Free Republic

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog Movie review: “Elysium” is implausible, because it’s based on a medical device manufacturer that does not employ any salespeople Elysium has too many loud, noisy action scenes, and not enough calm, quiet, reflective scenes of thoughtful contemplation. It didn’t have any lines of dialogue that I can see myself wanting to quote in the future. None of the characters were particularly interesting. And if I was a child, I couldn’t see myself wanting to buy any of the action figures that might be based on this movie.The machine that instantly cures cancer seems perfectly plausible. However,...

First off, the reason you probably haven’t heard of WinCo is partly because at this point its stores are limited to a handful of states in the West. But WinCo is a little-known player also because the company is a privately held enterprise that seems to take its privacy seriously, preferring a low-key, low-profile approach—which is extremely rare in a world of retailers boisterously begging for shoppers’ attention. Simply put, WinCo “communicates low prices by delivering low prices,” Jon Hauptman, a partner at Willard Bishop, a retail consulting firm, told Supermarket News. “WinCo doesn’t do much to communicate price and...

The Illusion of Free Trade“There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” says Milton Friedman, economist and Noble Prize winner. Nevertheless, Milton Friedman is the most prominent champion of “free” trade and it is difficult to find any economist1 that disagrees. His position is very straight forward: Our market is open to you without tariffs or other restrictions. Sell here what you can and wish to. Buy whatever you can and wish to. In that way cooperation among individuals can be worldwide and free.2 Friedman sees this as way to open markets and at the same time eliminate foreign aid...

Wednesday was the 101st anniversary of Milton Friedman’s birth, and it will be widely celebrated among the vast number of Americans who march in Tea Parties and wear tricorner hats in public. He will be hailed by the vast number of “libertarian populists” now burgeoning within the Republican ranks. But the new “libertarian populism” is increasingly at odds with the possibility of a shared future. Libertarian populists love markets. One of their favorite proposals is privatization: If there is a problem, they look to markets to solve it. Milton Friedman wrote, “The most important single central fact about a free...

Economist Milton Friedman would be 101 today. His passing several years ago was lamentable but many of his ideas — involving monetary policy and price theory, for instance — are immortalized in his many scholarly books, academic papers and tributes by fellow scholars who knew him best. Friedman was born the son of immigrants in Brooklyn, N.Y. He earned mathematics and economics degrees from Rutgers University before obtaining a master's degree in the economic science from the University of Chicago and holds a doctorate from Columbia in the same field. Friedman has been the greatest of my intellectual heroes, a...

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog In the real world, no liberal has ever bought a McDonald’s franchise and paid the workers $15 an hour Recently, Huffington Post published an article about how easy it would supposedly be for McDonald’s to pay its’ employees $15 an hour. Soon afterward, they took the original article down, and replaced it with this article, which admits that the original article had been wrong.But I knew they were wrong before they admitted it. Having read the original article, one thing I noticed was that it wrongly assumed that the demand for McDonald’s food would not go...

Listen up folks, after you read the bankruptcy filing for Detroit. 1. Right now, the City cannot meet its basic obligations to its citizens. 2. Right now, the City cannot meet its basic obligations to its creditors. 3. The failure of the City to meet its obligations to its citizens is the primary cause of its inability to meet its obligations to its creditors. 4. The only feasible path to ensuring the City will be able to meet obligations in the future is to have a successful restructuring via the bankruptcy process that recognizes the fundamental importance of ensuring the...

It was just two years ago that international, big-state economists were telling us that China would surpass the United States in GDP by 2016. Economic, financial and progressive talking heads- whose hind parts are where their head parts ought to be- were then saying that China was to become the dominant economic player in the world by 2016. That claim rested on the strength of an IMF report projecting GDP growth for China surpassing the US in GDP by 2016, just two years from now, by the specious use of purchasing power parity. Purchasing power parity is a math fiction...

Tea Party groups and environmentalists plan to rally in support of a proposal that goes before the state Public Service Commission later today that would force Georgia Power to use more solar energy long-term. The proposal by Commissioner Lauren “Bubba” McDonald would force the utility to include solar energy as part of its 2013 Integrated Resource Plan.

Not so many years ago, Americans could be heard snickering at our Canadian friends. “Socialists” was an epithet I heard muttered about Canadians and their political system. That’s changed. Something electrifying has happened, a new dawn for Canadians. Nowadays, “wrong-way” Canada is beating the pants off the United States in the pursuit of economic freedom. How did this happen? ...

