Free Republic

Rep. Jonathan Jackson (D-IL) went on MSNBC's "Way Too Early" show to say "Trump's emphasis on making government more efficient is a heartless attack on people who depend on government generosity to live. America is a rich country. The surplus of wealth produced by those who are capable should be redistributed to those who have needs. This was the crux of former President Lyndon Johnson's idea of the 'Great Society.' Three generations of Americans have adapted to this process and cannot survive on their own. This includes both the folks receiving the handouts and the government employees who administer the...

“Ponzi Scheme” is a term that was coined about 100 years ago. It was named after an Italian immigrant, Charles Ponzi, who realized he could get investors by promising large returns for undefined, high-yield investments. His endeavor needed to make just enough money to keep attracting new investors, whose money, after Ponzi’s cut, was used to pay some of the earlier investors. In our modern day, Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme resulted in losses in the billions of dollars when the stock market tanked during the Great Recession. Selling the Deal Americans are just beginning to see the tip of the...

Meet historical fascism’s true heirs.In the famous anecdote usually attributed to Bertrand Russel, a scientist lecturing on the earth’s position in the solar system is corrected an old lady who says the earth is actually supported by a giant turtle. When the scientist asked what supports the turtle, she triumphally answered, “It’s turtles all the way down!”Since the Twenties and the rise of Italian Fascism and German Nazism––which eventually become the main referent of the word––the term has become an all-purpose question-begging epithet so promiscuously abused in the Thirties that, as George Orwell said in 1944, “The word Fascism has...

Most Black adults say the prison (74%), political (67%) and economic (65%) systems in the U.S., among others, are designed to hold Black people back, according to a new Pew Research Center survey in September 2023. For example, 82% of Black adults say they have heard the following racial conspiracy theory about the prison system: Black people are more likely than White people to be incarcerated because prisons want to make money on the backs of Black people. Many Black adults (74%) say this racial conspiracy theory is true and happening in the U.S. today. For this report, we surveyed...

“… in 1966, a political revolution emerged in America that would have a massive impact on millions of families and marriages. The man behind it was President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who reached the White House amid a national tragedy but grabbed the reins of power quickly and purposefully, bent on transforming the country. Though he is lionized in popular culture these days, it is worth asking whether the celebratory tone accurately reflects the results of his revolution, at least in terms of his massive Great Society.” ……. “Johnson incorporated Moynihan’s study into a speech at Washington’s Howard University that suggested...

For anyone who had a parent, grandparent, or great grandparent receive benefits of any kind from the LBJ 'Great Society" handouts (over $10 trillion and counting) they repay for the benefits received by their ancestors from which they now benefit. Say, up to 5% of gross income until the $10 trillion is paid back. Seems just as fair as 'reparations'...

The new American way of life... For a guy and his girlfriend with two kids, all you have to do is follow these proven steps: 1. Don't marry her! 2. Always use your mom's address to get your mail. 3. The guy buys a house. 4. The guy rents out the house to his girlfriend with his two kids. 5. Section 8 will pay $900 a month for a 3 bedroom home. 6. Girlfriend signs up for Obamacare, so the guy doesn't have to pay for family insurance. 7. Girlfriend gets to go to college for free for being a...

Ronald Reagan speaking out against the growth of government, the Great Society, and all related matters.

University of Miami journalism professor Tsitsi Wakhisi remembers Trayvon Martin. Ten years ago, Sybrina Fulton joined the Black mothers’ crying line. She had lost her 17-year-old son, Trayvon, after he had walked too slowly in the rain at his father’s housing complex in Sanford. It made his killer, George Zimmerman, think he was “suspicious.” Since then, more Black mothers have joined Fulton in the crying line, and still more are coming. But Black mothers have been crying for centuries, mourning the sons they got … but did not get to keep. Not in America. Whether slave owners yanked your child...

The Democrats’ $3.5 trillion proposal to expand the U.S. safety net is being described as a make-or-break moment for the Biden presidency. Regarding electoral politics in the short term, that may well be true. But some of us are more concerned about what it could mean for the country beyond the next election or two. Liberals view a larger welfare state as an unalloyed good, but what’s the track record? Entitlement programs were dramatically expanded in the 1960s in the service of a war on poverty, yet poverty fell at a slower rate after the Great Society initiatives were implemented,...

