Free Republic

Excerpts from a letter of Ayn Rand to Leonard Read, the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education, February 28, 1946 -- "The Free Market", 2001 No. 1You imply that the cause of the world’s troubles lies solely in the people’s ignorance of economics and that the way to cure the world is to teach it the proper economic knowledge. This is not true – therefore your program will not work. You cannot hope to effect a cure by starting with a wrong diagnosis. The root of the whole modern disaster is philosophical and moral. People are not embracing collectivism...

Gearing up for what promises to be a difficult campaign, President Obama laid into his critics saying “they want you to be on your own.” He contrasted this “social darwinism” approach to his “on us” philosophy. “The idea that Americans want to be left alone to pursue happiness on their own is clearly out-of-step with the way most Americans think,” Obama maintained. “People only go to work because they have to, not because they want to. When they’re on the job they’re watching the clock waiting for the workday to end. They look forward to the weekend, not the workweek....

Many years ago in college, I took a required psychology class. One day we were told by our professor we had to divvy ourselves up into two groups for a particular project. I don’t remember the nature of the project, but I am quite serious when I say it took us three class days to divide ourselves. Much of that time was spent discussing all the hidden hurt feelings and angst that come with being “chosen” into one group or another, reminiscent of the painful procedure of choosing sides for softball in gym class. After one day of this ridiculous...

The attack on religious liberty is a two front war. One front you know about, the other one you may not have noticed. Language is the blunt instrument of choice with which the secularist left in this country bludgeons our freedoms. The secularist left has successfully used seemingly slight alterations in language to change the way ordinary people perceive an argument. Most people who pay attention to these things are very much aware of this tactic, as we have seen it so often. This is nowhere more apparent today than in the President’s repeated use of the phrase “freedom of...

The nation’s Catholic bishops have vowed to close their religious institutions rather than comply with the HHS mandate that they provide insurance coverage for contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs. In a column printed on CatholicNewWorld, Francis Cardinal George urged people to purchase a copy of the Archdiocesan directory “as a souvenir,” because in two years the page containing a list of Catholic hospitals and health care institutions “will be blank.” Ed Morrissey of the Hot Air blog calculated what it would mean if the Catholic bishops shut down all religious institutions that are ineligible for the conscience clause under the...

President Barack Obama has an emerging slogan — “greater together” — that he’s using to spur support among younger voters worried about jobs, education and debt. The collectivist slogan is appearing in more places, including fundraisers and in the title of the “Greater Together Student Summit Tour,” which is sending Obama’s deputies to colleges to galvanize students and youth. On Feb. 1, Obama used the slogan to spur support among young and old African-Americans, and especially African-American women. Less than half of younger African-American men are in the workforce, and the average wealth of African-American families was slashed by the...

The result of this two-party charade is that Americans – and those in most other countries in the Western World – are the victims of a great deception. Voters have been fooled into thinking they are participating in their own political destiny when, in reality, they are being herded into a high-tech feudalism entirely without their consent and, to a large degree, even without their knowledge. This is accomplished by the mirage of a meaningful choice at election time when, in fact, the major parties and their candidates are merely two branches of the same tree of collectivism. Voters today...

The recent NDAA Bill has been decried as an act of governmental tyranny. This is true, but the implications are much more than just a mere overstep. It is, in reality, a further step in the direction of decilivization. The word “collectivist” is sadly absent from the popular language of politics. Collectivism, in short, composes the political viewpoints that are focused on the collective, or the whole. This is starkly opposed to individualism, which is focused on the individual. Some of the political philosophies that are considered collectivist are Communism (and its various varieties), socialism, modern liberalism, and anarcho-syndicalism. The...