San Francisco park workers and volunteers spent much of Sunday picking up and hauling away 10,000 pounds of garbage strewn all over the eastern part of Golden Gate Park known as Hippie Hill, the remnants of Saturday's annual yet unofficial pot-smoking bacchanalia. But this year's annual celebration - which falls each year on April 20 and is known as "420" - drew a larger-than-average crowd of between 10,000 and 15,000 revelers on the warm weekend day. They proceeded to smoke, drink, eat and rack up more than $10,000 in costs for city crews to clean up the mess, ironically just...

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(Vatican Radio) Money, politics and economics must serve, not rule. They must serve people and promote an ethics of truth. This was the thread running through Pope Francis Letter to the British Prime Minister on the eve of the G8 Summit.The Holy Father's Letter was in response to one sent by David Cameron ahead of the Northern Ireland summit which gathers togther the leaders of the 8 most powerful nations in the world to the banks of Lough Erne. Listen: In his letter, Pope Francis praises the priorities on the agenda of the British G8 Presidency: the free international...

Michigan suffered a unique economic downturn in the 73 months of the 2001 to 2007 economic expansion. But since then, Michigan has rebounded better than national averages. A look at the employment shows that the recovery has been substantial, better than average, and only partly caused by the resurgence of the auto industry. This chart shows the payroll employment in Michigan compared to the United States. The numbers are normed to the recessionary trough in June 2009 to show performance before and after the recession. Michigan lost 5.5 percent of its jobs from November 2001, the beginning of the 2001...

... Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and who was a primary sponsor of the 2011 law, said he backs the president’s effort to suppress patent trolls. “The United States patent system is vital for our economic growth, job creation, and technological advance,” Mr. Leahy said in a statement. “Unfortunately, misuse of low-quality patents through patent trolling has tarnished the system’s image.” ...

Two of my favorite things in life are the Laffer Curve and the Georgia Bulldogs. So you know I’m going to approve when an economics professor from the University of Georgia writes a column about the power of the Laffer Curve. And since I’m a libertarian and the specific issue is about curtailing the foolish Drug War, it goes without saying that this is something that belongs on this blog. Especially when we get to celebrate some evidence that statists are acknowledging that tax rates matter! Here are some excerpts from Jeffrey Dorfman’s column at Real Clear Markets. Now that...

In 2009, as the financial crisis raged and General Motors and Chrysler plunged toward bankruptcy, Tesla Motors faced a seemingly impossible task: raising half a billion dollars to build an electric-car factory. Tesla had just staggered through a year of layoffs, canceled orders, and record losses. Then suddenly, salvation. The U.S. Department of Energy offered to lend the company $465 million at rock-bottom interest rates. *** And in sharp contrast to Solyndra, the solar panel maker that defaulted on its $528 million loan from the Energy Departtment, Tesla last week paid the government back early, with interest. Yet despite all...

When Cardinal Bergoglio was first chosen as Pope, my immediate reaction was that, although he would probably not tamper with the Church’s views on sexual issues, he would likely move it to the left in terms of economic rhetoric. I based that to some small degree on his choice of name: Saint Francis is something of a favorite of progressives in the Church due to his vow of poverty and his love of animals. But even more important to me was the intellectual milieu out of which he came: Argentine populism, and his own public statements as a cardinal in...

Full Title: "Did China or Jihadists try to bankrupt America? Pentagon report reveals financial terrorists may have triggered economic crash" Terrorists and other 'financial enemies' were likely responsible for the near collapse of the U.S. financial system in 2008, a new Pentagon report has concluded. The 2009 report, Economic Warfare: Risks and Responses, said financial terrorism by Jihadists or countries such as China may have cost the global economy $50 trillion in a series of co-ordinated strikes against the U.S. economy. In an astonishing conclusion, the report claims two unidentified traders deliberately devalued trillions of dollars' worth of stocks at...

Pajamas Media gives an exclusive look at an analysis prepared for the Department of Defense’s Irregular Warfare Support Program (IWSP) by Cross Consulting and Services in 2009 that alleges that the economic meltdown in 2008 was no accident. Kevin Freeman argued that a run-up of speculation by sovereign-wealth funds created a bubble in the oil industry that allowed bear raids on American financial institutions, using credit swaps and other non-regulated investment instruments to crash the US financial system. Bill Gertz reported on the analysis today for the Washington Times: Evidence outlined in a Pentagon contractor report suggests that financial subversion...