Free Republic

The dollar keeps going down, and the trade deficit keeps going up. Economists and reporters explain this in terms of American appetite for foreign goods outstripping overseas demand for US goods. There is another explanation, one perhaps closer to the truth. Americans are buying the same goods as in the past made by the same US multinational corporations; only the goods are no longer made in the USA. Their production has been outsourced or offshored to Asia. The same goods now count as imports, because they are produced offshore. A country cannot close its trade deficit if its economy is...

Fake Crimes Paul Craig Roberts Thursday, Feb. 5, 2004 Studies show Americans are close to being the worst educated and least aware population among First World countries. Americans easily stumble into war and give up their rights because of exaggerated fears of terrorists and criminals. Americans have been losing accountable government, liberty and justice for a long time. At some point, these values become irretrievable. Consider justice. The United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world and imprisons 6 to 10 times as many people as any other industrialized country. Between 1990 and 2000, the U.S. population...

TAXATION AND SLAVERY: ROBERTS RESPONDS TO THE CRITICS    The following was sent to me by Paul Craig Roberts, in response to criticism of his column comparing the income tax to slavery -- which I myself defended last week. From time to time people write to me asking how they can become columnists. I tell them that they do not want to become columnists. Read on. Many years ago when I was offered an appointment at the University of Rochester, I remember wide-ranging discussions of economic issues with the many distinguished economists who were at Rochester at that time. One...

Columnists Paul Craig Roberts begins a recent column with a criticism of the income tax -- something that certainly could be criticized -- but then says (emphasis added): Compare an American taxpayer's situation today with that of a 19th century American slave. Not all slaves worked on cotton plantations. Some with marketable skills were leased to businesses or released to labor markets, where they worked for money wages. Just like the wages of today's taxpayer, a portion of the slave's money wages was withheld. In those days the private owner, not the government, received the withheld portion of the slave's...

America the Unfree Paul Craig Roberts Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2004 The Heritage Foundation and Wall Street Journal's 10th annual Index of Economic Freedom pulls the wool over our eyes. The deception is unintentional and arises from a fatal flaw in the index. The index delivers the comforting conclusion that the United States is the 10th-most free country, far ahead of 155th-ranked North Korea. However, the index ignores the simple truth that people who do not own the product of their labor are not free. People subject to an income tax do not own the product of their labor. Our Founding...

Martin Luther King Day Paul Craig Roberts Monday, Jan. 19, 2004 As time passes, the controversy once associated with Martin Luther King Day fades. People who remember the controversy die, and new generations are only thankful for the three-day holiday. Eventually, people may forget why the holiday is celebrated. King was a brave and courageous person. I agree with him that a person should be judged by the content of his character and not by the color of his skin. To those who stress King’s loose sexual morals, I reply that sin is that for which we ask God’s forgiveness....

Jailing the innocent Paul Craig Roberts (archive) January 7, 2004 Every day, many Americans commit crimes of which they are unaware. Many of the crimes with which Americans are charged are absurd. One recent case brought to light by Ellen Podgor and Paul Rosenzweig is that of three Americans sentenced in federal court to eight years in prison for importing lobster tails from Honduras in plastic bags instead of cardboard boxes. Why this matters, no one knows. Moreover, the importers of the lobster tails have no responsibility for how the seafood was packed in Honduras. Federal prosecutors decided that Honduran...

Every day, many Americans commit crimes of which they are unaware. Many of the crimes with which Americans are charged are absurd. One recent case brought to light by Ellen Podgor and Paul Rosenzweig is that of three Americans sentenced in federal court to eight years in prison for importing lobster tails from Honduras in plastic bags instead of cardboard boxes. Why this matters, no one knows. Moreover, the importers of the lobster tails have no responsibility for how the seafood was packed in Honduras. Federal prosecutors decided that Honduran law was violated by the shipment because a few tails...

Copyright © 2003 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com Exporting jobs is not free trade Charles Schumer and Paul Craig Roberts NYT Wednesday, January 7, 2004 Rethinking protectionism NEW YORK I was brought up, like most Englishmen, to respect free trade not only as an economic doctrine which a rational and instructed person could not doubt but almost as a part of the moral law," wrote John Maynard Keynes in 1933. And indeed, to this day, nothing gets an economist's blood boiling more quickly than a challenge to the doctrine of free trade. Yet in that essay of 70 years...

December 10, 2003 ON THE ROAD TO SQUANDERVILLEby Paul Craig Roberts Has the U.S. economy lost the ability to create middle-class jobs?In November, the U.S. economy was able to create only 50,000 private sector jobs -- almost all in low-paying services: temporary help, accommodations and food services (hotels, restaurants and bars), and hospitals and ambulatory health care services. This pattern has held throughout the second year of the "economic recovery" that began in November 2001. Such jobs cannot support families and most might be filled by recent legal and illegal immigrants. During the course of the last year (November 2002...

