Free Republic

As so much despair has gripped our nation during this difficult time, I decided to go into our nation's most distressed communities with a message of hope and truth. I have been working on policy issues dealing with race and poverty through my organization, UrbanCURE, for 25 years. We purchased billboard space in hard-hit cities across the nation and posted a short, time-tested message that strikes at the heart of what drives poverty. The billboards show a picture of a young black man or young black woman and say: "Tired of Poverty? Finish school. Take any job. Get married. Save...

Prioritizing radical left 'rock-star' politicians over scripture and two millennia of tradition and teaching allows confusion and mischievous distortions of the truth to scatter and divide Christians. A galling op-ed in the National Catholic Reporter last week proclaimed that Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is “the future of the Catholic Church.” If executive editor Heidi Schlumpf is correct that a pro-abortion socialist who insulted one of the most courageous and compassionate modern saints is the new poster child for Catholics, God help us.Our Lord entrusted the church to St. Peter and the apostles, and its teachings have been faithfully passed down...

This week Goya Foods President and CEO Bob Unanue participated in the White House Hispanic Prosperity Initiative. The Initiative asked Hispanic business owners and managers for their ideas on how the Trump Administration could help improve opportunities within the economic and educational realm for prosperity among Hispanics. Unanue’s praise for this initiative sparked a firestorm of hate from anti-Trump hysterics demanding that he apologize or face a boycott of his company’s products. In contrast to typical corporate CEOs, Unanue held his ground and refused to apologize. “Unlike President Obama, President Trump is genuinely concerned with the prosperity of all Americans,”...

The Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) announced it is retiring the slogan "Work hard. Be Nice." Richard Barth, KIPP Foundation CEO, said "the amazing financial success of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) organization's business plan of 'Break Stuff, Get Paid' has inspired us to rethink our message." "Clearly, the 'work hard and be nice' model only works in a civilized free society." Barth declared. "If we examine the hundred thousand years that homo sapiens have lived we observe that in only a few hundred years and in very few places have we seen free societies. The 'break stuff and get...

At a time our country faces a massive recession brought on by the coronavirus lockdowns, America’s welfare state exacerbates that stagnation. Ronald Reagan had an old adage about the nine most terrifying words in the English language: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Recently, a new paper reinforced that truth and adds to the existing literature showing how America’s welfare state often traps generations in a cycle of poverty.At its core, a complicated set of welfare programs and tax breaks generate sizable incentives for many low-income Americans not to increase their incomes and improve their station in...

Imagine that you are an unborn spirit in heaven. God condemns you to a life of poverty but will permit you to choose the country in which you will spend your life. Which country would you choose? I would choose the United States of America. A recent study by Just Facts, an excellent source of factual information, shows that after accounting for income, charity and noncash welfare benefits such as subsidized health care, housing, food stamps and other assistance programs, "the poorest 20% of Americans consume more goods and services than the national averages for all people in the world's...

The movie is free at the link until June 2.

Denver Newsroom, May 13, 2020 / 03:36 pm MT (CNA).- Neither the Vatican nor U.S. bishops have responded to a letter signed by several Catholic bishops, which argues that the coronavirus pandemic has been exploited in order to create a one-world government. The May 7 letter, titled “Appeal for the Church and the World,” claims that “there are powers interested in creating panic among the world’s population with the sole aim of permanently imposing unacceptable forms of restriction on freedoms, of controlling people and of tracking their movements.” “The imposition of these illiberal measures is a disturbing prelude to the...

The accumulating death toll from COVID-19 can be seen minute-by-minute on cable news channels. But there’s another death toll few seem to care much about: the number of poverty-related deaths being set in motion by deliberately plunging millions of Americans into poverty and despair. In the first three weeks since governors began shutting down commerce in their states, 17 million Americans filed for unemployment, and according to one survey, one quarter of Americans have lost their jobs or watched their paychecks cut. Goldman Sachs predicts that the economy will shrink 34 percent in the second quarter, with unemployment leaping to...

Vice-president Dick Cheney stepped up America's war of words with North Korea yesterday by calling it a police state run by an irresponsible leader indifferent to the fate of his malnourished people.His words came just 48 hours after the Pentagon announced that it was sending 15 F-117A Nighthawk stealth fighter-bombers to South Korea, a US ally, for an undetermined period. The aircraft crews, trained to seek out targets with precision weapons, needed to familiarise themselves with the Korean terrain, the air force said. Speaking to CNN in an interview broadcast last night, Mr Cheney described North Korea's leader, Kim Jong...