A half-dozen House Democrats led by Representative Dennis Kucinich (Ohio) introduced a bill that would establish a new government agency aimed at insuring that no one makes an unreasonable amount of profit. The bill—the Gas Price Spike Act, H.R. 3784—is initially focused on excessive profits from oil and gas production. “It’s not that the oil and gas industry is the only one ripping us off,” Kucinich said. “It’s just that we had to start somewhere. Right now, we think there’s enough anger and envy toward this industry that people will more readily accept the idea of a government bureau to...

There were two thinkers who were greatly influential in forming philosophies that would affect the future political theories that followed. The greatest thinker of the modern age was John Locke, who provided the framework that would allow for liberal democracy. A thinker who perhaps inadvertently laid down the foundation for totalitarianism was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Both Locke and Rousseau were grand thinkers, but Rousseau was an advocate of his own form of collectivism while Locke believed in individualism, the basis for a truly free society. It is sensible to begin by analyzing Locke, as he preceded Rousseau. John Locke writes in...

"Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythologies, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins — or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that at least he won his own kingdom — Lucifer." Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky "A radical programme of social legislation, particularly unemployment insurance; the shifting of the burden of taxation to the wealthy classes; free popular-education — all these and similar measures, which in themselves do...

Those who still think that it's a good idea for government to "spread the wealth around" must think they're "wiser than God." That's what Plymouth Governor William Bradford concluded nearly 400 years ago after one of America's first socialist experiments led not to shared wealth, but pooled poverty. The Pilgrims, whom we remember at Thanksgiving, started life in the New World with a system of common ownership forced on them by Plymouth colony investors. That quasi-socialist arrangement proved disastrous, and had to be scrapped for one which gave these first Americans the right to keep the fruits of their labor...

Have you ever noticed that people on the left hold the public sector and the private sector to a different set of standards? If a public official and a private citizen commit the exact same wrongful act, the private citizen will be judged much more harshly. Consider this revelation in the news the other day: · Arizona…plans to limit adult Medicaid recipients to 25 days of hospital coverage a year, starting as soon as the end of October.· Hawaii plans to cut Medicaid coverage to 10 days a year in April.· Other states have already limited hospital stays under Medicaid:...

Elizabeth Warren, Harvard law professor and former Obama administration regulator (for consumer protection), is modern liberalism incarnate. As she seeks the Senate seat Democrats held for 57 years before 2010, when Scott Brown impertinently won it, she clarifies the liberal project and the stakes of contemporary politics. The project is to dilute the concept of individualism, thereby refuting respect for the individual's zone of sovereignty. The regulatory state, liberalism's instrument, constantly tries to contract that zone — for the individual's own good, it says. Warren says: "There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You...

Looks like Barack Obama really made an impression on the Congressional Black Caucus this weekend — but not the one he intended. Maxine Waters tells CBS that she’s not sure exactly who Obama thought he was addressing, and claimed that the CBC has worked a whole lot more on unemployment than the President has, without whining about their critics. But Waters goes one better by telling CBS that Obama wouldn’t have dared telling a couple of other identity groups to stop griping: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI0drr-F-2U&feature=player_embedded

Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren dismissed the GOP’s “class warfare” criticism of President Obama’s push for tax increases as “founded on fantastical notions about individual rights.” “The argument that people somehow have a ‘right’ to keep what they earn is totally bogus,” Warren contended. “In our complex economy it takes cooperation to produce anything. Who can say what anybody has ‘earned?’” Rather than leave the allocation of rewards to what she characterized as “the arbitrary whims of the market,” Warren argued for a “socially determined distribution of the jointly produced output.” “Wouldn’t it be more equitable for the people’s...

Combine class warfare, demonizing the rich, getting as many people onto the welfare rolls as possible, and pushing the economic system to collapse and you have a flawless formula for Cloward-Piven 2.0 -- and a vehicle that ensures Obama remains in power.

