Free Republic

Buying a home has become increasingly out of reach for Americans, who are grappling with a double whammy of high interest rates and surging home values. In his State of the Union address on Thursday, President Joe Biden proposed a new tax credit that would provide $10,000 to first-time home buyers. Biden is also proposing a separate $10,000 tax credit for current homeowners who sell their "starter home" in order to jump into a bigger house. That could help melt a real estate market in which homeowners who locked in low mortgage rates during the pandemic and are hesitant to...

Below is my column in The Hill on how Disney appears to be honoring the 300th anniversary of Adam Smith by recognizing some basic economic principles like the need to sell goods to make profits. Here is the column: This year marks the 300th anniversary of Adam Smith, the iconic figure behind the theory of free markets, or of what we have since come to call “capitalism.” Born in June 1723, Smith went on to explain how the “invisible hand” of the market worked as people exercised their choices between certain products. It can shape economies and challenge whole governments....

When Adam Smith got in his car, drove up to a Chick-fil-A drive through window and began confronting an employee about LGBT rights, he thought he was doing something positive.For him, it was one step in undoing anti-gay messaging he says he was taught as a child.But his first act of protest ever would soon cause his life to unravel.Smith filmed the 2012 encounter in Tucson, Arizona as part of a larger demonstration against the fast food chain. Its chairman, president and CEO Dan T. Cathy — a noted Christian — had publicly said he was "guilty as charged" for...

The Wealth of Nations, in full An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, work by the Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith, first published in 1776, that became a foundational study in the history of economics and the first formulation of a comprehensive system of political economy. Despite its renown as the first great work of political economy, The Wealth of Nations is in fact a continuation of a philosophical theme begun in an earlier work by Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). The ultimate problem to which Smith addresses himself is how the...

The head Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee says he is worried about a flurry of “extreme right-wing amendments” attached to the House version of the annual defense bill as lawmakers prepare to debate and vote on the legislation this month. Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) told The Washington Post he was concerned about GOP measures on “abortion, guns, the border, and social policy and equity issues.” “We’ll just have to wait and see what amendments are made in order when the bill is debated on the House floor,” he said. “Depending on which amendments pass, I will make an...

The House and Senate intelligence oversight committees are looking into hate speech that has flourished in spy agency chat rooms over the past five years, spokespersons there tell SpyTalk. The House Armed Services Committee is also “aware of these allegations and we are working with the relevant agencies to assess the claim," said Caleb H. Randall-Bodman, the panel’s spokesman. Dan Gilmore, who worked in an administrative group overseeing internal chat rooms for the classified Intelink system for over a decade starting in 2011, says that by late in the third year of the Trump administration the system was afire with...

On Wednesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “New Day,” Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) stated that he would be surprised if oil companies weren’t engaging in profiteering on gas prices and Congress needs to “keep an eye on that and try to make sure that the oil companies don’t take advantage of the situation.” Co-host Brianna Keilar asked, “Oil prices, as you know, are falling. Gas prices, they’re not following yet, but they are expected too. And one of your colleagues, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, says that there is profiteering that is happening by oil companies. Do you agree with that?”

Global food prices soared to a new record high in February, led by a massive jump in vegetable oil and dairy prices as well as higher costs for grains, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The move higher in food prices comes as the Russian invasion of Ukraine sent commodity markets into disarray, which indicates prices could continue to surge and may trigger another ‘Arab Spring’. The FAO Food Price Index (FFPI), a measure of the monthly change in international prices of a basket of food commodities, averaged 140.7 points in February, up 3.9% from January, +24.1%...

‘Whether it is true or not,’ this president and his enablers ‘need to project a different picture’: that the Afghanistan retreat was a great success.Earlier this week, this writer addressed the Biden administration’s instinctive lying on matters big and small, concluding: “When the president allows his key advisors lie to us about a dog bite, the only confidence the American people can have is that he will not be honest with us about these and other life-and-death matters if the truth would hurt his poll numbers or endanger Democrats’ reelection chances.”Regrettably, recent events confirm that the president’s deceptions and misstatements...

Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman's book, 'Religion and the Rise of Capitalism,' provides an illuminating, if not always convincing, examination of how theology influenced modern economic thought.“One of the fundamental elements of the spirit of modern capitalism,” German sociologist Max Weber wrote in his landmark 1905 book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, “of rational conduct on the basis of the idea of the calling, was born from the spirit of Christian asceticism.”Weber attributed the free-market success so prevalent amongst Protestant societies to its origins in Calvinist predestinarian theology: believers could never know for sure whether they had been...

