Free Republic

You gotta hand it to conservatives – we get abused and dumped and generally treated like dishrags, but we never stop falling for the latest politician who is going to sweep us off our feet and make sweet, sweet political love to us. Yet maybe, instead of acting on our infatuations,----

There are folks out there who think that the best solution to the Ukraine crisis – for the folks – is for Zelensky to just throw in the towel and save his people the nightmare of further war with Russia, and part of that group include American pols and blue checks who want to simply put this behind us to get on with what they think is more important business, like sucking up to Iran, and sacrificing to the angry weather goddess. Ukrainians not giving up means the fighting is on TV every night, along with economic pain, and that...

They think anytime a Republican is elected president, there must have been something 'illegitimate' going on. But: He was elected. And, contrary to the endless litany of Democratic complaints, he was legitimately elected. You may not like the way we elect presidents through the Electoral College — I do; if anything, I think the Founders erred on the side of making the presidency excessively democratic in character, with the disastrous results we see before us today — but the Electoral College was not invented in 2016, and it was not created to frustrate the ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Some...

Can you stand one more addition to the discussion on the Ahmari-French debates? The most positive assessment I can make of Sohrab Ahmari’s side of the argument is that many of us on the Right want to believe that we have a free and fair system for expressing our views and attempting to get the government to enact the policies we want, and under the law, we do. But in practice, the deck is stacked particularly high against conservative Christians, and some of our country’s most powerful institutions are less inclined to even give lip service to the concept of...

Martha G. Kavanaugh, the mother of Brett Kavanaugh was a Maryland district judge in 1996. In an amazing coincidence, Martha Kavanaugh was the judge in a foreclosure case in which Christine Blasey-Ford’s parents were the defendants. Now it all becomes clear. Blasey-Ford is going after Brett Kavanaugh, not because of what he did in high school. Instead, Christine Blasey-Ford is going after Brett Kavanaugh out of spite and revenge for a case rulled on by Brett Kavanaugh mother. Martha Kavanaugh, Brett’s mother was Montgomery County Circuit Court judge from 1993 until she retired in 2001. During a 1996 foreclosure case,...

Just came across an intriguing theory about Sergei Skripal, the former Soviet/Russian military intelligence agent who spied for Britain, and, along with his daughter Yulia, was nearly killed this spring by a dose of the nerve agent Novichok in the town of Salisbury, England, where they live. In a March 21 interview on the John Batchelor Show, Gregory R. Copley, editor and publisher of Defense & Foreign Affairs, posited that Sergei Skripal is the unnamed Russian intelligence source in the Steele dossier. Copley further explained (or tried to explain) to Batchelor (who kept cutting him off): “The people who wished...

Revisiting Bastiat’s parable. As president of the most powerful country in the world — and a man with the utmost confidence in his own judgment — would Donald Trump dare to tell the Sun, that fiery ball at the center of our solar system, “You’re fired!” It seems so, if we take him at his recently tweeted word (“Trade wars are good, and easy to win”) and take the liberty of injecting him into the center of the argument found in the “Candle Maker’s Petition,” a satire of protectionist tariffs written by the great French economist, Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850).

Last week, President Trump's announced sweeping tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports into the United States: 25 percent on American buyers of imported steel-mill products and 10 percent on American buyers of imported aluminum-mill products. Trump has favored strong tariffs for years, and some of his most prominent economic advisors are supplying him with arguments in service of his policy. Those arguments are all wrong. Here are the facts about some of the favorite arguments made by protectionists. For the sake of simplification, I will mostly focus on the steel tariffs. Argument 1: Trump's tariffs are necessary because our...

Whenever you hear any of these arguments against free trade, you will have answers. The arguments against free-trade all have this in common: they rely on coercion by the government. All of them rely on a concept of the legitimacy of government agents with badges and guns who have the moral authority and legal right to stick a gun in the belly of one or more people who want to make a voluntary transaction. The government tells these people that they do not have the moral right or the legal authority to make such a transaction. Think of two men:...

President Donald Trump has had a splendid first year in office. He has the economy moving again and at a healthy pace, some 2.6 percent in the most recent quarter. Unemployment is down, the stock market is up and the economic signs are mostly healthy. Well, for the stock market that was until last week. That was the week in which the President announced his intention to slap a 25 percent tariff on steel imports and a 10 percent tariff on aluminum. The market tanked, and more problems are said to be coming internationally. It appears the world does not...

