned – those for whom it wasn’t obvious from the start, that is – was that in fact, all jobs are essential. Our economy is the most complex of symbiotic relationships, as all the cogs of our economic engine work together for the greater good. In 2020,...

Free trade and open markets are great ideals. These principles, over the last few centuries, but especially since World War II, have created tremendous wealth, particularly in the developing world. But free markets were made for human society, not the other way around. Many thinkers on the right, however, have embraced a form of free-market fundamentalism that’s as ideologically brittle, entrenched, and impervious to critique as any Leftist vision of social utopia. These doctrinaire free-marketers believe that if China seeks to capture a huge industry like telecommunications through subsidies and protect their market, that will benefit us all. “Huawei’s a...

The 21st century so far hasn’t been the best of times for America. First 9/11, then a financial crisis and deep recession, then a global pandemic without recent precedent. The economy has suffered, and politics has been upended. American self-confidence has been badly bruised, and public trust in institutions has plummeted. What can we do about it? That’s the question that John Cogan and Kevin Warsh, both policy veterans and Journal contributors, asked themselves in September 2020 when prompted by former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. She had just taken over as director of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, where both...

Tunis (AFP) – Tunisian President Kais Saied declared war Wednesday on food speculators amid a shortage of products such as wheat and semolina -- key staples in a country already mired in a political-economic crisis. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has threatened supplies of basic foodstuffs, particularly wheat, which many Arab countries chiefly import from the two eastern European nations. Saied announced that he was launching a "relentless war on speculators and criminals", accusing them of seeking to "strike at social peace and security", in statement from the presidency. Saied had previously announced he was working on legislation introducing prison sentences...

President Donald Trump took a lot of heat from the mainstream, business and free-market Republicans for implementing tariffs against China and other countries. The common criticism was that it was a populist, anti-free market move. They pointed to it as evidence that he is a populist, not a conservative (I recently addressed the differences between populists and conservatives, showing the accusation to be a red herring). The MSM jumped on it even more, declaring — as if they are the authority — that Trump was going against Republicans. Was he? Look at history. The Founding Fathers imposed tariffs. The first...

Do you remember Armand Hammer? If you're over 50, you may. Hammer was a business tycoon who died in 1990. He was most famous for his deal-making with the Soviet Union. Hammer would cut business deals directly with the Kremlin. This was unusual; most U.S. businesses had very few dealings with America's greatest adversary. Today, by contrast, many American multinational businesses see their growth as much or more tied to China, our new primary adversary, as they do to America. I began my career as a young lawyer on a special congressional committee set up to investigate the transfer of...

Many earnest but ill-informed Americans legitimately wonder how the economy could have done so well under former President Donald Trump yet go spectacularly south in such a short time under President Joe Biden. The answer to that question is straightforward. Trump doesn't believe that the government should run the economy. Biden and his puppet masters think the government should run the economy, and that they should run the government. They're wrong. There are at least two good reasons why no individual or small cadre of people should "run" the economy: First, people are frequently wrong, even in subjects they know...

NEW YORK, NY—Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the world’s smartest socialist, is always talking about the evils of capitalism. Now tragedy has struck her with what she sees as a clear failure of that economic system: She has accidentally super-glued her face to her coffee table. “See what capitalism has done to me?!” Ocasio-Cortez told the press who had to meet her in her living room, since she couldn’t leave because a coffee table was glued to her head. “I had broken apart a vase I bought, to see if there was a prize inside — there wasn’t — and then I...

The U.S. economy peaked in late 2019 at $21 trillion. We are now remarkably 98 percent back to where we were before the terrible COVID-19 pandemic slammed these shores 14 months ago. This rebound is one of the outstanding U.S. achievements in history. Since June of last year, the economy has rocketed by 34 percent in quarter 3 of 2020, 4.2 percent in quarter 4 of 2020 and now 6.4 percent in the first three months of 2021. So far in this current quarter, growth is more than 10 percent.Almost no one expected this. The Federal Reserve Board, the Congressional...

The Democrats and many "Progressives" promise to increase the minimum wage to $15/hr. A recent street survey of some (really stupid) people suggests there are some out there who think $50/hr would be a "good" minimum wage. Really? Back in 1972 George McGovern was running for President. He had a photo op with Cesar Chevez, who was trying to get a wage increases for the lettuce pickers. McGovern voewed not to eat another salad until Chevez won his wage increase. A Sociology prof I worked with came in and told me what a great idea McGovern's boycott was. Stupid... The...

Adam Smith wasn't a flawless man, but it's intellectually dishonest to associate Smith with slavery and oppression while ignoring his actual writings.Today’s cancel culture won’t let death set anyone free from condemnation. News from Scotland reports the Edinburgh City Council added Adam Smith’s gravesite to a database of sites linked to “slavery and colonialism.” The Telegraph relays the council took this drastic action after it “launched a review of sites which ‘perpetuated racism and oppression’ following last year’s Black Lives Matter protests, with the option of ‘removal or re-interpretation’ for problematic monuments.” Sir Geoff Palmer, a professor emeritus at Heriot-Watt...

After winter storms continued to barrage the state Tuesday night, officials with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the body overseeing the grid that serves 90 percent of the state’s homes, couldn’t offer a timeline for when power for every Texan would be restored. Over the long weekend, the council had advised local utilities to shed energy use with rolling outages in order to maintain the reliability of the electric system after a surge in demand, or otherwise risk uncontrolled blackouts that will take longer to reverse. Some four million homes in the state had been left in the...

“America’s prosperity was not a gift from the government or anyone else. Free enterprise, not government, is the source from which our blessings flow.” I think that this quote by Ronald Reagan on prosperity just about perfectly sums up why we need to be mindful of government promises of prosperity. Yes, the government can implement policies that don’t constrain citizen action enough to limit wealth creation too much and we should always support politicians that promise those policies. But, frankly, any government action will only hurt the economy. The government might be here to help, but it’s like your idiot...

In a mad scramble to shore up the senior vote before November's election, President Trump recently signed an executive order that would drop Medicare payments for many prescription medicines to the lowest price paid in other developed nations. Given the haste with which the president crammed through this plan, it should come as no surprise that the policy is myopic at best and downright reckless at worst. Yes, foreign governments pay less for drugs than we do in the United States. But President Trump fails to consider exactly why prices are lower overseas. Many other countries unilaterally dictate how much...

The previous article, Wealth is Created, leads us perfectly to this post. Some of the ideas in this article are from chapter two of Organic Wealth fittingly entitled, Equal Transactions. I’m not going to give away all the gold here; there’s much more that’s left out of this article. But please keep reading for enough nuggets for some mind blowing revelation. Free market capitalism produces new wealth. To put it another way, the so-called wealth pie just gets bigger. The reason the wealth pie grows is because our economic system is based on equal transactions. Just the idea that...

Did you know that the consumption of the poorest 20 percent of Americans is roughly equal to that of the average Dutch or French person, and higher than that of the average Brit, Swede, Dane, or Japanese person? Our poor people are richer than the middle class of most nations! But how do we keep it that way?  Capitalism has allowed our nation to prosper. But it is always being pulled in different directions, usually to the left, as the government intervenes by increasing taxes, spending and regulations. America is being taken over by cronyism, which is based on connections...