Our country spends over a trillion dollars a year on anti-poverty programs. We address the symptoms, providing food, shelter, health care. But it's time to face the fact that many of these programs are not working. Our poverty rate hasn't changed in half a century. Money does not appear to be the solution. Sure, it helps, and no, we should not just cut the programs to zero. But it's time for us to face the fact that, while we've made living in poverty easier, we have not made it easier for individuals and families to move out of poverty; the...

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez famously took to the House floor last week to quibble over the origins of the old maxim about “pulling oneself up by the bootstraps.” “You know this idea, this metaphor of a bootstrap started off as a joke,” she said. “Because it’s physically impossible to lift yourself up by a bootstrap, by your shoelaces. It’s physically impossible!” She obviously believes this to be some sort of profound observation, but perhaps someone could have taken the time to explain to her that the difficulty of the physical act is kind of the point of the metaphor. According to Writing...

Last week, Wells Fargo and Fifth Third Bank announced they no longer would donate to the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program, which enables more than 108,000 low-income children and children in foster care to receive scholarships to attend a safe and effective school of choice. The move comes after the Orlando Sentinel published a piece suggesting that $105 million in tax credit scholarships had been used by families to pay tuition at faith-based schools that, as The Federalist’s Joy Pullmann put it, “uphold their faiths’ historic sexual ethics.” Businesses that contribute to nonprofit scholarship-granting organizations in the state can receive...

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which granted American women the right to vote and catapulted them out of the shadows of dependence into the full sunlight of long-awaited civic freedoms. The right to vote was only the beginning of a long list of goals achieved by the early women’s right movement. It also gained for us the right to control our property, to defend ourselves and our children from abusive husbands, to earn advanced degrees, and join professions reserved for men. But one right the early feminists did not fight for was the right to...

This week, children may learn about that greedy man, Ebenezer Scrooge. Scrooge is selfish until ghosts scare him into thinking about others’ well-being, not just his own. Good for the ghosts. But the way Scrooge addresses others’ needs matters. Today’s advocates of equality, compassion, increased spending on education, health care, etc., say “we care” but demand that government do the work. Controlling other people with the power of government doesn’t prove you care. If you want to help the poor, clean the environment, improve the arts. Great! Please do. But if you are compassionate, then you’ll spend your own money...

Multiple forms of socialism, from hard Stalinism to European redistribution, continue to fail. Russia and China are still struggling with the legacy of genocidal communism. Eastern Europe still suffers after decades of Soviet-imposed socialist chaos. Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea, and Venezuela are unfree, poor, and failed states. Baathism—a synonym for pan-Arabic socialism—ruined the postwar Middle East. The soft-socialist European Union countries are stagnant and mostly dependent on the U.S. military for their protection. In contrast, current American deregulation, tax cuts, and incentives, and record energy production have given the United States the strongest economy in the world. So why, then,...

The average bottom-quintile household receives $45,389 in government transfers. Private transfers from charitable and family sources provide another $3,313. The average household in the bottom quintile pays $2,709 in taxes, mostly sales, property and excise taxes. The net result is that the average household in the bottom quintile has $50,901 of available resources. The average middle-income household is only 32% better off than the average bottom-quintile households despite earning more than 13 times as much, having 2.5 times as many of prime working-age individuals employed and working more than twice as many hours a week.

My address to the Colorado Independent Cattlemen’s Association I’m not a cattleman and I’m not going to pretend I know everything you are facing. But I do know that the major weapon being used against your industry is the misnamed control devise called Sustainable Development. I know why and I know who the players are. I hope I can leave you today with some ideas on how to fight them. To begin, let’s set the terms and make one thing very clear. The use of the word sustainable may sound like a comfortable term, not threatening. After all, you, your...

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is targeting poverty and other social issues in a package of bills unveiled on Wednesday. The progressive first-year lawmaker's legislative package, dubbed "A Just Society," includes six individual bills. "I am both energized and humbled to introduce legislation today to build upon the most transformative programs of the last century," Ocasio-Cortez said in statement. **SNIP** Individuals who have been convicted of a criminal offense would be ensured access to all federal public benefits in the Mercy in Re-entry Act, and the Embrace Act would guarantee federal public benefits access to anyone, regardless of their immigration status....

Everywhere you look in early progressivism, the influence of Henry George and his ideals as espoused in the book Progress and Poverty can be found. So when doing some digging around this morning, I was surprised to learn that Sanger's father Michael was ardently in favor of George's ideas. My surprise was only in the individual,(my reaction was more like "Oh wow - now, that figures. It makes perfect sense.") for in the aggregate it is impossible to have progressive ideology without Henry George. The Higgins family was so impacted by the work of George that one of Margaret's brothers...