De-Emphasizing marriage and abolishing State Marriage would definitely have been seen as liberal, up until very recently. Certainly, removing state control over an area where it is not required is definitely liberal. That was the understanding when I began to back this long term goal back in 2004. (snip) ...the reason why we are fighting for marriage equality is because we have to work with the present governmental system for a while yet. Marriage equality is currently easier to achieve than getting government out of the business, but the latter should be our long term goal. As for de-emphasizing marriage...

Brock Chisolm, former Director of the (United Nations) World Health Organization, is quoted as saying, "To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men, their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas." [GWB quote of the day, 7/7/1999]. Remove from the minds of men? Doesn't that sound like mental conditioning? How does that square with the Alexander Downer/Tim Fischer version of globalism as freer markets? It doesn't, does it? Some years ago another hero of the globalist-Left, B.F.Skinner, in his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity, mounted a concerted attack on what he...

A paper published by several college professors, entitled Organizing the Curriculum for Labor Consciousness, calls for more weaving of Big Labor history and tactics into every day curriculum. Take the case of Kate Lyman, a teacher in the Madison, Wisconsin school district. According to an article she penned for the leftist Rethinking Schools magazine, she was swept into the protests by her daughter and Facebook, because “that’s how they did it in Egypt.” When teacher staged a “sick out,” Lyman described it as “four exhilarating days, four confusing days, four stressful and exhausting days.” For the record, she’s speaking of...

As you pump 13 gallons into your Honda CR-V -- American's best-selling SUV with 28 mpg on the highway and 21 in town -- it's nearly impossible to view the $50 you're spending with a positive attitude. With the national average for regular at $3.81, it's easy to label oil executives as pond scum, but try to remain open-minded. Think of the big picture: Though that promised road trip to Disney World has gone up in carbon monoxide, high gas prices may actually have an upside. Not for you and your family personally, maybe, but perhaps for the United States...

You've sent me emails in the past, commenting on my appearances on CNBC's Kudlow Report, my columns for the Wall Street Journal, National Review, SmartMoney or TheStreet.com, my Krugman Truth Squad column, or my blog The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor & Stupid. So I thought you'd like to know that thanks to the encouragement of people like you, I've written a book that brings together all the ideas I've been talking about, writing about and blogging about over the past ten years. My new book, written with Andrew Greta, is called I Am John Galt, and it was...

Lately, there have been duelling stories in the entertainment press about the future of ”Atlas Shrugged.” With disappointing box office returns, the producers have been asked if they will go ahead and complete the franchise and in one interview we’re being told there will be no trilogy and in another we’re being told that there will. To clear the air, I reached out via email and “Atlas” producers John Aglialoro and Harmon Kaslow were both good enough to respond with exclusive quotes that should help to calm fears of “Atlas” fans everywhere. Most surprising, though, was the revelation CNN, CNBC,...

One week til it opens. Anticipation High. Atlas Shrugged Site IMDb Site Rotten Tomatoes Site -- wow, right now a whopping 82?? First of 3 in series if box office is good. DO read the book if you have not done so. It is long but doable in a week. Get paperback at local Bookstore etc. Understand most libraries have waiting lists

I just finished reading Ayn Rand’s, The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution which is a compilation of articles she wrote in the late sixties and early seventies. In these articles she takes dead aim at the drug induced hippie movement and dissects them with her unique philosophy, objectivism. While she was recounting the debauchery and horrors of Woodstock, I was left wondering; did America’s greatest generation give birth to America’s worst generation? Tom Brokaw coined the term for those who came of age during the Great Depression and then went on to fight in World War II in his book...

I remember being grouped together with other students as early as the first grade. Rather than being arranged in rows of individual desks, we were clustered in groups of four, facing each other. We were given work to do as a group, rather than as individuals. I despised the practice then, and I continued to all the way through college. It didn't seem right to have to compensate for others and share a grade. The result was always the same. I did less and worse than I would have individually. It was far more work to pull others along than...

