Free Republic

Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano is on the East Coast meeting with housing experts to design the ideal standard house for all Americans. They are deciding what square footage, color, style, décor, appliances and landscaping should be mandated by the government. Sounds ludicrous, doesn’t it? But few people think that it’s ludicrous that she is doing something equally as ludicrous as the fictional opening paragraph. She’s meeting with left-leaning education experts to reform K-12 public education and establish a standard curriculum. Let me state it differently: From all of the different facts and views that can be taught in primary and...

Virtually every big-city newspaper in the country parrots press releases, studies and statistics from the government and special-interest groups, especially from their favorite group, the public education establishment, without questioning the validity of the information. Then newspapers wonder why they are losing intelligent readers to other media. It's not that intelligent readers have anything against parrots. They may even have them as pets and enjoy watching them at an aviary. But that doesn't mean that they want to get their news and information from them. Take the Arizona Republic. For years it has been parroting the public education establishment's claim...

My son is taking an algebra course this summer at the Catholic preparatory high school that he is entering as a freshman this year. It's also a political indoctrination course. Neither my son's excellent school nor his excellent math teacher is the source of the indoctrination. The source is the textbook, which is designed to do more than teach algebra. As I will show momentarily, it is also designed to convey politically-correct group-think. Because government schools have a near-monopoly over K-12 education, textbook publishers cater to their largest customer, the government. As a result, Catholic schools and other private schools...

What is a blatitude? It's a combination of blather and platitudes spouted by elitist central planners. For example, the following blatitude was written in an op-ed in the June 6, 2005 edition of the Arizona Republic by Richard Seline, CEO of New Economy Strategies: "All these efforts [at economic development] and many more like them suggest that Arizona is poised to catalyze a response to global innovation challenges." Let me catalyze a response to the above: Huh? Another blatitude: "Given the competitive landscape, accelerating the baseline performance of Arizona's assets and people is imperative." Well, I don't know about you,...

Are you smart enough to live in Arizona? To find out, answer the following five questions: 1. Who is at fault if your kids fail the AIMS test, which is a statewide test in Arizona that public school students have to pass in order to graduate? a) You and your kids. b) The government. c) Rich people. d) Wal-Mart, McDonald's, Enron and global warming. 2. What should be done about your kids failing? a) You should make them study more. b) They should get free tutors so that you can watch Oprah uninterrupted. c) They should get free breakfast and...

Listed below are 15 commonly-held myths about social, economic, health and environmental conditions in the United States, followed by facts that debunk the myths. The facts have been gleaned from the Pocket World in Figures 2005, published by the The Economist magazine. Myth # 1: The U.S. ranks low in human development. Fact: On the Human Development Index, which measures literacy, life expectancy and income levels, the U.S. ranks above Japan, Switzerland, Denmark, Holland, Luxembourg, the United Kingdom, Austria, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and 38 other countries. Myth #2: The U.S. is uncompetitive in global markets. Fact: The U.S. is...

KABUL (Reuters) - A man claiming to have kidnapped an Italian aid worker in Afghanistan told Reuters on Friday he had killed her, but a government spokesman said she was still alive. Clementina Cantoni, 32, who works for the CARE International aid agency, was snatched on Monday when four gunmen stopped her vehicle on a central Kabul street and bundled her into a white Toyota car. Cantoni's abduction raised fresh fears among Kabul's 2,000-strong foreign community of Iraq-style kidnappings by anti-government insurgents but officials said the kidnapper was Timoor Shah, the leader of a criminal gang. Shah, who has claimed...

A man claiming to have kidnapped an Italian aid worker in Afghanistan told media overnight he had killed her, but a government spokesman said she was still alive. Clementina Cantoni, 32, who works for the CARE International aid agency, was snatched this week when four gunmen stopped her vehicle on a central Kabul street and bundled her into a white Toyota car. Timoor Shah, who has claimed in several conversations with media to be holding Ms Cantoni, said he killed her after President Hamid Karzai's government refused to accept his demands. "We strangled her with a rope at nine...

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has just announced that tire sensors will be required on vehicles beginning in 2008. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently issued a report showing that car ownership costs are the second highest household expense in the U.S., second only to housing costs and three times as much as medical costs. Maybe the two agencies should talk to each other. That way, the NHTSA would know how its regulations have increased the cost of car ownership over the years, one regulation at a time. The establishment media could help. Instead of reporting that the...