Legend has long held that illegal aliens give American citizens cheap lettuce and cheap child care. Excepting for agribusiness and the upper classes, that legend is, in reality, a nightmare, in which the American middle and working classes pay and pay and pay for illegal immigration, and get nothing but grief in return. In states with heavy illegal alien populations, the budget of a middle-class family is full of hidden illegal alien surcharges. As a result, today’s middle-class American family with two full-time working parents has less discretionary income than its traditional forebear, in which the father alone was...

<p>Christmas is a time of traditions. If you have found time in the rush before Christmas to decorate a tree, you are sharing in a relatively new tradition.</p> <p>Although the Christmas tree has ancient roots, at the beginning of the 20th century only 1 in 5 American families put up a tree. It was 1920 before the Christmas tree became the hallmark of the season. Calvin Coolidge was the first president to light a national Christmas tree on the White House lawn.</p>

Forgive Us Our Injustices Paul Craig Roberts Tuesday, Dec. 23, 2003 How would you like to spend Christmas season in prison? Millions of Americans do. Many are imprisoned for victimless crimes, such as marijuana possession. Others are totally innocent. Experts estimate that there are several hundred thousand innocent Americans in prison. Among these many is Christophe Yves Gaynor. In my considered opinion, Gaynor was framed by a corrupt Arlington, Va., prosecutor and railroaded by a corrupt Arlington, Va., judge. Gaynor was a skateboard coach in Virginia who took his team to a New York competition. One of the team members...

Two Who Made a Difference Paul Craig Roberts Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2003 America lost two tax-cutting heroes last week – former Wall Street Journal editor Robert L. Bartley and former Republican senator from Delaware, William Roth. I knew both men well, having worked with Roth and his staff in creating the Kemp-Roth bill and having served on Bartley's editorial page. Both men did much for America: Roth cut tax rates, gave us the Roth IRA and championed the taxpayer against IRS abuse; Bartley acquainted influential people with an alternative policy to Keynesian demand management, which had mired the economy in...

A Coverup That Won’t Stay Covered by Paul Craig Roberts CNN recently reported that "the Justice Department is re-examining its investigation into the 1995 death of a federal prisoner that the victim’s family alleges was murder at the hands of the government." The victim was Kenneth Michael Trentadue. At 7 AM on August 21, 1995, officials from the Oklahoma Medical Examiner’s office arrived at the new Oklahoma City Federal Transfer Center for the body of a man recently picked up for parole violation who allegedly was a suicide by hanging. The astonished state officials saw a body with scalp split...

America's New Agenda Paul Craig Roberts Thursday, Nov. 27, 2003 Are the consequences of the U.S. invasion of Iraq likely to be a secular, democratic Middle East and a victory over terrorism, as the Bush administration claims? Or has the Bush administration embarked on an adventure with unintended consequences beyond its imagination? Hegemonic powers are not immune from miscalculation. When Napoleon marched his Grand Army into Russia, he overlooked that defeating Russia was different from seizing its capital, and that wintering in distant Moscow would give his European enemies ample opportunity to plot against him. In his haste to return...

Hold the Neocons Accountable Paul Craig Roberts Thursday, Nov. 20, 2003 Will neoconservatives be held responsible for orchestrating a war in order to pursue their Middle Eastern agenda? Will they get away with inflicting death and injury on thousands of Iraqis and Americans? Powerful people have good reasons to hold the neocons accountable. Secretary of State Colin Powell is one. Deceived into lying to the United Nations when he presented the case for a pre-emptive U.S. attack on Iraq, Powell was ruthlessly used by neocon administration officials. Colin Powell put his reputation on the line when he gave the United...

<p>Are we being spun on jobs by the White House and the rah-rah Bush media like we are being spun on Iraq? Make up your own mind after considering the following.</p> <p>Only a few of the 116,000 private-sector jobs created in October provide good incomes: 6,000 new positions in legal services and accounting — activities that reflect corporations gearing up to protect their top executives from Sarbanes-Oxley.</p>

Loss of Jobs in America Paul Craig Roberts Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2003 Are we being spun on jobs by the White House and the rah-rah Bush media like we are being spun on Iraq? Make up your own mind after considering the following. Only a few of the 116,000 private sector jobs created in October provide good incomes: 6,000 new positions in legal services and accounting – activities that reflect corporations gearing up to protect their top executives from Sarbanes-Oxley. The remainder of the 116,000 new jobs consist of temps, retail trade, telephone marketing, and fund raising, administrative and waste...

Why Africans Starve by Paul Craig Roberts War and drought are the standard explanations for starving Africans. War and drought definitely take their toll. But so do tax rates. Jude Wanniski has taken a look at taxation in Ethiopia. This is what he found. A farmer who earns $68 a year after expenses from cash sales of a crop is taxed 10%. Once a farm’s annual income passes the $4,235 mark, additional income is taxed at 89%. Wanniski wonders if such a tax system wouldn’t cause Ethiopians to starve in the absence of war and drought. Desperate for tax revenues,...