Free Republic

The genius of capitalism is that there is a link between effort and reward. In a genuine market economy (as opposed to cronyism), people can only make themselves rich by working harder and smarter to satisfy the needs and wants of others. The blunder of statism is that the link between effort and reward is damaged. Punitive tax rates, for instance, punish people for producing. Redistribution programs, meanwhile, create incentives for dependency. And regulation throws lots of sand in the gears of the economy, while also creating big opportunities for corrupt cronyism. I sometimes try to make this clear by...

The health care rollout is an enormous political gift that may lead the Republican Party to win control of the Senate in 2014. But as President Obama's health care law collapses, the GOP should avoid the temptation to promote its own top-down solution as an alternative. A better approach would be for both Republicans and Democrats in Congress to recognize the solutions will not be found in Washington. They'll be found only when consumers are given choices that put them in charge of their health insurance decision-making. Fortunately, we do not have to just sit back and wait for Congress...

Radio giant Rush Limbaugh is scorching the leader of the Roman Catholic Church for criticizing unfettered capitalism, saying, “This is just pure Marxism coming out of the mouth of the pope.” “You know the pope, Pope Francis has issued an official papal proclamation, and it’s sad,” Limbaugh said on his national broadcast Wednesday. “It’s actually unbelievable. It’s sad because this pope makes it very clear he doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to capitalism and socialism and so forth.” “I’m not Catholic,” Limbaugh added, “but up until this I admired the man.” In the 84-page document titled...

In a far-ranging 50,000 word statement released by Pope Francis on Tuesday, he illustrated that he is sympathetic to the tenets of liberation theology and hostile to capitalism.

The Exhortation is 288 pages long. Below is the excerpted index in which Pope Franis I criticized/condemned capitalism. The text corresponding to this excerpted index is 1996 words which is too long for a FR excerpt. CHAPTER TWO AMID THE CRISIS OF COMMUNAL COMMITMENT [50-51] I. SOME CHALLENGES OF TODAY’S WORLD [52-75] No to an economy of exclusion [53-54] No to the new idolatry of money [55-56] No to a financial system which rules rather than serves [57-58] No to the inequality which spawns violence [59-60]

Had today's politicians and opinion-makers been in power four centuries ago, Americans might celebrate "Starvation Day" this week, not Thanksgiving. The Pilgrims started out with communal property rules. When they first settled at Plymouth, they were told: "Share everything, share the work, and we'll share the harvest." The colony's contract said their new settlement was to be a "common." Everyone was to receive necessities out of the common stock. There was to be little individual property. That wasn't the only thing about the Plymouth Colony that sounds like it was from Karl Marx: Its labor was to be organized...

Swiss voters head to the polls on Sunday for a referendum on whether to peg executive pay so that bosses cannot receive more than 12 times the salary of their lowest-paid employee. The referendum campaign was spearheaded by the Socialist Party, plus the Greens and trade unions. To hammer their message home, the campaigners plastered Switzerland with posters showing a single hamburger next to a towering stack of a dozen, reading: "12 times more salary, that's enough".

What is socialism if not a journey into the mind and soul of a quivering little boy hiding in a big boy suit? His jacket and tie mask a brooding fear of failure and a yearning for validation that all is wrong with the world, while they also drive his own self-righteous laziness.

While President Obama continues to modify his healthcare law—already proven to be a web of bureaucracy and anything but affordable—the free market continues to demonstrate that Americans can find what works for them without government intervention. Sean Parnell’s blog, The Self-Pay Patient, is a tool for all Americans who want to be in charge of their own health care, without the government or an insurance company acting as an intermediary or provider of reimbursement payments to physicians and other health professionals.

WASHINGTON, November 13 (RIA Novosti) – The United States has scrapped plans to purchase additional helicopters from state-run Russian arms exporter Rosoboronexport amid pressure from federal lawmakers over Russian arms deliveries to Syria, a top US senator said Wednesday. “I applaud the [US] Defense Department’s decision to cancel its plan to buy 15 additional Mi-17 helicopters from Rosoboronexport,” US Sen. John Cornyn said in statement, The Associated Press (AP) reported. Cornyn, a Republican from Texas, has been leading a push in Congress to oppose the Pentagon’s purchase of Russian helicopters for deployment in Afghanistan due to Moscow’s weapons shipments to...

“Every day is now an Amazon delivery day.” So says Dave Clark, Amazon’s vice president of worldwide operations and customer service, announcing a deal with the United States Postal Service that will allow the delivery of Amazon purchases on Sunday. Clark is guilty of some exaggeration. To qualify, you must be a member of Amazon’s $79-a-year Amazon Prime program. And when the service begins on Nov. 17, it will only be available in New York and Los Angeles, though there are plans to gradually expand to other cities. But the gist is clear: Amazon’s message to everyone who has lived...

