Free Republic

Money doesn’t buy happiness, but success does. Capitalism, moored in values of hard work, honesty, and fairness, is key. On July 23, 2000, a forty-two-year-old forklift operator in Corbin, Kentucky, named Mack Metcalf was working a 12-hour nightshift. On his last break, he halfheartedly checked the Sunday paper for the winning Kentucky lottery numbers. He didn’t expect to be a winner, of course—but hey, you never know. Mack Metcalf’s ticket, it turned out, was the winner of the $65 million Powerball jackpot, and it changed his life forever. What did he do first? He quit his job. “I clocked out...

PARIS, France – Nicolas Sarkozy, the America-loving conservative, may be the new president, but he has some work to do changing the culture of a country largely in love with socialism. The front door of the European news bureau of the state-owned Radio France displays a bumper sticker reading "Capitalism … the social disease." Recently, WND correspondent Franklin Raff visited the impressive edifice of Radio France, located at the Maison de la Radio, a round building situated in the center of Paris. (Story continues below) All radio stations were nationalized when Nazi Germany invaded... (snip) When France was liberated by...

Banks, hedge funds and other financial institutions could find their investment strategies curtailed by the Federal Reserve to reduce the risk to the economy from asset bubbles, the US Treasury said on Tuesday. David Nason, the assistant secretary for financial institutions, said the US central bank should use its proposed new powers as a stability regulator to “lean against the wind” by forcing institutions to change their investment strategy if it judged they threatened the wider economy.

Senator, concerning the criteria by which you will nominate judges, you said: "We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old." Such sensitivities might serve an admirable legislator, but what have they to do with judging? Should a judge side with whichever party in a controversy stirs his or her empathy? Is such personalization of the judicial function inimical to the rule of law? • Voting against the confirmation of Chief...

Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch have written an interesting piece for today's Washington Post in which they argue that the 80's television drama "Dallas" helped win the Cold War. Their case is overstated, but not entirely invalid: It was the booze-and-sex-soaked caricature of free enterprise and executive lifestyles that proved irresistible not just to stagflation-weary Americans but viewers from France to the Soviet Union to Ceau?escu's Romania. "Dallas" wasn't simply a television show. It was an atmosphere-altering cultural force. The voluptuous charms of big oil, beautiful women, and sprawling ranches were dangled before viewers in nearly 100 countries, and spoke...

Ideologies: Once in a while the truth accidentally tumbles out on global warming activists' real agenda. That's exactly what happened at the U.N., when Bolivia's leader called for ending capitalism to save the planet. Delivering the keynote address at the United Nations forum on Indigenous People on Monday, Bolivia's President Evo Morales told the adoring crowd that "if we want to save our planet earth, to save life, to save mankind, we have a duty to put an end to the capitalist system."Morales elaborated on that by calling for an end to "unbridled industrial development, extraction of natural resources, excessive...

He was a character created by Actor Garrett Morris on the “Saturday Night Live” TV show, back in the 1970’s. Morris became famous for uttering these simple words in broken-English, with a Spanish-sounding accent: “Beisbol …been bery bery good to me …” “Chico” was a fictitious professional baseball player from the Dominican Republic. He barely spoke English, but loved the fact that he was able to leave his impoverished homeland and come to the United States, where he was paid quite handsomely to play ball. And each time “Weekend Update” Anchor Jane Curtain would introduce Chico on the news set...

Yes there is. Read on and you'll find out about it. Capitalist paradise exists here on Earth. However, it comes with a price tag called "competence". Most of the world lacks this "competence" and will have a hard time aquiring it, because it is a matter of spirit, a spirit that I'm convinced most parts of the world ever will fail to aquire. In my opinion, Scandinavia leads the world in true Capitalist endeavour (check out how many multinationals we possess in realation to population size). The explanation for this tradition of entrepreneurship is not Scandinavian "Socialism". Sooner, it is...