For years, the Propaganda Ministry of the government, government schools and left-liberal media outlets and think tanks have brainwashed Arizonans into believing that per-pupil spending is low in Arizona. Thanks to the Goldwater Institute, the Ministry's control of spending data has been ended. By going to the URL at the end of this article, you can get total spending figures for the state as a whole and for individual schools. District data will be added soon to the site. The average per-pupil spending in the state is $8,703 for K-3, $8,530 for grades 4-8, and $8,913 for high school. That...

The Sunday, January 16, 2005, edition of the Arizona Republic published what it called an "objective" report on how Arizona compares to other states. The report was written by the Morrison Institute for Public Plunder, located at Arizona State University. Oh, I got the name wrong? You say that the correct name is the Morrison Institute for Public Policy? I'm so embarrassed. My apologies to the staffers at the Institute. In my defense, the word "plunder" must have crept into my subconscious from years of reading Institute reports that advocated central planning, higher taxes, bigger government, and remaking Arizona and...

US Airways has announced a new pricing policy. Instead of letting customers know how much the airfare is for a flight, US Airways is going to start letting them know what the airline spends per seat. At a press conference to announce the new pricing, a US Airways spokesperson said, "Customers don't care about what they pay; they care about what it costs us to run this airline. The higher our per-seat costs, the more value our customers believe they are getting." Just kidding. The above is not a new pricing scheme by US Airways. It is an old scheme...

The Arizona Republic, which is a daily with the second-largest circulation in the Gannett empire next to USA Today, ran a long editorial on October 19 about the flu vaccine shortage. The title and subtitle were: "Bug in the system. Our stand: The shortage of flu vaccine reveals a yawning gap in health care." A telephone conversation between myself and the author of the editorial, an intelligent and personable member of the editorial board, reveals the yawning gap between many in the mainstream media and people like myself on the subjects of markets, economics, government and health care. It's a...

The government of the United States has become a government of unpatriotic gigolos. Congress and the President not only screw us out of our money while pretending to care about us, but they also commit one of the most unpatriotic acts possible: They brazenly violate the supreme law of the land, the Constitution, a document that embodies the very essence of the nation. Their actions are worse than spitting on the flag. At the same time, the political institution of the Supreme Court ignores the lawbreaking, government schools encourage it, and anyone who has the temerity to call it lawbreaking...

Now that the kiddies have returned to public school, here's a checklist that you can use to determine if they are being educated according to government standards: • Do they know that Sacagawea was on the Lewis and Clark expedition, but do not know that Thomas Jefferson was president at the time? • Do they know that the White man oppressed Native Americans, but don't know that Native Americans oppressed and enslaved each other? • Do they believe that FDR ended the Great Depression but don't know that he actually extended it through misguided central planning? • Do they know...

Last week, my wife and I drove 110 miles to Flagstaff, Arizona to escape the summertime furnace of Phoenix and to take our minds off of political issues, especially the meeting of plunderers and economic illiterates known as the Democratic National Convention, which will be followed by a meeting of plunderers and economic illiterates known as the Republican National Convention. Pulling into the hotel in the pines at 7,000 ft. elevation, our soaring spirits took a nosedive when we saw the marquis, where, emblazoned in large letters, was a welcome to plunderers and economic illiterates. As luck would have it,...

It is said that Social Security and Medicare are the third-rail of politics. If you dare mess with the entitlements, AARP will electrocute you on the third rail and then tell grandma and grandpa to drive the train back and forth over your body for fun. But there is another entitlement that is even more entrenched than Social Security and Medicare. If you have the temerity to even suggest that it is an entitlement, its beneficiaries will torture you before throwing you on the third rail. What entitlement am I referring to? Public education. And who are the people most...

In the event you missed it, last week's PBS show "Washington Week in Review" discussed the presidential campaign between John Kerry, George Bush, Ralph Nader and Thomas Jefferson. Here is a transcript of the segment: Gwen Ifill (Host): It's not surprising that John Kerry and George Bush are still running neck and neck, but the big news of the week is the huge drop in the polls for Libertarian candidate Thomas Jefferson. CBS is now projecting that he will get fewer votes than Ralph Nader. Michael Duffy (Time Magazine): I have never seen a candidate with such radical ideas and...

Why aren't Americans storming the castle and overthrowing the overlords who have consigned them and their offspring to lives of tax servitude? Are they wimps and socialists? They are neither. They are frogs. You may know that if a frog is put in hot water, it will jump out. But if it is put in a pot of cold water on a stove and the heat is slowly turned up, the frog will stay put and boil to death. The same is true for taxpayers. If government expenditures suddenly increased by 300%, taxpayers would grab their pitchforks, overthrow the House...

