Free Republic

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) convened a needed Task Force on Reducing Regulatory Burdens as part of his legislative agenda, "A Better Way." The Speaker and his colleagues who worked on the task force have rightly identified the massive regulatory burden imposed by federal bureaucrats as an obstacle to economic growth and a distortion of our constitutional form of government. That is why it is baffling that Ryan has failed to bring regulatory reform legislation that recently passed the Senate to the floor of the House for a vote. The tale is one of catfish and courage. The catfish you...

Cronyism is the ugly marriage between special interest groups and politicians, which results in an abuse of the government's power to grant special privileges to a few winners -- for example, unfairly preventing competition or doling out subsidies and bailouts at the expense of taxpayers. Though cronyism is always outrageous, the way cronies go about achieving their goals is sometimes oddly funny. Case in point: the government's changing the definition of catfish to classify the fish as -- wait for it -- meat, not seafood. As Patrick Mustain reports in Scientific American, Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., included an amendment in...

Cronyism in Energy Production “Diablo Canyon produces twice as much power as all of California’s solar panels, 24 percent more than all of its wind, and 40 times more than its largest solar farm. Also, Diablo Canyon provides power to 3 million Californians on a patch of land the size of three football fields. Achieving the equivalent from a solar farm would require 145 times more land; from wind, 500 times more.”—Michael Shellenberger, Breakthrough Institute co-founder, and Peter Raven, former Missouri Botanical Gardens head The announcement last week from PG&E that it was closing Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, rudely...

Last month, news came down the pike from the Harvard Business Review that should bring despair to the hearts of any honest defender of capitalism. As reported by American Enterprise Institute (AEI) blogger James Pethokoukis, the Harvard story, authored by Boston University economist James Bessen, found that growing corporate profitability is increasingly coming from investments not in benevolent, market-friendly costs such as research and development, but rather in augmented lobbying to shut out competition. In short, it is now more profitable to use Washington to stop people from building something new than to actually build it yourself.If a more devastating...

Conflict of interest disclosure reports filed by top federal officials were removed from public view by the Obama administration in recent months, a move that government transparency and accountability advocates condemn as a major setback. The Office of Government Ethics (OGE) reports are the primary tool that watchdog journalists, political activists and interested voters can use to guard against presidential appointees using their positions to enrich themselves or others.

One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.—Milton Friedman The story of the 340B discount drug program is a classic example of a government program that has been hijacked. Established by the Veterans Healthcare Act of 1992, 340B was intended to give veterans and the indigent discounted drugs. Pharmaceutical companies could sell through to government veterans programs but had to offer a small amount of drugs at costs to help poor and indigent vets. According to the program’s requirements, covered entities must not resell or otherwise transfer 340B drugs to...

resident Obama is a cronyism machine. No administration in our history has done more to punish its enemies and reward its friends. In fact, while engaging in rank identity politics - another Divider-Not-Uniter moment in seven-plus years full of them - the president himself said exactly this: “We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.”Cronyism candor from the commander in chief. And this promise he has kept. On steroids.But three more of the latest examples are some unequal-protection-before-the-law fiats from the president’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Except...

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/04/why-democrats-are-becoming-the-party-of-the-1-percent

Did you see that Sen. Bernie Sanders released his income taxes?....well, his 2014 income taxes, anyway. He did it around 7 p.m. on a Friday night, on the same day that the Democratic presidential hopeful was making international headlines by speaking at the Vatican and meeting Pope Francis, for at least a handshake. In journalism, releasing information at that off hour is what we call "a Friday news dump" -- usually an attempt to bury bad news. That's weird, because if I were handling PR for the Bernie Sanders campaign, I'd be shouting the news from the Green Mountain-tops. They...

A blogger recently complained that I (along with my fellow bloggers from George Mason University's Department of Economics) "seem to be shills for industry." This lazy accusation is as familiar as it is mistaken, for if I were truly a shill for industry ... • I'd be wealthy, raking in many more dollars than I now take in from my job as a professor at a state university. • I would not have come by my strong preference for freedom and free markets when I was still an undergraduate at Nicholls State University in south Louisiana. Corporations are not known...