One of the ironies of trade protectionism is that tariffs and import quotas are what we do to ourselves in times of peace and what foreign nations do to u‎s with blockades to keep imports from entering our country in times of war. Or consider that we impose sanctions on U.S. enemies such as North Korea, Russia, and Iran because we want them to feel the economic pain of being deprived of imports. But now we are imposing sanctions on our own country, putting up tariffs supposedly to make Americans more prosperous. If ever there were a crisis of logic,...

As the Wall Street Journal observes in the related editorial today (behind the Journal’s paywall): “The 37-page indictment contains no evidence of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, but it does show a systematic effort to discredit the result of the 2016 election. On the evidence so far, President Trump has been the biggest victim of that effort, and he ought to be furious at Vladimir Putin.” The Journal editorial asks a good question: “The indictment also makes us wonder what the Obama Administration was doing amid all of this. Where were top Obama spooks James Clapper and John...

... if the Republicans are smart, they can craft legislation that legalizes the “dreamers” (but needn’t provide them a path to citizenship) in exchange for an end to chain migration, an end to the “diversity lottery,” and a merit-based system that would admit a reduced number of legal immigrants who can provide economic benefit. And, I suppose the wall, too. Note that I didn’t put the wall at the top of the list of policies the GOP should negotiate for. The much more important issue is employer enforcement. A reader with a deep interest in the subject writes: An excellent...

Repeal Obamacare now. Here's why it would work. House Republicans are reportedly ready to return any day now to health-insurance reform after the spectacular failure in late March of the American Health Care Act, the resoundingly unpopular bill to “replace” the long-unpopular and misnamed Affordable Care Act. This time, they need to deliver: After seven years of promises to repeal Obamacare root and branch, the party can’t go back to the voters with nothing more than a participation trophy. It won’t be easy, and it may be agonizingly slow, but the Democrats didn’t get Obamacare passed overnight: They spent 40...

Last week, the conservative magazine National Review published a long and scathing attack on Donald J. Trump. Notable names included Glenn Beck, Erick Erickson, Michael Medved, and Thomas Sowell. Absent was the radio champion of conservatism, Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh said National Review’s attack came “too late now,” and would not convince Trump’s supporters. This may be true, but it could also be Limbaugh’s way of explaining why he won’t attack Trump himself. Could Limbaugh be “cheating on conservatism” with The Donald? Does he identify with Trump, or does Limbaugh’s hatred of the “establishment” run so deep that he is willing...

This is just the bloodletting the Republican Party needs Democrats have spent years raging about the rise of super PACs and the millionaires and billionaires who fund them. Maybe they should start laughing instead, because the largest super PAC in history may come to be best known for taking down the Republican candidate who may have had the best chance to win in 2016. On Thursday, we learned that 35 percent of the money spent so far by the super PAC supporting Jeb Bush has been used to target the candidacy of his fellow Floridian, Marco Rubio. According to Jeremy...

Some news to report out of Las Vegas where Donald Trump sat down with Field & Stream magazine for an interview during the National Shooting Sports Foundation’s annual SHOT Show. First up, the GOP front-runner came out against letting states control public lands now run by the federal government saying, “I don’t like the idea because I want to keep the lands great, and you don’t know what the state is going to do."

Bipartisan deals -- so beloved by media pundits -- have produced some of the great disasters in American history. Contrary to the widespread view that the Great Depression of the 1930s was caused by the stock market crash of 1929, unemployment never reached double digits in any of the 12 months that followed the stock market crash in October, 1929. Unemployment was 6.3 percent in June 1930 when a Democratic Congress and a Republican president made a bipartisan deal that produced the Smoot-Hawley tariffs. Within 6 months, unemployment hit double digits -- and stayed in double digits throughout the entire...

Donald J. Trump, the Republican frontrunner who has repeatedly promised to “Make American Great Again,” participated in organized soccer as a high school student approaching the age of legal adulthood, the Free Beacon has learned. The following was published in the 1964 edition of the New York Military Academy yearbook:

What ever happened to Ronald Reagan’s “Thou shall speak no ill of a fellow Republican”? And what about W. F. Buckley’s admonition to always work for the Republican with the best chance to get in? He meant the most conservative candidate in a position to get in. I do not think he meant you should vote for the strongest conservative even when the strongest conservative was likely to get creamed by the weakest liberal. He meant you should vote for a weakly conservative or imperfectly conservative candidate if he is in a position to beat the left. No enemies on...