“…Today I authorized the Armed Forces of the United States to begin a limited military action in Libya, in support of an international effort to protect Libyan civilians…”Thus began a press conference with President Barack Obama. It was Saturday March 19th. While traveling in Brazil, he took a few minutes to announce that a military response to the Gaddafi crisis was underway. Calling the matter “a limited military action in Libya” that would “protect Libyan civilians” was an earnest attempt at a positive spin. But this fact remains: after spending the first two years of his presidency insisting that the...

What do Moveon.org, thinkprogress.org, americanprogress.org, and mediamatters.org all have in common ? Well, they're all part of Pharoah $oros' empire....They're all followed by the 2+2=5 crowd....They all hate America.....Oh yeah, NOT ONE OF THEM HAS COME OUT AGAINST CHAIRMAN OBAMA'S LIBYAN ADVENTURE! If you'll kindly take a stroll with me down Memory Hole Lane, you'll recall that all of the above websites and parent organizations were virulently against the wars in Afganistan and Iraq. They often compared then President Bush to Adolf Hitler, chanted nonsense like "Not in my name!", held peace rallies, blah, blah, blah, yadda, yadda, yadda. It...

He's going to try fleshing it out in real life. For the uninitiated, Directive 10-289 is ratified roughly halfway through Atlas Shrugged as an emergency measure. It locks the economy in place. As they learned the hard way in the subsequent pages, economy, like an education, is motion, not a status, position or level. To lock it in place is to kill it. Point One: All workers, wage earners, and employees of any kind whatsoever shall henceforth be attached to their jobs and shall not leave nor be dismissed nor change employment... Point Two: All industrial, commercial, manufacturing, and business...

...Remarkably widespread derision has greeted the Obama administration’s damn-the-arithmetic-full-speed-ahead proposal to spend $53 billion more (after the $8 billion in stimulus money and $2.4 billion in enticements to 23 states) in the next six years pursuant to the president’s loopy goal of giving “80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail.” “Access” and “high-speed” to be defined later. ...[Florida's] Rick Scott, has joined Ohio’s (...Kasich) and Wisconsin’s (...Walker) in rejecting federal incentives—more than $2 billion in Florida’s case—to begin a high-speed rail project.... The three governors want to spare their states from paying the much larger sums likely to be...

The ultimate goal of the left has always been to move our country away from a constitutional republic based on the tenets of the protection of individual rights and personal liberties toward a socialist democracy based on the tenets of collectivism, interdependence and “civil liberties”. Pretty much every point of contention between the left and the right in our country boils down to this basic argument. I bring this up because lately I have noticed many conservative talking heads on the radio, internet and TV referring to the United States of America as a democracy, and in some cases, actually...

The ultimate goal of the left has always been to move our country away from a constitutional republic based on the tenets of the protection of individual rights and personal liberties toward a socialist democracy based on the tenets of collectivism, interdependence and “civil liberties”. Pretty much every point of contention between the left and the right in our country boils down to this basic argument. I bring this up because lately I have noticed many conservative talking heads on the radio, internet and TV referring to the United States of America as a democracy, and in some cases, actually...

THAT TURKEY IS MARXIST. EvergladesInstitute.org ^ | November 23, 2005 | Jan Michael Jacobson Posted on Wednesday, November 23, 2005 8:46:38 PM by GladesGuru THAT TURKEY IS MARXIST. The first Thanksgiving was not at all what most Americans have been taught. The Indians didn’t make the difference between starvation and plenty for the Pilgrims in what they called ‘Ye Plimouth Colonie’. What really made the critical difference between that first year, which Governor Bradford called “The Starving Winter”, and the year of the first Thanksgiving? This critical factor lies at the heart of the American experiment in government. Yet virtually...

Feast and football. That’s what many of us think about at Thanksgiving. Most people identify the origin of the holiday with the Pilgrims’ first bountiful harvest. But few understand how the Pilgrims actually solved their chronic food shortages. Many people believe that after suffering through a severe winter, the Pilgrims’ food shortages were resolved the following spring when the Native Americans taught them to plant corn and a Thanksgiving celebration resulted. In fact, the pilgrims continued to face chronic food shortages for three years until the harvest of 1623. Bad weather or lack of farming knowledge did not cause the...

