Free Republic

Who is Hillary Clinton pandering to this week? Ah yes… we’re back to the women and the gender wage gap. In her ongoing effort to put some daylight between herself and Bernie Sanders, Clinton is working to shore up her support with female voters and what better way than to promise that everyone will get a raise? (Washington Post) If she is elected, employers would be required to review employee pay to ensure that women are being paid fairly, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said Tuesday.“I’m going to require that everybody take a look,” Clinton said to applause at...

Were you aware that Christian parents are in the grip of fear over Islamic indoctrination in public schools? Neither was I, and I live at ground zero of a raging controversy over the manner in which public schools teach Islam, Christianity, and other world religions. My home county, Maury County, Tenn., made headlines when parents objected to an assignment, to middle-school kids, to write the shahada, the Islamic declaration of faith. Other parents objected to apparent bias in the curriculum, noting that instruction about Christianity was both delayed and skewed, with an emphasis on Christians persecuting other Christians and...

Does Fairness Depend on Kindness or Justice? An MIT study with the Tsimane People of Bolivia shows the origins of fairness. Posted Nov 11, 2015Imagine you have to split a plate of cookies. Does the person who baked the cookies get the most or do you split them evenly? Most very young children would split them evenly — that's fair, right? But as kids get older, they start to take into account who did the work. MIT researchers (link is external) working with the Tsimane' People, who live near San Borja, Bolivia, wondered what makes kids switch from "egalitarian" to...

“From each according to their ability” (you DON’T OWN what you produce)… “Too each according to their needs” (you DON’T get to decide that. Your “needs” and that of your family are done by "experts" at the Government “Central Needs Determination Office”)… January 20, 2017 (and thereafter): In Bernie’s (Hillary?) perfect "progressive" world, and with Global Warming (Climate Change on cold days) "crisis" looming (it's gonna happen any day now, PROMISE!)... quick action to “save” the planet has been instituted. As we all want to help “solve” this “crisis”, we now get our monthly ration coupons (after we wait in...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Federal regulators have approved a long-delayed rule requiring companies to reveal the pay gap between CEOs and their employees. The Securities and Exchange Commission voted Wednesday to order most public companies to disclose the ratio between their chief executives' annual compensation and median, or midpoint, employee pay.

Hillary Clinton says she wants a "growth and fairness" economy, and that her policies will bring it about. But the little she has revealed about her economic plans sounds like a carbon copy of President Obama's agenda: higher minimum wage, universal preschool, paid time off, more money for "clean energy" and infrastructure, more regulation, expand ObamaCare, still more tax hikes on rich.

Millions flock to the Southern California coast each year, often renting a cottage or condo for a respite by the sea. But the explosive growth of online travel booking sites in recent years has prompted several coastal cities to consider tightening regulations on those who rent out their homes for short stays. While proponents of the short-term rental industry say the additional income often is vital to property owners’ livelihoods and the local economy, city leaders and neighbors want greater oversight to protect residential neighborhoods, tax revenue and the availability of housing amid a booming industry. Santa Monica, Laguna Beach,...

(CNSNews.com) – Federal Communications Commission (FCC) member Ajit Pai said over the weekend that he foresees a future in which federal regulators will seek to regulate websites based on political content, using the power of the FCC or Federal Elections Commission (FEC). He also revealed that his opposition to “net neutrality” regulations had resulted in personal harassment and threats to his family. Speaking on a panel at the annual “Right Online” conference in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, Pai told audience members, “I can tell you it has not been an easy couple of months personally. My address has been publicly...

Just last month, Apple chief executive Tim Cook made headlines when he wrote a piece in The Washington Post, panning Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act as "very dangerous." Apple, Cook wrote, does not believe in discrimination and strives to "do business in a way that is just and fair." This month, the San Francisco Chronicle's Wendy Lee reported, Apple fired some construction workers at Apple Campus 2 in January because they had been convicted of felonies or face felony charges. Just and fair? Hardly. Apple would not respond on the record, but someone familiar with the matter said the Apple...