Just when you think that wokeness could not become more absurd, it surpasses itself. A leaked document from the Edinburgh Slavery and Colonialism Legacy Review Group recently revealed that the grave of Adam Smith—author of one of the most important books written in history, the Wealth of Nations (1776)—has been listed as a potential site to investigate on the basis that Smith allegedly accepted slavery as “inevitable.”

Adam Smith wasn't a flawless man, but it's intellectually dishonest to associate Smith with slavery and oppression while ignoring his actual writings.Today’s cancel culture won’t let death set anyone free from condemnation. News from Scotland reports the Edinburgh City Council added Adam Smith’s gravesite to a database of sites linked to “slavery and colonialism.” The Telegraph relays the council took this drastic action after it “launched a review of sites which ‘perpetuated racism and oppression’ following last year’s Black Lives Matter protests, with the option of ‘removal or re-interpretation’ for problematic monuments.” Sir Geoff Palmer, a professor emeritus at Heriot-Watt...

The House Armed Services Committee chairman railed at the expensive F-35 Joint Strike Fighter on Friday, saying he wants to “stop throwing money down that particular rathole,” ― just days after the Air Force said it too is looking at other options. “What does the F-35 give us? And is there a way to cut our losses? Is there a way to not keep spending that much money for such a low capability because, as you know, the sustainment costs are brutal,” Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., said a Brookings event. Air Force officials recently said they are conducting a study...

Today, U.S. Representative Peter DeFazio (OR-04) introduced the Wall Street Tax Act, legislation to create a new tax on financial transactions that would generate billions in revenue, while reducing speculative trading and volatility in the market. “High-frequency traders front-run the market and drive up prices for individuals, pension funds and other value investors,” said Rep. Peter DeFazio. “Some days high-frequency traders trade billions of shares that they sometimes hold for only seconds or less. They reap enormous financial benefits for themselves and their privileged elite investors but add no value to our economy. Congress needs to rein in excessive speculative...

It can happen in a moment of time. One ill-advised tweet. One poorly worded post. One foolish act in public. And that’s it. You are branded. You are marked. You are guilty. For life. Whatever good you’ve done in the past is forgotten, cancelled. However deep and sincere your apology, it will never be enough. You must carry the shame for the rest of your days. Away with you! Ben Howe, author of The Immoral Majority, recounts with horror how he helped spread the video posted by a 37-year-old man named Adam Smith. Smith thought he was doing a good...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Thursday that she will send the articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump to the Senate "when I'm ready," rebuffing calls from top Democrats to submit them. “No, I’m not holding them indefinitely," Pelosi told reporters during a press conference at the Capitol. "I will turn them over when I’m ready, and that will probably be soon.” Some Democrats in the House and Senate have joined Republicans in recent days in saying it's time for Pelosi to send the articles to the Senate. After initially saying in an interview Thursday morning that he thought...

TEL AVIV: Five days ago, an undisclosed intelligence agency intercepted a telephone call made by the head of Iran’s Quds Force, Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, in which he was heard ordering his proxies in Iraq to attack the U.S embassy in Baghdad, as well as other Israeli and American targets, with the aim of taking hostages, Israeli sources say. It’s unclear whether this was a lapse in tradecraft on the part of the usually savvy Soleimani or whether the notorious Iranian military leader’s phone calls were being routinely intercepted. Nor is it clear whether it was the US or another...

Today’s Democrat Party continues to lurch to the extreme Left as evidenced by its political, economic, and social policies. Politically, Democrats favor policies like open borders, “justice reform” that essentially means letting guilty people go if they’re part of a minority group, and anything that Republicans and POTUS Donald Trump don’t want. Economically, the party is closer to Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin than Adam Smith, the latter of whom is credited with being the “father of modern capitalism.” Socially, the party is anti-life and pro-murder — there’s just no other way to say it. While Democrats shed tears for...

The U.S. government is tracking three separate migrant caravans, one of them estimated to be more than 12,000 people in size, heading north toward the U.S., a top Pentagon official said Tuesday. Defense Undersecretary for Policy John Rood told Congress that those caravans are one reason why the presence of active-duty troops is still needed on the U.S.-Mexico border. He also said military medical personnel are helping with the latest border problem, dealing with an increase in sick migrants showing up at the border and in need of immediate attention. Some 2,300 active-duty troops are still on the border, down...

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the socialist congressional candidate from New York who touts honesty and authenticity as her greatest strengths, used to describe herself as a follower of Adam Smith, the so-called father of capitalism -- and said that terms like “feminism” and “empowerment” were “relics from the past.”