The June 8 edition of the Arizona Republic had a front-page story with this opening line: "More than 45,000 seniors and disabled Arizonans have saved $3.2 million on prescription drugs in the year since Gov. Janet Napolitano launched her program to help deal with expensive but necessary medication." In keeping with the standard journalism formula, the story had the obligatory quotes from someone with AIDS and from a single mom of three kids. It also printed quotes from leftists who think the program isn't rich enough, from a Retard (Republican embracing taxes and rampant dependency) and from a representative of...

Proof of what I just wrote on pathetic press coverage About an hour ago I had sent an e-mail offering my take on the Arizona Republic's 8% drop in circulation and attaching an article of mine on the formula used by the establishment media to cover taxes and government spending. (The e-mail and article are posted at the end of this.) Since then, I have picked up the Arizona Republic and read the front-page story on cities renewing pay raises. The theme of the piece is that city workers have had to endure cuts in their cost-of-living (COLA) increases this...

Subject: Info for Cantoni TV interview? The local ABC affiliate, Channel 15, is interviewing me at my home office at 5:15 today on the subject of outsourcing for the station's 15-minute segment, "The Investigators," which runs during the Sunday evening news. I have a number of studies dubunking the myths put out by the opponents of global trade and outsourcing, including a Cato study, "Job Losses and Trade." But if you have a particularly good article or study on the subject, please e-mail it to me (CCan2@aol.com). The interview was triggered by Gov. Napolitano wanting to stop the state from...

April 15 is not only tax day. It's also a day of anger and questions. After paying a tax accountant $1,125 to prepare two tax returns for my wife and me, two returns for our 13-year-old son, and five returns for my 82-year-old mother and deceased father, I am overflowing with anger and questions. I'll discuss the tax returns after I ask a question that I ask every April 15th: Is it moral for me to use force to stop an armed robber from stealing my family's money? If the answer to the above question is yes, then a follow-up...

<p>An early draft of the Communist Manifesto had a plank calling for the state to raise children, but it was removed from the final version for being too controversial. It has resurfaced in Arizona 156 years later.</p> <p>The state has done such a superb job in educating kiddies that it now wants to expand socialized education to all-day kindergarten. Proponents claim that early childhood indoctrination, er, development is necessary to lower the dropout rate and improve academic performance. In addition to all-day kindergarten, they also want the state to provide free pre-kindergarten. Free diapers and strained carrots will be next.</p>

<p>I've always wondered why there is a full-time police presence at Scottsdale district high schools. Now I know why. It is so the police can place a kid in handcuffs and arrest him for wearing his baseball cap sideways in the cafeteria, as they did recently at Saguaro High School.</p>

Dear Mel Melendez: The article pasted below was published yesterday as my weekly column in the Scottsdale edition of the Republic. Today, you proved my point with your front-page story, "School boards fail ethnic-diversity test," which lamented that school boards have few minorities and that minority students are failing because of the fact. I was shocked to discover from your story that the man I thought was my father all of my life really wasn't my father. You see, he was an Italian, but according to you, I'm an Anglo, so he couldn't have been my father. Maybe the milkman...

The intellectual contradictions of liberals and conservatives are often hilarious, but they've outdone themselves with their philosophical somersaults over gay marriage. Liberals are squawking about gays being denied rights, but as lovers of big government, they have endorsed government programs that infringe on the rights of gays. Conservatives, on the other hand, love small government but want more government when it comes to gays. Neither liberals nor conservatives seem to understand that gay rights wouldn't be an issue and wouldn't be plastered all over the media if the government had not made it an issue by putting its nose where...

<p>The following three books are antidotes to the campaign claptrap of presidential candidates about Iraq, education and health care.</p> <p>David Fromkin's A Peace to End All Peace is a history of how the modern Middle East was created by the imperialistic European powers after World War I. Of particular relevance to today is how our ally in the current Iraq war, Britain, got itself into a costly mess eight decades ago when it created the artificial country of Iraq out of Mesopotamia and when it allowed Zionists to settle in Palestine.</p>

<p>I used to pooh-pooh the belief of libertarian intellectuals that voting only encourages politicians to steal. Now, based on the upcoming presidential election and the Scottsdale mayoral and council election, I'm beginning to think they are right.</p> <p>Judging by the domestic spending binge of Bush's first term, a vote for the president would mean a vote for a larger leviathan. A vote for John Kerry would mean a vote for an even larger leviathan. Some choice. We can vote for a big-government Yalie with slicked-down hair or a bigger-government Yalie with blow-dried hair who is married to a ketchup heir.</p>