I Came across a liberal article today that was steeped in total and utter ignorance "Top ten Reasons why liberals are better than conservatives." HAH! After two years of Obama and the Democrats, you must be blind not to see the fallacy of this statement. Add to this the trashing of our constitutional rights by Democrats for decades. With this in Mind, I decided to refute it with something of my own. Why Liberals are really WORSE than Conservatives. BTW, this guy claims to be centrist. He certainly is not. 10) Liberals prefer to be sensitive to the issues of...

Ron Miller, author of Sellout: Musings from Uncle Tom’s Porch, spoke at The Bloggers Briefing at the Heritage Foundation on September 14, 2010. “It seems to me that we are not allowing ourselves to embrace the concept of individual liberty,” Miller said, “and that is really at the heart of what makes us unique as Americans.” “Those [individual liberties and free enterprise] are things unique to America, and make us exceptional as a nation,” he stated. Further, Miller blasted what he calls the “collectivist mindset.” Miller notes that at least 88 percent of Black Americans vote Democratic. Taking a look...

I think it's a fair question to ask. I too have taken notice that 'Obama is a muslim', some of the puzzle pieces fit. But not enough IMHO, it doesn't stand on it's own. Now, if you re ask the question as "Is Obama an appeaser of muslims" then all of the puzzle pieces fit, particularly that of radical liberation theology. There shouldn't be any questions that he believes that garbage. Obama is not a muslim, he is a believer in liberation. And that does stand on it's own.

The Not-So-Great Generation and the Vision That Dare Not Speak Its Name "The unnamable vision always leads to the unspeakable crime." -- AD Commenter Gloria Daniel Henninger in a prophetic 2007 "Wonderland" column in The Wall Street Journal, Talking Ourselves Into Defeat , examined the pall of self-loathing that has settled over the American mind in the past decade. A self-loathing that has reached, for now, its apotheosis in those "Americans" that love the idea of an Islamic mosque at Ground Zero. For the most part, his estimate of the roots of this malaise is accurate, but one insight strikes...

According to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif), persisting high rates of unemployment aren’t the bad news a lot of doomsayers contend. That is, as long as the unemployment checks keep coming. As Pelosi sees it, the spending of these checks by the unemployed is an underappreciated stimulus to the economy. “A working person is bogged down by having to spend up to 40 hours or more per week to get paid,” Pelosi pointed out. “Freed of this encumbrance, the recipient of unemployment benefits has many more hours to aggressively spend the money he or she receives. This robust demand is...

President Obama on GOP's opposition to him: "It's a belief that government has little or no role to play in helping this nation meet our collective challenges. It’s an agenda that basically offers two answers to every problem we face, more tax breaks for the wealthy and fewer rules for corporations."

An audio-only podcast, in honor of the blessed American military heroes who died to keep us free. We examine the oaths of service sworn to by millions of past and current soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, and guardsmen. What did they swear to protect? Hint: It wasn't a king, or a person, or even a government. We listen to some timeless truths from the greatest president of modern times, Ronald Reagan. From his January 1981 inauguration, and from his speech at Pointe du Hoc on the 40th anniversary of the D-Day invasion. We consider the domestic enemies of liberty--the Collectivists among...

Dr. Donald Berwick of the Harvard Medical School does not like free enterprise, but he does like rationing. Two years ago, in England, he delivered a talk celebrating the 60th birthday of Great Britain's National Health Service, the bureaucracy that runs that nation's socialized medical system. He apparently entertained some fear that day that the Brits might turn back to free enterprise. So, in his address (as reprinted in the July 26, 2008, edition of the British Medical Journal), and as reported this week by Matt Cover of CNSNews.com, he offered British socialists some words of advice. "Please," he told...

