Free Republic

Lessons from Milton Friedman, Herbert Stein ... and Cloward-Piven. Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman scolded the Wall Street Journal for cheerleading an open-border immigration policy. "It's just obvious you can't have free immigration and a welfare state," he warned. This leads to a “transfer state,” as the Heritage Foundation describes, the government taxing the upper and middle classes, transferring money to lower economic classes via subsidies and benefits. In other words, “The transfer state redistributes funds from those with high-skill and high-income levels to those with lower skill levels.” Heritage makes the assumption, “It takes the entire net tax payments...

You have to understand the way the government prosecutes its cases. If you look closely, all cases are charged with CONSPIRACY. That means the proof is NOT the crime itself, but only an AGREEMENT to commit a crime. Bankman-Fried’s ex-girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, who was also the CEO of Alameda Research, a privately-controlled hedge fund, and Gary Wang, co-founder of FTX, have both pleaded guilty earlier this week, according to newly unsealed court documents. That means the case is already over. Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang cut deals so they get less time, or even no time, in return for throwing...

A growing consensus of IT experts, outside and inside the government, have figured out a principal reason why the website for Obamacare’s federally-sponsored insurance exchange is crashing. Healthcare.gov forces you to create an account and enter detailed personal information before you can start shopping. This, in turn, creates a massive traffic bottleneck, as the government verifies your information and decides whether or not you’re eligible for subsidies. HHS bureaucrats knew this would make the website run more slowly. But they were more afraid that letting people see the underlying cost of Obamacare’s insurance plans would scare people away.

65 Ways That Everything That You Think That You Own Is Being Systematically Taken Away From YouApril 12, 2011 Everything that you own is slowly being taken away from you. It is being done purposely and it is being done by design. Many Americans like to think of themselves as "well off", but as will be demonstrated below, we don't "own" nearly as much as we think that we do. The truth is that most of us have to frantically run around accumulating wealth as rapidly as we can so that we can somehow stay ahead of the rate that...

Pakistan received $656 million in security funds from the United States as authorities probed links between the country and the confessed Times Square bomber. According to Dawn newspaper, the U.S. embassy in Islamabad transferred $188 million to Pakistan's central bank last week and the remaining $468 million on Monday. The coalition-support funds compensate Pakistan for counterterrorim and counterinsurgency operations. Faisal Shahzad, a Connecticut resident and the 30-year-old son of a retired official in Pakistan's air force, was hauled off an Emirates airlines flight bound for Dubai on Monday night and charged Tuesday with attempting to detonate an SUV bomb in...

The investigators concluded that the Treasury under the federal bailout had invested $254 billion into companies but the preferred stock it got in return had a market value at the time of only $176 billion, or 69 percent of what the government paid, according to a congressional oversight panel report scheduled to be released today. Elizabeth Warren, the chairwoman of the panel, said former Treasury secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. had promised that the government would buy the assets at their market value and that it was alarming that he didn't do so. "At various points, Treasury has articulated policy...

With every developer West of the Mississippi drooling over the chance to develop some 1/4 acre of the Concord Naval Weapons Station, it seems every politician and city planner worth their salt is now talking about “affordable housing.” But what is “affordable housing” in California?Since normal people know that “affordable housing” doesn’t really exist in the regions of California where normal people really want to live, what is it that big-government, pro-redevelopment politcos really mean when they yap on and on about “affordable housing” this campaign season?Two words: Subsidized Housing.When you look at it, most everything about housing in California...

The idea of wealth redistribution is often described as 'taxing the rich to give to the poor'. This act of theft almost seems noble when described in such nostalgic terms. However, anyone who has argued against the untouchable liberal tenet of wealth redistribution has undeniably drawn the wrath of the self-described, 'tolerant' left. If a dissenter dares to describe the practice as 'robbing the laborers to give to the loafers', or 'stealing from the successful to give to the irresponsible', that person has opened his/herself up to personal attacks of greed and insensitivity. To question wealth redistribution is to question...