The stupidest, lamest, and couldn’t-be-more-mistaken charge often leveled at those who find great merits in free markets (such as me and my colleagues at GMU Economics and the Mercatus Center, and my dear friends at institutions such as the Cato Institute and the Hoover Institution) is that we’re “bought off by” or are “paid shills for” rich business people. Such a charge or belief reflects an utter misunderstanding of economics and of how economies operate. Currently successful business people have a material interest in stifling at least some market competition and in themselves receiving handouts and special privileges from the...

The intensity with which some American companies try to use the government to trick or deceive consumers is astonishing. Yet the extent to which lawmakers seem content to cater to these crony pursuits never disappoints, either. Case in point: the current attempt to protect contact lens sellers from competition at the expense of consumers. An estimated 40 million Americans wear contact lenses. That's a $4 billion industry. Thanks to the heavy-handed government regulation of all things health care, contacts already cost more than they should. However, if an ongoing effort to reduce competition through government cronyism were to succeed, costs...

Everyone has already voiced their astonishment regarding the complete disenfranchisement of approximately 1,000,000 registered Republican voters in the State of Colorado. It is clear that the Colorado Republican Party has no interest in the voice of their constituents. The CO Republican Party rules for the delegation selection process and delegates are outlined at the source below. http://www.thegreenpapers.com/P16/CO-R As you have seen, the GOP is extremely proud of their achievement to privatize the selection of a presidential candidate for Colorado. They have published the list of Colorado delegates in The Denver Post and other sources. Many of you may have friends...

Last fall, I wrote a piece about Hedge Fund Billionaire Bill Ackman and his unmitigated assault on the health products company Herbalife; Battle of The Hedge Fund Titans. It was an interesting piece about one man’s personal vendetta and attempt to take down a famously successful American company. The short of it (no pun intended), is that Bill Ackman used his hedge fund company, Pershing Square, to take a $1 Billion short position in Herbalife. Thus, banking on the failure of the company to profit immensely, while actually attempting to trigger that failure. Herbalife fought back and the demise of...

As president, Donald Trump would sell off $16 trillion worth of U.S. government assets in order to fulfill his pledge to eliminate the national debt in eight years, senior adviser with the campaign Barry Bennett said. "The United States government owns more real estate than anybody else, more land than anybody else, more energy than anybody else," Bennett told Chris Jansing Sunday on MSNBC. "We can get rid of government buildings we're not using, we can extract the energy from government lands, we can do all kinds of things to extract value from the assets that we hold." In a...

When pressed by Matthews, Trump added, "I have, actually, believe it or not, I have a lot of friends that are Muslim and they call me. In most cases, they're very rich Muslims." "But do they get into the country?" Matthews then asked. "Oh, they'll come in," Trump responded, later adding that the ban will have exceptions.

Breathe easy, America. Before you judge Donald Trump's proposed Muslim ban too harshly, consider this: It will not apply to Muslims who are, A. Donald Trump's friends, and B. rich. Feel better? The Republican presidential candidate, with a totally straight face, told MSNBC's Chris Matthews on Wednesday that he has "a lot of friends that are Muslim," many of whom are "rich" and would get special treatment to let them in the country....

We did trade wrong. We could have had a good trade policy that increased trade and raised living standards. We could export more soybeans, airplanes and software, and protect the environment around the world. We could have low-cost goods and encourage democracy, respect for human rights and improved working conditions.

While movement conservatives would like to blame the Republican establishment for the rise of Donald Trump and the attendant political problems he has created for the national Republican Party, as our friend Rick Manning, President of Americans for Limited Government, pointed out in a recent article for Breitbart, those whom we call “establishment conservatives” bear just as much responsibility for Trump’s rise.  And there is no better example of how DC’s snide elitist “conservatives” have helped create Trump than a recent cover article in National Review by one Kevin D. Williamson.   Mr. Williamson, who has apparently never done anything in conservative politics except pontificate for various elite journals, took to...

Berlin’s mayor has been forced to answer questions in parliament over the decision to grant a lucrative contract to the consultancy McKinsey. The US firm has hired one of the mayor’s old party colleagues. The list of companies turning a profit from Germany’s influx of refugees grew a little longer in early March, when US consultancy McKinsey signed a €238,000 ($268,000) contract to come up with a plan to integrate the city’s influx of 80,000 refugees. Now that deal, much criticized a month ago because it had been handed to the company without a tender process, has gained an extra...