A weak economy, high unemployment rates, failing schools, and high child poverty levels all plagued Cleveland in 1982. Those same issues remain in 2020, laid barer by the coronavirus pandemic that limited access to social services and increased social isolation that devastated people’s mental health. The two years are linked because they represent the worst two years in recent history for deadly violence in Cleveland. The city hit 185 homicides on Dec. 20, the most in a single year since 1982 when the city hit 195 homicides and when nearly 200,000 more people called the city home. The homicide rate...

In 1857, the Supreme Court, with 7 of the 9 Justices being Democrat, decided that Dred Scott was not a citizen, but property. Chief Justice Roger Taney was appointed by the first Democrat President, Andrew Jackson. Taney wrote in his Dred Scott decision that slaves were "so far inferior ... that the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for their own benefit." Abraham Lincoln rejected this. He did not believe in "stare decisis" - that he had to honor the precedent of the Dred Scott decision, stating June 28, 1857: "We think the Dred Scott decision is...

In the last Presidential election, Donald Trump was lauded for his performance among black voters – he scored 4 percent of female black voters and a whopping 13 percent of black male voters, the highest since Richard Nixon. This isn’t shocking. Black voters have voted en masse for the Democratic Party since the mid-60s and the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and the social welfare programs of the Great Society. This solidified black voters behind the Democratic Party, but they had been moving there since the New Deal. However, it’s a historical anomaly in...

I know the democrats don't teach the truth about Marxism/socialism in school but they can google it now. Perhaps educated and privileged blacks like Senator Booker could set up workshops teaching the truth about freedom vs socialism in the inner cities. And possibly workshops to teach job skills so these people can raise themselves out of poverty and crime.

—Sargent Shriver, brother in law of JFK and the “architect” of the “War on Poverty,” to socialist Michael Harrington (who wanted much, much more of the American taxpayers’ dollars), 1964. Amity Shlaes’ newest book, Great Society: A New History is a sequel to her two studies of 1930s and 1920s, 2007’s The Forgotten Man, and 2013’s Coolidge. The eponymous Forgotten Man was the taxpayer, the man footing the bill to fund FDR’s New Deal. As a UCLA press release explained in 2004, “FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate.” Even socialist Roosevelt worshiper Paul Krugman has been...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru4SVUlNfMY

In Great Society: A New History, Amity Shlaes revisits the welfare programs of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations to show not only how misguided they were but also what a warning they present to those who wish to resurrect and extend such programs. “The contest between capitalism and socialism is on again,” the author writes in her introduction. Despite the Trump administration’s thriving economy, or perhaps because of it, Democratic Party progressives are calling for new welfare programs even more radical than those advocated in the 1960s by the socialist architect of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, Michael Harrington....

In Changes in Family Structure and Welfare Participation Since the 1960s: The Role of Legal Services, (NBER Working Paper 26238) Andrew Goodman-Bacon and Jamein P. Cunningham investigate the contribution of low-income communities' access to legal services — enabled by the rollout of the War on Poverty's Legal Services Program (LSP) — as a driver of these changes. Their findings suggest that the program played a central role in changes in family structure and welfare participation of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s. The LSP sharply increased the availability of free legal consultation for low-income households. LSP attorneys could assist with divorce...

How can government get rid of poverty? It’s a question that gets asked not in a society where almost everyone is poor but in one giddy with surging growth and concerned about those who seem left behind—a society whose leaders have “an almost mystical belief in the infinite potentials of American society.” Those are the words of Paul Jacobs, a prominent left-wing journalist and activist a half-century ago, quoted by Amity Shlaes in “Great Society: A New History.” Just as she presented a skeptical alternative to New Deal historians’ accounts of the 1930s in “The Forgotten Man” (2007), Ms. Shlaes...

Fifty years separate us today from 1968 and the two momentous legacies of the then failed presidency of Lyndon Johnson: The declaring of war on America's supposed domestic ills in the form of the "Great Society" programs, and the aggressive military intervention in a real war in Vietnam. Both of these "wars" reflected the arrogance and hubris of the social engineer who believes that he has the power and ability to remake and direct society in his own preferred image.... A part of the Vietnam War tragedy was due to the fact that it was managed by "the best and...