A great show (and essay, in my humble opinion) in which we review the key topics covered in the prior 19 episodes: - Ayn Rand and her epic novel, “Atlas Shrugged”. - Collectivism, individualism, and the TRUE nature of man. - The flow of events—Short-term chaos, long-term trends. - Generational Dynamics: The most accurate model of historical cycles based on the flow of human generations. - The “crash” of 2008 was just a warning of what’s coming—and we haven’t heeded it. - Don’t bet your future on political change. - “Shrugging Out” combines the concepts of Atlas Shrugged and Modern...

One-term Representative Alan Grayson (D-Fla) argued against voters putting Republicans in the majority position in the upcoming November election because “Republicans don’t know how to govern.” “The right-wing in American politics is deluded by idealistic notions that individuals ought to be free to chart their own lives,” Grayson asserted. “The fact is most people haven’t the foggiest idea on how to run their own lives. So, if the government is just going to leave these people alone what good is it?” “The great benefit of government is that it can give most people more than they deserve,” Grayson contended. “It...

...A criminal wouldn’t be a criminal if he were loved more and society supported him, therefore it’s society’s fault that he is committing the fill-in-the-blank crime.So who is to blame, then, when a black man rapes a woman? Would it be the rapist? No.What follows is the harrowing and cognitively dissonant account of a woman’s rape at the hands of a black man she considered a friend. Her name is Amanda Kijera and here is her story: Two weeks ago, on a Monday morning, I started to write what I thought was a very clever editorial about violence against women...

"Starving the Monkeys" was written by Tom Baugh, self-described "former Marine, patented inventor, entrepreneur and professional irritant." It's the closest thing to the Shrugging Out philosophy that I've found yet (aside from Atlas Shrugged, of course). In this 10-minute videocast, recorded during my daily commute, as usual, I cover the key points in this challenging and occasionally disturbing book. If you're not motivated yet to start "shrugging out", read this book, and I think you will be. A note of thanks to Freepers: I've been amazed and humbled by how many people have watched and listened to my podcasts in...

As state after state enacts measures to prohibit its citizens from being compelled to purchase health insurance, US Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), Kathleen Sebelius vowed that “all such measures will be overruled by the supremacy of the national government.” Sebelius specifically rejected the argument that the Constitution’s Tenth Amendment reserves powers not delegated to the federal government to the states. “I think the ‘general welfare clause’ pretty much disposes of any contention that any state can object to any action Washington takes to promote the general welfare of the people,” Sebelius argued. “Congress and the President have...

The Obama administration announced it is cracking down on lenders who insist on being repaid for mortgage loans. Lenders will now be required to postpone or cancel repayment if the mortgage holder is unemployed. “The idea that a debt must be repaid no matter what is simplistic and outdated,” said US Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Shaun Donovan. “It assumes that a person can and should be permitted to make his or her own financial decisions without reference to social conditions or the nation’s collective well-being.” Donovan defended the government’s intervention as “necessary to protect social justice. Just...

President Obama contends that Americans have acquired a distrust in government that “endangers the future of the country.” He vowed to “do whatever it takes to reverse this trend and restore the kind of faith in government we saw during World War II.” “During World War II, every American was joined in a common purpose,” Obama said. “Everyone did their part. Everyone had faith that following the leadership of the Roosevelt Administration would be best for all. There wasn’t all this quibbling over individual rights and personal prerogatives.” The President acknowledged that “the scope of government control during the war...

Here's one of those peeks inside the mind of a true believer, a follower of Marx, whether they realize it or not. Even though this parent feels she is doing what is best for his child, she wonders if she shouldn't sacrifice her child's education for the greater good.Not my words...hers: My family lives on the west side of Los Angeles. I face the same choice as many urban families: Will the kids attend public or private schools? Should one minimize opportunities for one's own child in service to the greater good? In our desire to protect our children physically...