Free Republic

For as long as anyone can remember, rent increases rarely happened at Ridgeview Homes, a family-owned mobile home park in upstate New York. That changed in 2018 when corporate owners took over the 65-year-old park located amid farmland and down the road from a fast food joint and grocery store about 30 miles northeast of Buffalo. Residents, about half of whom are seniors or disabled people on fixed incomes, put up with the first two increases. They hoped the latest owner, Cook Properties, would address the bourbon-colored drinking water, sewage bubbling into their bathtubs and the pothole-filled roads. When that...

Everywhere, people trash capitalism. But what they think they know about capitalism is usually wrong. My new video debunks some myths about capitalism. "No one ever makes a billion dollars," complains Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. "You take a billion dollars." In other words, capitalists get rich by taking money from others. That's nonsense, and Myth No. 1. People believe that myth if they think that when one person wins, someone else must lose. It's natural to believe that if you think there is a finite amount of money in the world. But there isn't. Free markets increase total wealth. Competition encourages...

Under a Vice President Kamala Harris, Americans shouldn't expect a war on poverty as much Harris to continue her prosecution of the poor. Catholic News Agency recently quoted several prominent Catholics who were positive about Joe Biden’s vice-presidential selection of Kamala Harris. Donna Toliver Grimes, for example, who serves as the assistant director for African American Affairs in the Secretariat of Cultural Diversity at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, expressed her belief that a Biden-Harris ticket would have a “policy that is favorable to people on the margins.”That’s a curious comment, because Harris has spent considerable professional energy...

California exports more than commodities such as movies, new technologies and produce. It also exports truck drivers, cooks and cashiers. Every year from 2000 through 2015, more people left California than moved in from other states. This migration was not spread evenly across all income groups, a Sacramento Bee review of U.S. Census Bureau data found. The people leaving tend to be relatively poor, and many lack college degrees. Move higher up the income spectrum, and slightly more people are coming than going. About 2.5 million people living close to the official poverty line left California for other states from...

In the 1970s, crime was soaring, and American policymakers had all sorts of ideas for how to reduce it: longer sentences, more police, prison reform and more. But one of the most potent remedies was not conceived as a way to combat crime. To clean up the environment and improve public health, the federal government banned lead in paint and gasoline. By diminishing lead, though, it reduced the harm it was doing to young brains -- harm that could push kids into delinquency. Curbing lead exposure was a big reason for the decline in violent crime that began in the...

It is always in poor taste for modern Americans to liken their ideological critics to Nazis. So when venture capitalist Tom Perkins wrote a letter to The Wall Street Journal that equated "the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the 'rich,'" with "fascist Nazi Germany," he opened his double doors to the cable TV umbrage-fest that followed. I have a teensy bit of advice for Perkins: When your reported worth is somewhere in the neighborhood of $8 billion, you don't need to wrap quotes around the word "rich." In three paragraphs, Perkins, 82, lambasted the San Francisco Chronicle...

Robert wrote: Powerful: your radio show. Pitiful: not being able to listen to a recent show of yours online, when life keeps you from listening to it live. Or have I just not managed to find the proper webpage? Please help? Dear Robert, That’s very nice of you to say. For folks who don’t listen to the show, on Thursdays we play clips of politicians saying things, like when Elbert Guillory changed parties, or when Obama’s press Jester Jay Carney said that Benghazi was a long time ago, and I judge them either “powerful” or “pitiful.” You might guess where...

Occupy Wall Streeters claimed that they were populists. Their ideological opposites, the Tea Partiers, said they were, too. Both became polarizing. And so far populism, whether on the right or left, does not seem to have made inroads with the traditional Republican and Democrat establishments. Gas has gone up about $2 a gallon since Barack Obama took office. Given average yearly rates of national consumption, that increase alone translates into an extra $1 trillion that American drivers havencollectively paid in higher fuel costs over the last 54 months.Victor DavisVictor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution,...

Barack Obama has admitted the need to break his most celebrated campaign promise. Suddenly he is "agnostic" on increasing taxes for people earning less than $250,000. Nine years ago, as an Illinois State Senator, Obama criticized the Supreme Court for not removing a roadblock that forbids Washington to redistribute income. That roadblock is the United States Constitution. Washington routinely redistributes income within American society. When Joe Taxpayer receives government benefits that exceed what he pays in taxes, the effect is what the Heritage Foundation calls a "distributional deficit." Joe's higher-earning fellow taxpayers must fill that deficit. "Each year, government is...