Free Republic

Already this effort is generating a fierce, almost culture-war-style backlash. It is generating a backlash among people who do not have faith in Washington, who do not have faith that trained experts have superior abilities to organize society, who do not believe national rules can successfully contend with the intricacies of local contexts and cultures. This progressive era amounts to a high-stakes test. If the country remains safe and the health care and financial reforms work, then we will have witnessed a life-altering event. We’ll have received powerful evidence that central regulations can successfully organize fast-moving information-age societies. If the...

Sustainable consumption? Reconfiguring businesses, infrastructure and institutions? What do these words mean? They do not mean merely reshuffling the existing order, but rather replacing it with a completely new economic system, one that has never before been seen or used in the history of the world. This paper will demonstrate that the current crisis of capitalism is being used to implement a radical new economic system that will completely supplant it. This is not some new idea created in the bowels of the United Nations: It is a revitalized implementation of Technocracy that was thoroughly repudiated by the American public...

As a young economics professor in the late 1970s, Richard Thaler began noticing small but nagging ways in which ordinary people defied the predictions of economic theory. A friend confided that he mowed his lawn to save $10, but winced at the suggestion that he mow someone else's to make $10. A colleague confessed that he'd never go out and buy a $50 bottle of wine for a family meal, but that he'd recently opened up a $50 bottle at dinner because it happened to be lying around. The textbooks assumed people would behave identically when equal amounts of money...

"There is nothing wrong with your thermostat. Do not attempt to adjust the temperature. We are controlling your power consumption. If we wish to make it hotter, we will turn off your air conditioner. If we wish to make it cooler, we will turn off your heater. For the next millennium, sit quietly and we will control your home temperature. We repeat, there is nothing wrong with your thermostat. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to... SACRAMENTO!"* Building codes and engineering standards...

“Oh, yes, I know, we have recently been told by no less than 365 academic economists that such a thing cannot be . . .Their confidence in the accuracy of their own predictions leaves me breathless. But having been brought up over the shop, I sometimes wonderwhether they pay back their forecasts with their money.” —Margaret Thatcher, 1979 As our $500 billion/yr trade deficit, with its attendant job destruction and long-term damage to our industrial base, continues to spiral out of control, the public may be forgiven for wondering whether there might be problems with the free-trade theories that have...

The Conservatives' War on Ideas by Karen De Coster When Russell Kirk, a most engaging intellectual and the father of the modern conservative movement, wrote of "terrestrial hells" and zealotry, he was speaking of ideology. So adamant was he about the perils brought on by ideas and change, Kirk put together an entire book on this, The Politics of Prudence. To Kirk, ideology is a series of "terrestrial hells" that is not favorable to a statesman's prudence because it bears the fruit of malevolent revolution against tried-and-true conservative traditions. Hence, it is a serious vice. Kirk advocates prudence over ideology,...