Free Republic

I was young 20's when these talks, debates, whatever were on TV and quite frankly ... at that age (and era) I never watched TV ...

Is it too soon to dub this mess Ebolagate? I note that Democrats everywhere are trying to sidestep that designation by spreading the party line that Ebola is not a threat and there’s no reason to stop flights in and out of West Africa just because it’s a horrible disease that kills 70% of it’s victims. And West Africa used to be the only place it lived.Dr. Friedman is the keynote spokesmouth for the official position that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself: “We remain confident that Ebola is not a significant public health threat to...

Thomas Friedman, the respected New York Times columnist, tried to do a beleaguered President Barack Obama a favor by publishing a summary of an extended interview between the two men, which was grandly entitled “Obama on the World.” Friedman tried to present the President in a positive light, by calling his weak responses “feisty.” Yet there is no denying that Obama’s rudderless foreign policy has been a disaster. The international order has rapidly deteriorated since Obama entered the Oval Office. The current situation is so perilous that so long as Obama remains President, the phrase “presidential leadership” will continue to...

Milton Friedman, a renowned economist and conservative intellectual once said that we can have open borders, and we can have a welfare state, but we cannot have both. Open borders will collapse the welfare state because there isn’t enough money to redistribute in order to prop up low-skilled laborers from third world countries who rely the most on the benefits of the welfare state. So why then does the Left in this country, who believes so strongly in the welfare state, continue to try to collapse it with illegal immigration? To understand the answer to this question, we have to...

The lesson of Dave Brat’s victory over Eric Cantor last week is being missed: In all pundits’ talk about immigration, no one has stopped to point out that Brat boldly grabbed the third rail of American politics, ripped it off the tracks, and beat Cantor with it.George W. Bush, Michele Bachmann, and Rick Perry all rhetorically touched entitlement programs and lived, but I’ve never seen a politician tell the plain, actuarial truth the way Brat did and get rewarded for it. Republicans should be overjoyed that they can finally shout about underfunded social programs. Instead, the only lesson they’re learning...

An Obama administration official upset with the direction of the Bergdhal story voiced his concern on Twitter on Wednesday, floating a theory that put Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in a more sympathetic light--and his fellow soldiers as part of the problem. The American people, he argued, were too quick to jump to conclusions about Bergdahl after his fellow soldiers spoke out about his disappearance. “Here's the thing about Bergdahl and the Jump-to-Conclusions mats: What if his platoon was long on psychopaths and short on leadership?” asked Brandon Friedman, the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at Department of Housing and Urban...

Like his teacher Milton Friedman, Gary Becker was a supporter of freedom and free markets. One could certainly disagree with him for being too tolerant of some kinds of interventionist government economic policy. Nevertheless, he was often critical of government intervention in the economy, arguing in support of free trade, deregulation, privatization, and against the Affordable Care Act.

WASHINGTON, March 28 –The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s (CEI) animated short film, “I, Pencil” about the free-market wonders of making the common pencil won first place at a prestigious film contest this month co-hosted by Canada’s Manning Centre and the Free Thinking Film Society. The award was presented at the 2014 Manning Networking Conference, held February 27 - March 1, 2014, in Ottawa. The films were evaluated by a three-judge panel and featured themes on conservatism, liberty, free markets, and democracy. CEI’s 6 minute long “I, Pencil” film was adapted from the 1958 essay by the late economist Leonard E. Read...

Wow. This was warped and offensive. New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman sited a debunked study to compare global warming deniers to Trotsky Marxists – then blames the Syrian revolution on global warming, not on Bashir Assad’s brutality. Let me put this in personal terms. Your son or daughter has a disease. And you go to 100 doctors. 97 out of a hundred say, “This is a cause and this is a cure,” and three percent say, “This is a cause and this is a cure.” It’s like 97% of experts say this. 3% say that. And, conservatives...

