Free Republic

In April 2008, The Orange County Register published a bombshell of an investigation about a license plate program for California government workers and their families. Drivers of nearly 1 million cars and light trucks—out of a total 22 million vehicles registered statewide—were protected by a “shield” in the state records system between their license plate numbers and their home addresses. There were, the newspaper found, great practical benefits to this secrecy. “Vehicles with protected license plates can run through dozens of intersections controlled by red light cameras with impunity,” the Register’s Jennifer Muir reported. “Parking citations issued to vehicles with...

Syndicated columnist Bob Novak, writing about the surprising number of conservatives who are backing Democrat Barack Obama rather than Republican John McCain for the presidency, captured their widespread sentiment when he quoted one "Obamacon" with impeccable GOP credentials: "The Republican Party is a dead rotting carcass with a few decrepit old leaders stumbling around like zombies in a horror version of 'Weekend at Bernie,' handcuffed to a corpse." These Obama supporters hold no illusions about Obama's liberalism, but they are so angry at the GOP, Novak writes, that they seek a "therapeutic electoral bloodbath." Thomas Jefferson argued that "The tree...

"If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. … The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom, and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is. … I think that libertarianism and conservatism are traveling the same path." – President Ronald Reagan That quotation was appropriately reprinted on the first page of the official program for the Conservative Leadership Conference in Reno last weekend, an event that sought to rebuild the largely frayed conservative/libertarian Reagan coalition in time to...

Well, when you've got a headache, you take an aspirin. When you've got the flu, you take something a little stronger. When you've got cancer, you need chemotherapy, which kills cancer cells but can come perilously close to killing the patient. It's a sad truth, but the Republican Party has the political equivalent of cancer. The party is immune from internal reform. Only the nastiest medicine imaginable can save it, and four (but probably eight) years of Clinton, backed by a Democratic congressional majority, is pretty tough medicine. Columnist Joe Dumas, writing for the Chattanoogan.com, captured the party's problem succinctly:...

California has more than 36 million residents and is expected by some projections to have 60 million by 2050. People keep moving here, and yet the state government is doing everything it can to make it harder to build the homes necessary to house everyone. It's already incredibly costly and difficult to get government approvals to build housing developments, as cities micromanage pretty much everything a builder does. People will need to live somewhere. If other counties embrace Marin's overall approach toward development, the newcomers will have nowhere to live – even as Marin officials bask in their moral superiority....

Cities need to keep fees and taxes low. City staff should be helpful to customers. Hey, why not schedule office hours at times that suit those customers, not that suit city workers? Yet cities are increasingly closing their offices Fridays so that workers have another day off. Cities need to look at privatization and at shedding unnecessary departments – Sandy Springs, Ga., privatized the entire city (with the exception of public safety services) and is far better run and more efficient than neighboring cities. This new urban agenda also would end subsidies and special privileges for politically well-connected businesses, with...

Watching how my kids spend money, I'm constantly reminded of something rather obvious, but still instructive: They are far less profligate with their own cash than they are with mine. What's 40 bucks for a concert if it comes right out of Dad's wallet? But that same concert is far less of a must-see event if they've got to spring for it out of their own piggy banks. My kids would explain this economic principle with one word: "Duh." People are much more careful with their own resources than with others' resources or with those resources that are publicly owned....

f I refuse to pay the full amount, I will become a ward of one of the biggest growth industries in the country: the government-run prison system. I am free to pay about half of all my earnings to the government, which will use those taxes to erect a multitude of offices and pay its workers salaries and benefits that are far more than most of us will ever earn. The government's "child protective services" workers are free to take anyone's children away from them based on their discretion. Parents are then forced into a totally secret court system, in...

Likewise, I've been reading the imaginative arguments from the "No on 90" committee. Proposition 90, slated for the November ballot, would ban the use of eminent domain for private uses – i.e., the transfer of your home to Costco – and would make governments pay compensation when they use regulations to steal property – i.e., the city of Brea's theft of millions of dollars in property by downzoning it so virtually nothing can be built on the land. Most Californians, liberal and conservative, would no doubt agree with the fundamental principles here. Yet a coalition of organizations in the anti-90...

At the Republican convention in San Jose last weekend, conservatives tried to mildly chasten Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for his more-liberal policies, but they were turned back by a Republican majority more interested in winning elections and putting up a facade of unity than in making a stand for principle. I'm saddened by what the failed revolt means for the Grand Old Party. The Republican Party is far from perfect, but if it doesn't stand up for limiting government, then those ideas will have no prominent place in the governing debate. Until the November special election, the governor had done a...