WASHINGTON -- The cover of the latest issue of BusinessWeek shows Ben Bernanke in profile against a bright red and orange backdrop, pensively stroking his grey beard and looking remarkably like Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The imagery is intentional and pointed. From BusinessWeek to The Wall Street Journal and beyond, the U.S. business elite has awoken to the realization that the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, backed by the Bush administration, has embarked on a revolutionary course to save financial capitalism from implosion. It isn't just about the Bear Stearns rescue, which Mr. Bernanke greased with a $30-billion (U.S.) loan. Mr. Bernanke's...

In a landmark address on race, which has already eclipsed Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream‘ speech, Democrat presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama today said the U.S. can achieve the Founding Fathers’ vision of “a more perfect union” only if black and white come together to overthrow the bourgeoisie who run the military-industrial complex and control the means of production. In distancing himself from the “wrong” and “divisive” racially-charged preaching of his long-time pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Sen. Obama simultaneously defused America’s racial tensions, while filling his listeners with “the audacity to hope that the empire of American...

We all know about the sub-prime mortgage crisis which is pretty easy to grasp. Greedy lenders gave a lot of money to risky borrowers evidently believing that housing prices would continue to go up 7% a year forever. The debate over bailing out the industry has been interesting. Do we reward companies who took a flyer on bad risk loans? Or do we reward the borrowers who didn’t read the fine print and got themselves in over their heads? Rewarding stupidity or ignorance is not the way of capitalism. In a perfect capitalistic society, those who make their own bed...

Playwright and screenwriter David Mamet has a confession to make: he doesn’t like NPR. He also has discovered that government solutions tend to make matters worse than better. Mamet has also discovered that America isn’t the root of all evil in the world. In fact, rather than see corporations and capitalism as evils, he now understands that life is a marketplace, and that the United States understands that better than any other nation.Uh-oh. Mamet has become — gasp! — a conservative! Or, at the least, he has dumped “brain-dead” liberalism: Do I speak as a member of the “privileged class”?...

It is ironic that New York Democrat Governor Eliot Spitzer has had his undeserved reputation for high moral standards tarnished by his sexual escapades which, while perhaps sleazy, did not harm any of us. In fact he deserved our moral scorn for his assault on productive individuals and flaunting of the rule of law when he was New York attorney general, done arrogantly in the name of "morality." In an article entitled "Eliot Spitzer: Ayatollah General," in the April/May 2005 issue of The New Individualist, Roger Donway exposed the details of that envy-based assault as Spitzer prepared to run for...

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton declares, "The economy is not working for middle-class and working families," noting the typical American family earns less now than it did seven years ago. Citing the same trend, her Democratic presidential rival, Sen. Barack Obama, promises "to put America back on the path to prosperity." Sen. John McCain, the likely Republican nominee, says, "It is harder for families to weather hard economic times." The candidates' pitches are aimed at wooing the vast majority of Americans who consider themselves middle class. Those people tell pollsters that they are increasingly anxious about their financial security, a feeling...

Cleopatra's Cosmetics And Hammurabi's Heineken: Name Brands Far Predating Modern CapitalismEgyptian perfume bottle. Could product branding have begun in ancient Egypt? (Credit: iStockphoto) ScienceDaily (Feb. 19, 2008) — From at least Bass Ale's red triangle--advertised as "the first registered trademark"--commodity brands have exerted a powerful hold over modern Western society. Marketers and critics alike have assumed that branding began in the West with the Industrial Revolution. But a pioneering new study in the February 2008 issue of Current Anthropology finds that attachment to brands far predates modern capitalism, and indeed modern Western society. In "Prehistories of Commodity Branding," author David...