Five-Thirty-Eight's Nate Silver mocked New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman as a "hedgehog" who "only knows one thing." When asked to describe what a hedgehog is, Silver pointed to Friedman specifically and the op-ed columnists at the Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal: ... They don’t permit a lot of complexity in their thinking. They pull threads together from very weak evidence and draw grand conclusions based on them. They’re ironically very predictable from week to week. If you know the subject that Thomas Friedman or whatever is writing about, you don’t have to read the column. You can...

IT’S WELL KNOWN AMONG THE SMALL WORLD of people who pay attention to such things that the liberal-leaning reporters at The Wall Street Journal resent the conservative-leaning editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. What’s less well known—and about to break into the open, threatening the very fabric of the institution—is how deeply the liberal-leaning reporters at The New York Times resent the liberal-leaning editorial page of The New York Times.

"In my opinion, a society that aims for equality before liberty, will end up with neither equality nor liberty. And a society that aims first for liberty, will not end up with equality, but it will end up with a closer approach to equality, than any other kind of system than has ever been developed. Now that conclusion, is based both on evidence across history, and also I believe, on reasoning, which if you try to follow through the implications of aiming first at equality, will become clear to you. You can only aim at equality, by giving some people...

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...

When Professor Friedman Opened Pandora’s Box: Open Market Operations At the end of the day, Friedman jettisoned the gold standard for a remarkable statist reason. Just as Keynes had been, he was afflicted with the economist’s ambition to prescribe the route to higher national income and prosperity and the intervention tools and recipes that would deliver it. The only difference was that Keynes was originally and primarily a fiscalist, whereas Friedman had seized upon open market operations by the central bank as the route to optimum aggregate demand and national income. There were massive and multiple ironies in that...

Tom Friedman's latest column in The New York Times argues that employers don't care if you went to Yale: Since jobs are evolving so quickly, with so many new tools, a bachelor’s degree is no longer considered an adequate proxy by employers for your ability to do a particular job — and, therefore, be hired. So, more employers are designing their own tests to measure applicants’ skills. And they increasingly don’t care how those skills were acquired: home schooling, an online university, a massive open online course, or Yale. They just want to know one thing: Can you add value?...

Wednesday, January 12, 2011 INTELLIGENCE BRIEFING Strategy site to Obama: End alliance with Israel WASHINGTON — A newsletter-publisher said to have ties with the Obama administration has called on Washington to end its strategic alliance with Israel. George Friedman, publisher of Stratfor, has published a book that called on the Obama administration to reorder U.S. foreign policy. Friedman has argued that the key element of the proposal required the end of U.S. strategic ties with Israel and bolstering of cooperation with the Islamic world, particularly Iran and Pakistan. "The United States must quietly distance itself from Israel," Friedman says in...

Ben Bernanke Just Told A Massive Lie About Milton Friedman And I Can Prove It Ben Bernanke is so desperate to find support regarding his steal from the poor and give to the 0.01% policies he is now telling blatant lies about famous, dead economists that can’t refute what he says. In this case Milton Friedman. In his Q&A today, The Bernank claimed: *BERNANKE: MILTON FRIEDMAN WOULD HAVE SUPPORTED WHAT FED DOING

Milton Friedman explodes the myth that government can provide goods and services at no one's expense

WE are in the midst of a natural gas revolution in America that is a potential game changer for the economy, environment and our national security — if we do it right. The enormous stores of natural gas that have been locked away in shale deposits across America that we’ve now been able to tap into, thanks to breakthroughs in seismic imaging, horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” are enabling us to replace much dirtier coal with cleaner gas as the largest source of electricity generation in America. And natural gas may soon be powering cars, trucks and ships...

Milton Friedman (1912–1986), free market economist and author who schooled Phil Donahue on national television about capitalism and the freedom of the market place, would have turned 100 years old on July 31st of this year. Friedman’s calm demeanor, as he put the arrogant, know-it-all, and multimillionaire talk show host in his place, is a thing of beauty. If you haven’t seen it, then you are in for a real treat. It’s less than 3 minutes in length and worth every second: --------------------cut------------------- Friedman’s “I don’t even trust you” and the rabbi’s comment about the cruelty of man say a...