Free Republic

As drought kills Kenya’s livestock, some herders are fighting hunger by growing their own grass. At noon in Joseph Kwopin's dry and dusty homestead in Kenya's central Baringo County, a calf shelters from the sweltering sun under a shed made of sticks. The barren ground has no vegetation but for a few shrubs and the red-flowered Carraluma socotrana plant – a rare species whose appearance here could seem cruel given that it isn't edible, even to livestock... According to UNICEF, 2.6 million Kenyans have become food insecure as a result of the lack of rainfall. The Kenya Red Cross reported...

City officials began blitzing street musicians with nuisance summonses and posted a "Quiet Zone" sign last week at the beloved Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, where virtuoso performers have been making beautiful music together for over a century. On weekends, baritone John Boyd, 48, would belt out spirituals backed by a choir including six of his nine children and fellow classical buskers. But two months ago, Parks police descended on the Bethesda Terrace arcade with a message: Muzzle the music. Last week, they posted a Quiet Zone sign banning Boyd and other serious musicians from playing in the arcade where...

Easter island, fools' paradise Ronald Wright 18 November 2004 The greatest wonder of the ancient world is how recent it all is. No city or monument is much more than 5,000 years old. Only about seventy lifetimes, of seventy years, have been lived end to end since civilization began. Its entire run occupies a mere 0.002 per cent of the nearly 3 million years since our first ancestor sharpened a stone. The progress of “man the hunter” during the Old Stone Age, or Palaeolithic – his perfection of weapons and techniques – led directly to the end of hunting as...

Bioethicist Garrett James Hardin, who coined the term "tragedy of the commons," passed away this September at the age of 88. In his now famous 1968 essay,  "The Tragedy of the Commons," Hardin describes how common, i.e., public, property, is overused until it deteriorates or is destroyed. Because of his essay, many consider him to have fathered the concept of the tragedy of the commons; however, Ludwig von Mises describes this concept in relation to external costs in his 1940 Nationalökonomie[1] and, later, in Human Action (1949): "If land is not owned by anybody, although legal formalism may call it public...

Czar is the perfect title for Carol Browner, the person President Obama chose to rule over climate policy. The woman runs her kingdom like an autocrat, taking no prisoners and she has a history of demanding secrecy for example.....When working for the Clinton Administration, Browner had her files erased Against a court order, As Michele Malkin reported back in January: According to testimony in a freedom of information lawsuit filed against EPA by the Landmark Legal Foundation, a Virginia-based conservative legal watchdog group, Browner commanded a computer technician on Jan. 19, 2001: “‘I would like my files deleted. I want...

The goal of the Democrats' plan for health care reform is coming more and more out into the open: They want to eliminate health insurance. This is the line of attack the Democrats have chosen as they've gone into the August recess: Private health insurance companies are evil, and big government is here to save us from them. According to the New York Times, President Obama is planning an "August offensive against the insurance industry." It is "a campaign of increasingly harsh rhetoric" that is "intended to drive home the message that revamping the health care system will protect consumers...

Every year around this time, schoolchildren are taught about that wonderful day when Pilgrims and Native Americans shared the fruits of the harvest. "Isn't sharing wonderful?" say the teachers. They miss the point. Because of sharing, the first Thanksgiving in 1623 almost didn't happen. The failure of Soviet communism is only the latest demonstration that freedom and property rights, not sharing, are essential to prosperity. The earliest European settlers in America had a dramatic demonstration of that lesson, but few people today know it. When the Pilgrims first settled the Plymouth Colony, they organized their farm economy along communal lines....

There was a time when Frank Popper needed police protection to speak at public meetings on the Great Plains. “People have gotten friendlier,” Popper said Thursday. Popper stopped in Rapid City on his way to the Rosebud Sioux Reservation. On Saturday, tribal officials there gave their official blessing to Popper’s controversial thesis about one possible future for the Great Plains. Popper and his wife, Deborah, coined the phrase “Buffalo Commons” in 1987. In a scholarly article in an obscure professional journal, the Poppers predicted a depopulation of the Great Plains from Mexico to Canada. The harsh, arid climate of the ...

In this dust-choked region, long seen as an increasingly barren wasteland decaying into desert, millions of trees are flourishing, thanks in part to poor farmers whose simple methods cost little or nothing at all. Niger, a place of persistent hunger and deprivation, has recently added millions of new trees and is now far greener than it was 30 years ago. These gains, moreover, have come at a time when the population of Niger has exploded, confounding the conventional wisdom that population growth leads to the loss of trees and accelerates land degradation. From colonial times, all trees in Niger had...