Neither markets nor governments are perfect. Both often fail, buckling under the weight of human error, bad chance, or dishonest motives. Racial discrimination is perhaps the greatest example of such failure; years of atrocious government policies have resulted in failed schools, chronic incarceration, little economic opportunity and rampant crime. But rappers face these challenges, and rather than seek the assistance of the state, they resolve to climb their way past them through the free market. Moreover, because economic growth in the free market is value-added, the rappers' pursuit of Benjamins also benefits society at large. In addition to their own...

Earlier this summer Benedict urged the nations of the world to embrace each other in solidarity and work towards "an ever more just distribution" of wealth," warning that "It is not possible to continue using the wealth of the poorest countries with impunity, without them also being able to participate in world growth." (Zenit: "Pope Urges Just Distribution of Goods" June 1, 2007).

Bill Gates may be the world's richest person — and also the most generous, as measured by amount of philanthropy — but we shouldn't assume those characteristics make him the most perspicacious.In a Jan. 24 speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Gates laid out his vision of "creative capitalism," which encourages companies to spend money on worthwhile causes or on money-losing projects that are judged to be socially desirable. According to Gates' fuzzy logic, this is "market-based social change" that does "work that eases the world's inequities." Good goals, bad strategy. Gates is not the first paragon...

In Venezuela, they are now standing in line to get powdered milk. Not whole, 2%, 1%, or skim, but powdered. Not chocolate or strawberry in half-gallons, quarts or pints, in cardboard or glass, but powdered.

Royal Dutch Shell has been forced onto the defensive after its announcement of record profits sparked calls for a windfall tax and complaints from motorists about soaring pump prices. While investors fretted about whether the $27.6bn (£13.9bn) profits based on the current cost of supply masked deep problems facing the world's second largest non-government oil company, Shell received a barrage of complaints that its earnings were "obscene". Understatement: Shell's chief executive,Jeroen van der Veer, said the figures were "satisfactory The annual profits, which were up 9pc, are a record for a European listed company and were driven by last year's...

The real estate auction business is booming. Real Estate Disposition Corp is auctioning 2,000 homes in California and 575 in DC, Maryland, and Virginia. More states are coming up.

Bill Gates seems to think there are bugs in the operating system of the modern economy. It doesn’t fight poverty well enough and sometimes suffers debilitating crashes. While attending the World Economic Forum at Davos, he called for a more “creative capitalism” than the one that America hasn’t had to seriously reboot since The Great Depression. He defined “creative capitalism” as follows: "The challenge here is to design a system including profit and recognition to do more for the poor," he said, calling for a new form of "creative capitalism.""Creative capitalism is an approach where governments, businesses and NGOs (non-government...

Excerpt - Free enterprise has been good to Bill Gates. But later today, the Microsoft Corp. chairman will call for a revision of capitalism. In a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the software tycoon plans to call for a "creative capitalism" that uses market forces to address poor-country needs that he feels are being ignored. "We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well," Mr. Gates will tell world leaders at the forum, according to a copy of the speech seen by The Wall...

Economy: Along with the usual gloom that comes with a cyclical economic downturn, there's inevitably something darker and much more cataclysmic: predictions that capitalism as we know it will soon end. Please.A lot of reputable people think we're headed for a recession. That may or may not be true. But headed for an epic meltdown that will make our way of life obsolete? On Wednesday, billionaire socialist George Soros penned a piece for London's Financial Times suggesting the era of capitalist dominance is coming to a screeching halt: "The current crisis is the culmination of a superboom that has lasted...

While Disney artists bring their imaginations to life through animation, Disney executives are living a lifestyle that animators can’t even begin to imagine. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Disney chief executive Bob Iger received a 7% pay increase in 2007 for a total financial compensation of $27.7 million. According to the company’s proxy statement, the breakdown is as follows: $2 million salary, which remained the same as 2006; a $13.7 million bonus, which was a decrease from his $15 million bonus in ‘06; stock awards totaling $7.9 million, and $740,000 for personal air travel, security and a car...