<p>I'll begin with some sobering facts: Arizona has dug a huge budget hole by increasing spending faster than inflation and population growth, President Bush has morphed into a Democrat and engaged in record levels of domestic spending, Americans have squandered so much of their own money that personal savings have plummeted from 10 percent of income 20 years ago to 2 percent today, the prosperity of the United States now depends on China and other nations continuing to buy our debt, and the nation might elect another big spender, John Kerry, to the presidency.</p>

One of the most powerful and insidious lobbying groups in the nation is the K-12 public education establishment, which feeds on the concerns of parents about their children, paints state legislators into a corner by threatening to portray them as not caring about children, and bombards the mainstream media with folderol about the need to increase public education spending -- for the children, of course. Since you won't read an expose in your local newspaper about the deviousness and power of the education lobby and how it is joined at the hip with leftist organizations, this article in intended to...

A recent e-mail debate that I had with an Arizona State University education professor reveals the fallacious thinking about the public good that permeates colleges of education and flows, through the graduates of the schools, to innocent k-12 students, like sewage flowing unfiltered into a pristine river. It is collectivist, communitarian and vacuous thinking. Rarely balanced with individualistic thinking and reasoned debates, it explains why the vast majority of Americans engage in group-think about the public good and public education, never questioning the one-sided view that they were taught in government schools by government teachers, and not knowing the sordid...

The establishment media -- or what I refer to as the "stupid media" -- has outdone itself in stupidity, which I had thought was an impossibility. It has been abuzz the last two days with a ranking of the fattest U.S. cities, published by that respected medical journal, Men's Fitness magazine. Not that additional proof was needed, but the coverage proves that any nonsense can get published in the stupid media as long as it doesn't violate the rules of political correctness. How did Men's Fitness magazine determine the fattest cities? Did it take a representative, statistically valid sample of...

Do you know what your family pays for public education? You probably don't, because it is a number that the establishment media do not tell you and that the government and the National Education Association do not want you to know. If you knew, you might not put up with their incessant begging for more money. If you own a home, your property tax bill shows how much of your property taxes goes to public schools, but that is only about half of what you pay. The other half is hidden in your state and federal income taxes and other...

I recently published an article about attending an exhibit on flight and seeing a display about Hispanic pilots but no displays about Italian pilots or pilots from the many other ethnic groups in the United States. The article raised the question of why Hispanics aren't insulted by such blatant racial pandering and by similar pandering in the mainstream media and on university campuses. Such pandering has racist overtones, I said, because it is based on the assumption that Hispanics are somehow inferior to other ethnic groups and need to be treated paternalistically by non-Hispanics. Scores of Hispanics have been sending...

<p>I'm not a psychologist. Nor am I a contemporary liberal or a conservative.</p> <p>Like the founders, I'm a classical liberal who believes in maximum liberty and minimal government.</p> <p>As such, I'm not qualified to say what makes a liberal a liberal and what makes a conservative a conservative. All I can do is judge them by what they say and do.</p>

Public speaking and writing a newspaper column on public policy issues have introduced me to a new branch of economics: Marxicon economics. It is a bizarre combination of Marxism and free-market capitalism that is embraced by a large number of conservatives. A case in point: I recently shared the dais at a meeting of conservatives with British historian David Irving, who has been both praised and vilified for his books on the Second World War and the Holocaust. He spoke about his books, and I spoke about the new Medicare bill. Both of us had a similar sub-theme: that governments,...

Overhearing me complaining about taxes, my 12-year-old son said, "Pretty soon they'll start taxing trees." I responded, "Well, Chris, they already do. For instance, if you owned apple trees and sold the apples, you'd pay a tax." He replied with the wisdom of a seventh-grader: "Then I wouldn't grow apples." Not wanting to discourage him from studying and trying to become a contributing member of society, I didn't tell him about all of the taxes heading his way because of the profligate spending of today's adults and their duly elected representatives -- taxes that he will not avoid by not...

Imagine for a moment that two presidential candidates were on the campaign trail espousing state-sponsored murder, with the Democratic candidate advocating the murder of all heterosexual white males and the Republican candidate advocating the murder of all Hollywood atheists. There would be a moral outrage, and decent citizens would conclude that it would be immoral to vote for either candidate. They would not conclude that it would be moral to vote for the Republican candidate because his platform would result in fewer murders. Now picture a scene from real life. Picture presidential candidate Howard Dean and President Bush advocating state-sponsored...

Politicians, especially Democrats, talk about tax fairness but never talk about tax morality. That's because their notion of a fair tax is really an immoral tax, for it is based on theft -- on some people taking money from other people for themselves. Let's look at examples of moral and immoral taxes and four principles to use in determining which is which. The first example is gas taxes. Gas taxes are a moral tax if the revenue is used for roads. The taxes are moral because the users of the roads pay for the cost of the roads and do...