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had once failed an entire class. That class had insisted that Obama’s socialism worked and that if enacted, no one would be poor and no one would be rich. It would be a great equalizer. The professor then said, “OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama’s plan.” The Professor decided that all grades would be averaged together and everyone would receive the same grade. No one would fail, but no one would receive an A either....

Go to the video link athttp://dailybail.com/home/peter-schiff-of-course-were-not-going-to-pay-back-the-chines.html?ref=patrick.net

In this dust-choked region, long seen as an increasingly barren wasteland decaying into desert, millions of trees are flourishing, thanks in part to poor farmers whose simple methods cost little or nothing at all. These gains, moreover, have come at a time when the population of Niger has exploded, confounding the conventional wisdom that population growth leads to the loss of trees and accelerates land degradation, scientists studying Niger say. From colonial times, all trees in Niger had been regarded as the property of the state, which gave farmers little incentive to protect them. Trees were chopped for firewood or...

The American Way of War An e-mail exchange with Robert Coram, the author of Boyd, and Donald Vandergriff, the author of The Path to Victory ..... From: James Fallows To: Robert Coram and Donald Vandergriff Subject: What's wrong with the military? Dear Donald Vandergriff and Robert Coram: Thanks very much for joining this exchange. I have two goals in mind for the conversation we're about to begin. First, I hope to introduce as many readers as possible to the arguments and implications of your recent books. For reasons we're all aware of, military policy is the part of public life...

Why we need to protect our public resources from private encroachment.* David Bollier They hang the man and flog the woman That steal the goose from off the common, But let the greater villain loose That steals the common from the goose. —English folk poem, circa 1764 ne of the great questions of contemporary American political economy is, who shall control the commons? "The commons" refers to that vast range of resources that the American people collectively own, but which are rapidly being enclosed: privatized, traded in the market, and abused. The process of converting the American commons into market...

Even as the Left still flirts with socialism (and I'm being nice with the word, "flirts"), the first Pilgrims who arrived here in 1620 learned their lesson early: socialism, even on the scale of the Pilgrims colony at Plymouth Rock, doesn't work. William Bradford wrote about his "experiment" with socialism then in his journal, "Of Plymouth Plantation". Check it out sometime in a library or get it on Amazon. It is an early primary history of the Pilgrims' spirit of adventure, free enterprise, and devotion to religious freedom. We could use a little taste of their spirit today. I pulled...

Bruce Yandle of Clemson University and George Mason University's Mercatus Center looks at the tragedy of the commons and the various ways that people have avoided the overuse of resources that are held in common. Examples discussed include fisheries, roads, rivers and the air. Yandle talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the historical use of norms, cooperative ventures such as incorporating a river, the common law, and top-down command-and-control regulation to reduce air and water pollution

The controversy about carrying guns in public is not new. In 1967, however, the political alignments on this issue were completely different. Many conservatives (and others) objected when the Black Panthers insisted on exercising this right. In response, Governor Ronald Reagan signed the Mulford Act banning the carrying of guns in public. Many defenders of liberty have felt the need to reflexively defend gun-toting citizens at these rallies. This is a mistake, or at least an incomplete response. A far more productive contribution to an otherwise debate is to emphasize privatization as a solution. We can only find a...

It was always tempting to dismiss the ownership society as an empty slogan--"hokum" as former Labor Secretary Robert Reich put it. But the ownership society was quite real. It was the answer to a roadblock long faced by politicians favoring policies to benefit the wealthy. The problem boiled down to this: people tend to vote their economic interests. Even in the wealthy United States, most people earn less than the average income. That means it is in the interest of the majority to vote for politicians promising to redistribute wealth from the top down. So what to do? It was...

There are two dangerous stages of economics knowledge, one leans left and the other leans right. The first is ignorance, which leads to a zero sum worldview and a failure to appreciate that there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. The next stage is the free market zealot, who employs a priori reasoning from first principles based on perfect competition. Here is what you need to know to get past both stages. The business cycle The president has little impact on the ups and downs of the economy. The Federal Reserve's monetary policy does. Understand the liquidity trap,...

NIMBY's versus Socialism - Open Space Now Becoming Socialized Good The Pasadena Pundit- April 7, 2007 Up until now new homeowner's have been willing to pay for open space land surrounding their tract homes - and for good reason because such amenities translate into pricey view premiums when the homes are re-sold. But now a developer has imposed a fee on new homes for open space that benefit property owners other than the homeowners paying the fees. We might call this open space without value capture. Now realtors are balking because when the homes are re-sold that fee will not...