From skimble, via the Sideshow: If we deplete our stock of American intellectuals simply to make more money — without actually doing anything to make more money, such as research or innovate — where will we end up? Where we are. Money worship is what got us here: to the subprime mess, to hedge fund managers wildly overcompensated and undertaxed, to international wars for SUV fuel and no-bid defense contracts, to monstrous CEO severance packages, to corporate ownership of life itself through court-sanctioned genetic patents, to a legislature and presidency whose campaigns serve only as an advertising windfall for television...

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 17 (Xinhua) -- Senator Barack Obama, vying for the Democratic presidential candidacy, vowed to change bankruptcy laws and cap interest rates during his campaign tour in Southern California, the Los Angeles Times reported Thursday. During what his campaign dubbed a "Roundtable on Economic Opportunity" there, Obama called for an exemption in the 2005 bankruptcy bill for people who can persuade a bankruptcy court that they filed for bankruptcy because of debts caused by medical expenses. His proposal also includes extending the 36-percent limit on payday loans to military members to all Americans; encouraging banks, credit unions and...

The success of its economy poses a serious challenge to liberal democracy. 2008 will be China's year. The Olympic Games -- no doubt perfectly organized, without a protester, homeless person, religious dissenter or any other kind of spoilsport in sight -- will almost certainly bolster China's global prestige. While the U.S. economy gets dragged down further in a swamp of bad property debts, China will continue to boom. Exciting new buildings, designed by the world's most famous architects, will make Beijing and Shanghai look like models of 21st century modernity. Chinese entrepreneurs will be featured more and more in those...

Folks, if you don't like the video below, there is something wrong with you. I've had some practice making these YouTube videos over the last week, and I think I finally know what works. You can only expect better ones to come. This is the fifth, and possibly final, compilation of videos that I titled, "Naomi Klein: Shockingly Ignorant." Since she loves to distort what Milton Friedman stood for, I thought I would let Milton debate her in his own words. He makes her look like a fool.

Now there are generally two reactions to the above story. If you're like me, you're reminded yet again why you love capitalism. It's dynamic. And the more capitalist your economy, the more dynamic it is. Every great success story is vulnerable to the next great success story – which is why teenagers aren't picking their CDs from the Sears-Roebuck catalog. There's a word for this. Now let me see. What was it again? Oh, yeah: "change." Innovation drives change, the market drives change. Government "change" just drives things away: You could ask many of the New Hampshire primary voters who...

There is probably nobody in Australia more committed to the proposition that capitalism is bad for the soul than Clive Hamilton. The executive director of the Australia Institute, a green socialist think tank, he is the author of books such as Growth Fetish and Affluenza, which have achieved some influence in Australia and notched up quite respectable sales. His message, aimed mainly at a disaffected intellectual middle class, is that we have become preoccupied with the pursuit of wealth and are increasingly unhappy and unfulfilled as a result of our materialistic lifestyles. Clive believes we have broken our ‘magical relationship...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Former British prime minister Tony Blair is expected on Thursday to join U.S. bank JPMorgan Chase & Co Inc as a senior adviser, according to a person familiar with the situation. JPMorgan declined to comment. The Financial Times in London first reported the move on its Web site, saying it would be the first of a series positions Blair expects to take in the private sector. Blair, a key ally of U.S. President George W. Bush, was replaced last year by Gordon Brown as prime minister amid growing discontent over Great Britain's policy in Iraq. Details...

In France and Germany, students are being forced to undergo a dangerous indoctrination. Taught that economic principles such as capitalism, free markets, and entrepreneurship are savage, unhealthy, and immoral, these children are raised on a diet of prejudice and bias. Rooting it out may determine whether Europe’s economies prosper or continue to be left behind. Millions of children are being raised on prejudice and disinformation. Educated in schools that teach a skewed ideology, they are exposed to a dogma that runs counter to core beliefs shared by many other Western countries. They study from textbooks filled with a doctrine of...