U.S. Representative Trent Franks (R-AZ) was one of the conservative holdouts on the Medicare bill who ended up voting yes after being pressured by President Bush and other Republicans. On a radio show with me after the vote, he tried to justify his vote by saying, among other things, that the bill's provision for Health Savings Accounts is a free-market innovation. Congressman Franks and other Republicans have a strange definition of "free market." Of course, Democrats have always been clueless. HSAs are about as "free market" as industry was in the Third Reich. When Hitler was asked why he didn't...

It's amazing what you can learn from the Arizona Republic. Take a chirpy front-page story on early education programs in the Nov. 19 edition. The story used 45 column-inches to explain the glories of the state providing a more "free" services and replacing parents in the rearing of kids. I learned that in a state of 5 million people and a nation of 280 million people, there is not one taxpayer who is concerned about the cost of the services, not one scholar who has debunked the value of such programs, and not one conservative or libertarian who sees a...

Someone sent me a confidential transcript of a recent strategic planning meeting of the top brass at the Arizona Republic. Just kidding, but if such a transcript did exist, it would read as follows: CEO: I want to open our annual strategic planning meeting by reviewing some numbers. Our circulation dropped 3.7 percent for the six months ending in September, in spite of being in a high-growth state. As you know, we're the highest circulation daily in the Gannett empire next to USA Today, which saw its circulation rise only .7 percent. During the same period, the Wall Street Journal...

I recently rode with an over-the-road truck driver, who told me that he gets all of his news from USA Today, which he considers an excellent newspaper. The poor soul. That makes him just as ignorant of complex current events and economics as those who rely solely on network TV or their hometown newspaper for news. Such people are unaware of facts like the following. - Contrary to what the ignorant media have led the general public to believe, it is not just the United States that has been losing manufacturing jobs. Due largely to worldwide factory overcapacity, manufacturing employment...

In 1850, Frederic Bastiat published his book, The Law, in which he said: "The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." It is time to resurrect Bastiat and have a national debate on whether citizens have a constitutional and moral right to steal from each other. According to Bastiat, there are three types of government: 1. A government in which "the few plunder the many." 2. A government in which "everybody plunders everybody." 3. A government in which "nobody plunders anybody." With the exception of morons, liars and Ted Kennedy,...

Mr. Talton writes: "by some estimates, 700,000 of Wal-Mart's employees have no health insurance." I wonder who his anonymous "some estimates" sources might be......... Talton's ignorance, lack of research, economics illiteracy, and simplistic, uninformed demonization of an American success story are an embarrassment to the journalism profession, to Arizona and to his employer, the Arizona Republic. Him being a business columnist is akin to making Ralph Nader the dean of the Harvard Business School. Wal-Mart's VP of benefits became a friend of mine when we began working together on health care reform after the Wall Street Journal published an article...

Arizona Republic reporter Chip Scutari used immoderate language and lousy spelling on the front-page of the September 12 Arizona Republic to paint the fiscally conservative Club for Growth as an extremist group. Scutari said that the organization was "created to target GOP legislators who don't worship at the alter (sic) of tax cuts, economic growth and school choice." A revealing choice of words. In my experience, no Republic reporter has ever described a liberal organization as targeting Democrats who don't worship at the altar of tax increases, economic stagnation and public school collectivism and coercion. From the unbalanced political perspective...

<p>Imagine if 69 percent of America West's airplanes failed to make a safe landing, or if APS failed to keep the lights on 75 percent of the time, or if your car failed to start 36 percent of the time. Would you keep buying the products and services?</p>

This is intended to be a public service for Arizona residents. It presents little-known facts about state spending and taxes, and can be used as ammunition to fight the big-government juggernaut, which consists of the following advocates of government growth and gouging: - the establishment media, especially The Arizona Republic, which endorses higher taxes and spending by at least five to one over lower taxes and spending; - the left-leaning Morrison Institute at Arizona State University, which is a darling of the establishment media and which, of course, has a vested interest in higher taxes; - teacher unions, the education...

<p>There has been no shortage of gaseous rhetoric from Gov. Janet Napolitano, a lawyer by trade, about the gas shortage. Like most liberals and other economic illiterates, her immediate reaction was to blame private industry.</p> <p>According to Mark Ellery of Napolitano's Commerce Department, the owner of the broken pipeline, Kinder Morgan Partners, has been trying for two years to get the government to approve permits for a new gasoline pipeline from Tucson to Phoenix. Two years.</p>