I say: Privatize everything. Regulations forbid buying and selling organs, so the market cannot operate. Desperate patients must wait and hope someone gives an organ out of sheer generosity, that someone dies at just the right time, and that hospital administrators bump their case to the top of the list. In the United States, 100,000 people are on waiting lists for kidneys. Kidneys make up 80 percent of the organ shortage. We have two kidneys but need only one. Donors could save many lives, but not enough choose to donate. By contrast, in Iran, there’s often a waiting line of...

"The Guy Fawkes mask has now become a common brand and a convenient placard to use in protest against tyranny — and I'm happy with people using it, it seems quite unique, an icon of popular culture being used this way," British graphic novel artist David Lloyd, the man who created the original image of the mask for a comic strip written by Alan Moore, told BBC. At the top of Reddit today is somewhat ironic image of this icon of rebellion being mass-produced in a factory in Sao Goncalo near Rio de Janeiro. Reuters notes that the masks are...

Rome (AsiaNews) - With the ninth World Islamic Economic Forum, held in London between 29 and 31 October, Islamic finance has come into its own and gone mainstream. Until a few years ago, Islamic finance was unknown to most people. Some even equated it to the financing of Islamic terrorism. In fact, in the years right after 9/11, anything about Islam was viewed with concern. Now things are different. British Prime Minister David Cameron, who spoke at the forum, said that London is no longer happy to be the main Islamic financial centre outside Muslim countries; it now wants to...

Pearce: A journalist recently stated that you believe that Russia has overthrown the evils of communism only to replace them with the evils of capitalism. Solzhenitsyn: over the years I have had to prove that socialism, which to many western thinkers is a sort of kingdom of justice, was in fact full of coercion, of bureaucratic greed and corruption and avarice, and consistent within itself that socialism cannot be implemented without the aid of coercion. Communist propaganda would sometimes include statements such as "we include almost all the commandments of the Gospel in our ideology". The difference is that the...

Oddly enough, this is perhaps the most frequent argument I have with people on the Left in cocktail party conversations.It begins this way -- some abuse of "private enterprise" is cited.  Almost every time, I have to point out that the abuse in question could not occur if private companies were not availing themselves of government's coercive power to [fill in the blank: step on competitors, limit choice, keep prices high, rake in subsidies, etc.] Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story is very much in this mold, blaming bad outcomes that result in government interventions on free market capitalism.Kevin Drum...

Hyatt Gun Shop states that a subsidiary of Visa shut down payments for its customers' online gun purchases, effectively cutting ties with "the nation's largest gun store," Hyatt claims, because of legal online gun sales. Hyatt Gun Shop is located in Charlotte, NC, and owner Larry Hyatt says Authorize.net—described on its website as "a solution of Cybersource, a wholly owned subsidiary of Visa"—sent him an email saying they were ending their business relationship with his store over "the sale of firearms or any similar product." According to the Washington Examiner, the email said "that gun sales violated a section of...

What has lifted more people out of poverty, charity or economic freedom? It's not even close. Charity is wonderful, and I'll be the first to say we have an obligation to share our gifts, be they material, intellectual, or talent oriented. Yet whether our redistributionist endeavor is charity -- and charity is voluntary redistribution -- or the less noble, coercive outsourcing of charity known as government programs, there first must be wealth to redistribute. But where does wealth come from? If we go back to biblical times and beyond, a man might be considered wealthy if he had 70 goats....

Entrepreneurial capitalism takes more people out of poverty than aid.” That statement came not from a tea-party leader or a congressional Republican, but from Bono, singer, celebrity, and global anti-poverty activist, speaking to Georgetown’s Global Social Enterprise Initiative last year. As we mark the second anniversary of Occupy Wall Street this week, it is worth recalling just how much Bono is right and OWS, at its anti-capitalist core, is deeply and profoundly wrong. Occupy Wall Street did have a point when it took to criticizing the crony capitalism that helped precipitate the economic crisis of 2008 and the recession that...

Given the evidence of the superiority of capitalism in achieving prosperity, isn’t it astonishing we still debate its merits? Filmmaker Michael Moore actually made an anti-capitalism “documentary” called “Capitalism: A Love Story.” Moore says: “Capitalism is an evil, and you cannot regulate evil. You have to eliminate it and replace it with something that is good for all people.” Is it relevant that Moore’s net worth is reported around $50 million, give or take a few mil, and that his accumulation of wealth occurred within the system of free markets that he trashes? Another Hollywood leftie, Ed Asner, is a...