"Selfish" is a bit more useful term, and it's the human motivation that gets wonderful things done. For example, I think it's wonderful that Alaskan king crab fishermen take the time and effort, often risking their lives in the cold Bering Sea, to catch king crabs that I enjoy. Do you think they make that sacrifice because they care about me? I'm betting they don't give a hoot about me. They make it possible for me to enjoy king crab legs because they want more money for themselves. How much king crab would I, and millions of others, enjoy if...

Rail passengers will be hit by "unfair and unjustified" fare rises of up to 11 per cent from tomorrow, despite the "abysmal" record of many train companies. Commuters with season tickets will be among those worst hit by the price hikes, which are way above inflation in many cases Even passengers on First Great Western trains, who are eligible for a five per cent reduction in fares this year because of the company's appalling performance in 2007, will in reality see their fares rise by up to 9.8 per cent because of the huge increases - in effect meaning an...

The Washington Post had a good story on the dealings of the electronics retailer Circuit City. Unfortunately, it was buried in the business section where no one will see it. It should have been plastered at the top of the front page. The basic story is that last March, the wise men who run Circuit City came up with the brilliant idea of laying off their more senior salespeople, who get $14-$15 an hour, and replacing them with new hires who get around $9 an hour. It turns out that this move was not very good for business. One of...

China makes the little voice inside my head nervous. China has surpassed India in having the largest population in the world with no other country coming remotely close to a billion in number. [1] As a matter of fact, the United States claims less than ¼ the number of China’s population. If forced into a war with China, we would be battling the largest military in the world. [2] It’s possible they are not as well trained as our forces and do not have as sophisticated weaponry, however there is no disputing they are currently “engaged in the most significant...

Even more relevant than when she said it in 1961. Substitute "Islamists" for "Communists" Hopefully, we will see in our lifetimes a realignment of the GOP in favor of reason and individual rights and away from faith and tradition. Religion is a private matter. With the respective candidacies of Giuliani and Huckabee the split has become even more glaring: the pro-freedom Giuliani (pro-choice, socially liberal, capitalist, anti-regulation- who respects profit and achievement) vs the christian socialist Huckabee (pro-tradition, anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-reason, anti-capitalist, pro-regulation altruist) Interestingly, in Rand's 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged (celebrating 50 years in publication) the President is the...

Laugh all you want at George Lakoff’s advice for the Democrats to win by framing the debate and altering the vocabulary. Language is a key battleground in culture wars, and as soon as you step into your opponent’s frame of reference and start identifying bad weather as climate change, illiteracy as public education, and freedom as desperate need of care and supervision, you may lose not just the debate but the war, the culture, and your very way of life. A recent humorous discussion about PeopleSpeak™ at the People’s Cube prompted me to take a more serious look (to the...

The Rev. Robert Sirico is not your ordinary parish priest. He is not only the pastor of St. Mary Catholic Church in Kalamazoo, Mich., he’s the co-founder and president of The Acton Institute, a market-friendly think tank devoted to promoting “a free and virtuous society characterized by individual liberty and sustained by religious principles.” Father Sirico, a frequent contributor to the country's top op-ed pages and regular commentator on TV, has made it his extra-spiritual calling to educate future religious leaders about the principles – and moral virtues -- of a free-market economy. I talked to him by phone Tuesday...

January 1978 “Whatever Happened to Free Enterprise?” Ronald Reagan Most recently known for his bid for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination, Ronald Reagan is distinguished for his successful careers in motion pictures, broadcasting, and politics. Mr. Reagan was a player and production supervisor of television's "General Electric Theater" for eight years and hosted and acted in the "Death Valley Days" television series. For many years he owned and operated a horse breeding and cattle ranch. Elected California's 33rd governor in 1966, he was re-elected in 1970. After leaving office in early 1975, Governor Reagan began a daily radio commentary program,...

