Free Republic

I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. Philippians 3:14 (KJV) Once again we have the Marxist Media explaining to us what is wrong with the best Gross Domestic Product quarterly results in the last four years. To have a bunch of leftist economists explaining why a roaring capitalist economy is a bad thing is like being lectured by atheists about the Bible or Maxine Waters preaching why calling for violence against Trump supporters is ordained from God. The only difference is these economists know less about capitalism than Mad Maxine...

An Allentown woman called the city 911 center late Tuesday demanding that an ambulance take her to the hospital for a stubbed big toe. She got the ride. The woman, 52, first phoned at 11:10 p.m. from the 600 block of W. Liberty Street, according to emergency radio reports. No ambulance was sent. But 10 minutes later the woman called, again seeking a ride to the hospital for her toe.

ELLSWORTH — A concerned citizen called police Sept. 23 after seeing a man dumping new bottles of water on the ground near a local store with a goal of returning the bottles to get money to buy cigarettes. Officer Rick Roberts spoke with the man, who advised he had bought the water with his food stamps and was dumping the water out so he could recycle the bottles to get cigarette money.

The lingering lesson of Hurricane Katrina is the great value of self-reliance and the terrible danger of dependence. It was a huge storm. Possibly the largest natural disaster ever to hit the United States. It was the storm of the century. But it taught us more about human nature than it did about the power of nature. More frightening than the storm itself, was the widespread personal failure demonstrated in its wake. It was a peek into the entitlement culture and a sad display of the unwillingness and inability of some Americans to take the slightest responsibility for themselves and...

PARIS - Tear gas. Students clashing with police around the famed Sorbonne university in Paris. Barricades in the capital's streets. Is March 2006 proving to be May 1968 all over again? So far, no. While comparisons between the student protests of then and now are tempting, they are also misleading. The young protesters of '68 wanted to turn French society upside down. "Break the old molds" was one of their many slogans. Their children want not revolution but status quo: the same access to pensions, jobs, prosperity and generous welfare systems their parents enjoyed. In short, a comfortable European lifestyle...

Debt issued by banks can never be repaid in full. Some people can repay everything while others cannot repay anything at all. All this is because every time banks lend money, they expect the borrower to pay back the money plus interest. But where do they expect people to earn the interest? Here is the problem: Let's say the federal reserve prints a trillion dollars. Banks put that money into circulation by lending it to the people. The people invest the money and somehow they pay it back with interest. The question is where do they get the money to...

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Swedish welfare authorities plan to launch a campaign to educate Swedes about when they can take sick leave, after a study showed 40 percent believe it is enough to feel tired to stay home and draw benefits. "Our mistake could be that, in some misdirected benevolence, we were not clear enough on where the limits are," the National Social Insurance Board's head Anna Hedborg wrote in a column for the Dagens Nyheter daily. Sweden, famous for its generous welfare policies, has seen sick leave absenteeism double over the last two years to 800,000, or one fifth of...