Free Republic

The new American way of life... For a guy and his girlfriend with two kids, all you have to do is follow these proven steps: 1. Don't marry her! 2. Always use your mom's address to get your mail. 3. The guy buys a house. 4. The guy rents out the house to his girlfriend with his two kids. 5. Section 8 will pay $900 a month for a 3 bedroom home. 6. Girlfriend signs up for Obamacare, so the guy doesn't have to pay for family insurance. 7. Girlfriend gets to go to college for free for being a...

There's an interesting headline out there today, which can serve as a good educational moment. Due to the ravages of the fires out in California, the White House is threatening to cut off federal funding. Now first off, The notion of this phrase "federal funding" (the article also uses the phrase "state funding") is offensive because it's dishonest. It's welfare, that's what it is. I'm not interested in P.C. comfort terms. As I wrote in May of 2017, when the progressives were starting off building their nanny-state empire, they had a very specific list of welfare queens - 48 of...

Many in America’s freedom movement still hope that the Libertarian Party will one day become a power on the political scene to challenge the Democrat-Republican monolith. But in 42 years it hasn’t happened, and it probably won’t happen. There are some very distinct reasons why the LP and all other alternative / independent parties fail. This essay will examine them. Let’s take, for example, the top independent parties out there: the Libertarian Party and the Constitution Party. Even though each of them haveappeared at times to be a start toward genuine political reform, they repeatedly fail because they have structured...

Barack Obama has admitted the need to break his most celebrated campaign promise. Suddenly he is "agnostic" on increasing taxes for people earning less than $250,000. Nine years ago, as an Illinois State Senator, Obama criticized the Supreme Court for not removing a roadblock that forbids Washington to redistribute income. That roadblock is the United States Constitution. Washington routinely redistributes income within American society. When Joe Taxpayer receives government benefits that exceed what he pays in taxes, the effect is what the Heritage Foundation calls a "distributional deficit." Joe's higher-earning fellow taxpayers must fill that deficit. "Each year, government is...

Floating Around Europe New & Old... Old Europe tends to tell the U.S. what to do (about taxation, welfarism, Islamofascist terror, and foreign policy). New Europe -- perhaps more appreciative of America's role in its own de-satellization -- tends to want to learn from us, to take our lead, or even (on, e.g., taxation) to show us the way... Floating around for two weeks in Europe old and new, it certainly seems so -- not least in a service level, a desire to please visitors and customers, rarely seen in the U.S. That hospitality, even with the dollar plunged to...

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...