Free Republic

This video details the historical shift of economic power from the British Empire to the United States across the late 19th and 20th centuries. It argues that this transition was not an accident but a result of deliberate industrial, financial, and political strategies. Key Stages of the Economic Shift: American Industrial Ascent (1860s - 1890s): Following its Civil War, the United States utilized Alexander Hamilton's protectionist blueprint, infrastructure investment, and the rise of powerful industrialists (Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan) to overtake Britain’s manufacturing output by the 1880s (3:30 - 6:50). Impact of World War I (1914 - 1918): The conflict drained...

We saved Europe from starvation and communism. Now America needs a Marshall Plan of its own. The brilliant historian William Manchester, in his work The Glory and the Dream, covers four tumultuous decades of American life, stretching from 1932 through 1972. In his treatment of postwar Europe and America, he points out the disastrous situation in which Europe found itself. In 1947, the British Empire was bankrupt and breaking apart at the seams. Greece was embroiled in a civil war that threatened to turn it communist, while Turkey faced growing Soviet pressure. Great Britain, which had been supporting anti-communist efforts...

The commentary in a recent Wall Street Journal by Senator Phil Gramm and Representative Jeb Hensarling did the nation an immense service by dismantling the persistent myth that private market greed and financial deregulation caused the 2008 financial crisis. As they rightly pointed out, inflation-adjusted mortgage rates during the bubble era were historically high, and financial institutions were suffocating under increasingly strict federal mandates, not running wild in a deregulated vacuum. Yet, for nearly two decades, the public has been fed a completely fabricated baseline narrative. Having served as the Chief Economist at the Department of Housing and Urban Development...

At a conference I attended recently in DC, I had the chance to show a lot of my colleagues around the downtown monuments. For them, many from other countries, seeing the Lincoln, the Washington, the Capitol, was once in a lifetime – for me, it was Tuesday. At one point, a German in the group – fatigue in his voice – asked me, “Tell me… How can Americans keep voting for Trump?” The term Trump was shorthand for Americans’ embracing nationalism and rejecting globalism, which seems oh-so backwards to our European cousins. I think he expected me to dance around...

This is an incredible delivery by Voight. The subject is solemn and poignant. I’ve scrubbed forward 1 minute to get right to the meat. Go back if you want his setup. The link goes to YouTube

After the high of the Declaration of Independence, wartime reality set in for the founders.Michael O’Hanlon is a defense and strategy analyst at the Brookings Institution and the author of “To Dare Mighty Things: U.S. Defense Strategy Since the Revolution.”Despite the heady moment in Philadelphia with the Declaration of Independence’s approval in early July, 1776, that summer was a tough one for the nation’s founders, George Washington in particular. The rest of that year — until Washington crossed the Delaware River and won the Battle of Trenton on Dec. 26 — would go down as the worst period of the...

A socialist Dem running for Wisconsin governor became visibly uncomfortable and served up a word salad when asked whether she still stands by her call to “cancel Thanksgiving” because it is “celebrating colonialism.” At the height of the Covid pandemic, Francesca Hong, who is the frontrunner to become the Democratic nominee in America’s Dairyland, said that the beloved holiday needs to be scrapped, and that America “should have done this in 1621.”She added: “If it takes a worldwide pandemic for us to realize we should stop celebrating colonialism and the original superspreader event that killed Indegenous [sic] folx [sic] and...

The distinguished historian says the U.S. isn’t like other nations and never has been. There is no American ethnicity to back up the state.’ Democracy is a powerful and dangerous force, as America and the European democracies are discovering. Elites on both sides of the Atlantic haven’t done a very good job of handling it. We have some anniversaries coming up next year that may help us. We have, of course, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The same day is the bicentennial of the deaths of the two founders most responsible for that great document, John Adams...