That's very true. As America demonstrates, faith thrives in a free market. In Europe, the established church, whether formal (the Church of England) or informal (as in Catholic Italy and Spain), killed religion as surely as state ownership killed the British car industry. When the Episcopal Church degenerates into wimpsville relativist milquetoast mush, Americans go elsewhere. When the Church of England undergoes similar institutional decline, Britons give up on religion entirely. Instead of a state church, Europe believes in the state as church – the all-powerful beneficent provider of cradle-to-grave welfare. "Freedom requires religion," said Mitt Romney, and, whether or...

One of the most popular rock bands of all time has finally managed to offend--not for its songs, but for how it sells them. There's a lesson here in technology, new business models, and hidebound "progressives." The first new album from the Eagles in over a decade, "Long Road Out of Eden," has already sold more than a million copies, hitting Billboard's #1 in its first week. It's the kind of blockbuster that used to pay Christmas bonuses at the big record companies, only this album wasn't produced by a big record company. The Eagles released it themselves and are...

On Sunday the October 14th, the Times Argus published an article entitled "Scholar to bring 'Christian Left' message to Vt.", by Mel Huff. The article refers to Biblical scholar Marcus Borg, who teaches religion at Oregon State University. Professor Borg seems to be on a crusade. "We were trying to counter fundamentalist and very conservative Christianity by letting the public know there's another way of looking at this," In short, he is trying to promote the "Christian Left" as an anecdote to "counter the negative impressions of Christianity created by the Christian Right." What are those negative impressions? Borg says...

Respect Blackwater The firm's operations in Iraq are not sordid -- they're just business Monday, November 5, 2007 By ROGER ROLAND The frenzied debate over the role of Blackwater USA in Iraq has resulted in more misconceptions than truths. The most common myth, propagated by the media and some politicians, is that Blackwater's private security contractors are mercenaries working for the United States military. This simply is not the case. Blackwater's contractors do not support U.S. armed forces in battle against terrorists and insurgents. They are not soldiers, but rather a corps of professionals who provide personal security to American...

Sweden: "The Highest Standard of Living Anywhere" The beautiful nation of Sweden has the highest standard of living in the world.

Why, despite such transparent manipulations of fact and science, and their overt indifference to economics, have environmentalists been winning the battle for the hearts and minds of ordinary people? Because they've never based their appeals primarily on facts, statistics, science, or economics. They rest their case ultimately on ethical and philosophical grounds. Both their appeal and their shamelessness arise from the widespread belief that they are idealists: that they are champions of the Good against the forces of Evil that are sullying and raping a once-virginal planet. Reading environmentalist literature or listening to the movement's founders and leaders, one is...

"Lars Barfoed, a leading Conservative MP, said: 'We either need to come up with another welfare reform in the coming term, or we need to adjust the old one.' Negotiations leading to the 2006 reform were accompanied by a number of popular demonstrations protesting the changes. With those scenes in mind, parliament's two largest parties, the Liberals and the Social Democrats, appeared unwilling to re-open a discussion about further reform."

A voguish Dem theme is that America's reputation in the world has been eroded and that the next Dem president will restore it. Hillary Clinton has gone so far as to propose appointing Bill as a "roving" [I'll say] ambassador for such purposes. We can safely ignore such fluff as so much presidential-season silliness. A great nation's reputation is forged not by its goodwill ambassadors, but by its actions. But while the bad-mouthing of America might be written off as so much election-year posturing, there is in fact an important, ironic lesson to be drawn, and it was on display...

The Curse Of Che Guevara By Jens Glüsing Legendary Argentinian guerrilla fighter Ernesto "Che" Guevara was shot dead in Bolivia 40 years ago. Some worship him like a saint, while others credit him with the power to take revenge on his killers from beyond the grave. The man who shot the most famous guerrilla fighter of all time lives in Bolivia's largest city, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, in a typical middle-class neighborhood. The street is quiet and located close to Avenida Paraguay, one of the main thoroughfares in the sprawling city. The man who lives here is 68 years...