Oxfam reports that the richest one percent of people in the world own 48 percent of the world's wealth. Many claim that we should be alarmed by income inequality because it hampers upward mobility. Others argue that because income is distributed so unevenly, justice and fairness require income redistribution. Let's look at fairness and justice. What constitutes fairness and justice has been debated for centuries. Widespread agreement has proved to be elusive at best. However, I think that an important part of an intelligent discussion about fairness and justice is the recognition that knowing results of a process cannot establish...

As a New Year’s resolution, I thought I would look at making 2015 the Year of Neutrality.  The idea of Net Neutrality is so absurd that it I thought we might apply it to everything.  Here’s just a few I came up with. Airline Seat Neutrality.  Oh, you bought a business class seat?  Great!  You paid the airline to fund that seat and we’re very proud of you, but there’s a rule saying that the airline has to give the seat to whomever the government tells them.  You get to sit in coach while some schmo is sitting in the...

WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Barack Obama should move quickly on his executive amnesty because it is the fair thing to do for families that fear deportation.

The USSA’s Center for Disease and Gun Control has announced that the State will not impose any travel restrictions due to the Ebola outbreak until after the November 4 elections to ensure that all workers and peasants can have free access to ballots and polling places during this critical struggle for Progress. Comrade Disease Director Thomas Frieden has declared that Ebola is only ‘semi-transmittable’ and therefore only official Party-certified doctors can actually impose quarantines on an as-needed basis. In the meantime, those who believe they are exhibiting symptoms, while not contagious until after the November 2 elections, are asked to...

The U.S. Army is opening the door for women to go to Ranger school. It's one of the first steps in the broader effort to allow women to begin moving into more grueling combat jobs.

Progressive hearts are all aflutter this week, riding high on the continued coverage of Thomas Piketty and his new book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” which continues to fly off the virtual shelves at Amazon. To say that Piketty’s basic premise is flawed is probably too much of a compliment. Ed already looked at one of the fundamental assertions last week – that median household income had only risen 3.2% over the past three decades – and found it to be off by a factor of ten. But there are other, deeper problems with the Piketty model. One of them...

As millions of Americans rush to file their federal income tax returns on Tuesday, few will be thinking that the current tax code is the fairest one of all, according to the latest IBD/TIPP survey. Just 39% of Americans say today's income tax code — which features multiple tax brackets along with myriad deductions and exemptions — is the fairest. As to what sort of tax system would be more fair, the public hasn't made up its mind. Thirty-six percent say a flat tax is the fairest way to collect income taxes, while 19% would prefer a national sales tax....

What kind of rules should govern our lives? I'd argue that the best rules are those that we'd be satisfied with if our very worst enemy were in charge of decision-making. The foundation for such rules was laid out by my mother. Let's look at it. My mother worked as a domestic servant. That meant that my younger sister and I often lunched at home by ourselves during our preteen years. Being bigger and stronger than my sister, I seldom divided the food evenly, especially the desserts. After a tiring day at work, Mom would be greeted by sob stories...

Most of us can remember feeling that someone had done us a great injustice. On those occasions, we want nothing more than to exact revenge. I remember being unfairly treated as a lowly ROTC cadet by one of the sergeants who resented the fact that my brother had been promoted to captain and company commander over him. I was ambitious and worked extremely hard, resulting in my promotion in record time to the rank of colonel and city executive officer. This individual was now firmly under my command, and I could have wreaked havoc in his life. Instead, I chose...

It seems as if everywhere you turn these days there are studies claiming to show that America has lost its upward mobility for people born in the lower socioeconomic levels. But there is a sharp difference between upward mobility, defined as an opportunity to rise, and actually having risen. That distinction is seldom even mentioned in most of the studies. It is as if everybody is chomping at the bit to get ahead and the ones who don’t rise have been stopped by “barriers” created by “society.” When statistics show that sons of high-school dropouts don’t become doctors or scientists...

It seems as if, everywhere you turn these days, there are studies claiming to show that America has lost its upward mobility for people born in the lower socioeconomic levels. But there is a sharp difference between upward "mobility," defined as an opportunity to rise, and mobility defined as actually having risen. That distinction is seldom even mentioned in most of the studies. It is as if everybody is chomping at the bit to get ahead, and the ones that don't rise have been stopped by "barriers" created by "society." When statistics show that sons of high school dropouts don't...