Free Republic

Academics are always mystified that the American public perceives reality differently than they do. It never occurs to the former that the latter may be closer to it. The American Council on Education (ACE) polled its members at the ACE annual convention on a quartet of questions. "Not surprisingly, most of those at the meeting who took the poll answered, correctly, that the economic value of college is increasing; that half of borrowers indeed owe less than $13,000; that most institutions do try hard to manage costs and limit tuition increases; and that traditional colleges and universities are nonprofit institutions,"...

BILLINGS -- As bipartisan crowd-pleasers go, few get Montanans nodding more approvingly than calls for a balanced federal budget, which is why U.S. Sen. Steve Daines recently offered a bill forcing his peers to go unpaid unless they reign in spending. “As I travel around Montana, as I did in December wrapping up a 56-county tour, when I talk about this bill, it’s a bill that will literally bring applause from across the state,” Daines told The Gazette. The state of Montana balances its budget. The federal government should do the same, or so goes the narrative that literally every...

Few areas of historical research have provoked such intensive study as the origins of America’s Great Depression. From 1929 to 1933 America suffered the worst economic decline in its history. Real national income fell by 36 percent; unemployment increased from 3 percent to over 25 percent; more than 40 percent of all banks were permanently closed; and international investment and trade declined dramatically. The dimensions of the economic catastrophe in America and the rest of the world from 1929 to 1933 cannot be captured fully by quantitative data alone. Tens of millions of humans suffered intense misery and despair. Because...

We are not in a recession. We are in a depression, and have been since the turn of the century ___ Economic depressions unfold slowly, which obscures their analysis, although they are simple to understand. Governments and central banks turn recessions into depressions, which are preceded by unsustainable expansions of debt untethered from the real economy. The reduction and resolution of excess debt takes time, and governments and central banks usually act counterproductively, retarding necessary adjustments and lengthening the adjustment, and consequently, the depression. If one dates the beginning of a depression from the beginning of the unsustainable expansion of...

Remove the burden of government • Restore the Constitution, rule of law • Limit the power of the Federal Reserve, regulatory agencies • Stop redistributing wealth It was my great good fortune to be a son of depression parents. My mother and father were born in the early 1920s. They were observant, sensitive, thoughtful parents who took the time to tell stories. They reflected on and spoke of their early years often to their sons, sharing the hopes and fears of their upbringing as we grew up ourselves. They showed us how to observe the world around us. One set...

The rapid deterioration of our economy is attributable to the wholesale liquidation of our best companies to foreign interests. The U.S. has sold more than 16,000 of our best companies in the last 30 years to these foreign interests. This trend erodes our ability to generate earnings, and tax revenues to sustain our current standard of living – resulting in our reliance on imports thus creating uncontrolled and escalating foreign debt. Holding our debt our jobs and the production of our goods, foreign countries have ultimate leverage over our policies and our future. If we allow this to continue, it...

One view of what caused the Great Depression in the 1930s is that the Federal Reserve failed to prevent a collapse in the money supply. This is the famous thesis of Milton Friedman's and Anna Schwartz's A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, and it was, more or less, the view of Ben Bernanke when he was chairman of the Federal Reserve. The global economy today resembles that of the 1930s in several ominous ways. Financial author Edward Chancellor recently called attention to a paper written by Caludio Borio, head economist at the Bank of International Settlements, that provides...

The “infamy” of December 7, 1941, is deeper than most Americans have ever imagined. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was almost certainly the result of a Soviet plot—“Operation Snow”—carried out by Harry Dexter White, a figure of enormous influence in the Roosevelt administration and a known Soviet spy. Americans remember Pearl Harbor as the work of a Japanese military machine hell-bent on a war of conquest. The truth is more complicated. The imperial regime had faced severe political shocks throughout the 1930s. Two attempts on the life of Emperor Hirohito—one by a Japanese communist whose father was a member...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I mentioned to you last week that I had a story about how what we are living through right now is actually worse than the Great Depression and why nobody knows. I went back to my archives, and I got that story, and I have it here. Open borders, bigger government, free college for everybody. How many people already have free college by virtue of having their student loans forgiven or what have you? Everything these people have tried has not worked, so they want to try even more of it. "Bigger welfare state. Get rid of...

The Dems want to pin the Confederate Flag, KKK, Great Depression, urban decay, and harsh marriage laws on the GOP... pin the tale on the Donkey instead!

I don't know too much about Jim Rickards, just found this to be an interesting video about the overall economy and some tidbits about what our government agencies are up to. The video is a 45 minutes long interview of sorts and discussion. Just posting in the event other are interested.

Fred Ross's change-making Axioms for Organizers is updated for the Internet age, and for a new generation battling discrimination and police brutality.Most residents of Ferguson, Missouri, have probably never heard of Fred Ross, Sr., but they could use his help now. Ferguson's population is two-thirds African American, but the mayor, almost all members of the city council and school board, and 95 percent of the police department is white, and in last year's municipal election only 7 percent of blacks came to the polls. Ross—perhaps the most influential (but little-known) community organizer in American history—had a successful career mobilizing people...

Inflation has been notably absent from the economy this summer, despite bullish moves in gold and a continued debate over the tapering of asset purchases by the Federal Reserve. According to Art Cashin, director of floor operations at UBS Financial Services, the central bank's effect on the financial system has worrying parallels to the period leading up to the Great Depression. "The weak data that we've gotten, particularly the housing on Friday, hints that tapering may be held back or may not be a factor, " Cashin told "Squawk on the Street" on Monday. "Many of the proponents of gold...

Unemployment is not getting better, it’s getting worse. Even the establishment media is taking notice. “Widely followed pollster Gallup puts the nation's unemployment rate at an ugly 8.6 percent in August,” reports CNBC, “a startling jump from the 7.8 percent the organization recorded for July. When counting the underemployed, the rate zooms to 17.7 percent, off its 2013 high of 18.2 percent.” If you count in those who have dropped out of the work force, you get closer to 24 percent unemployment. Gee, and all this time I thought that the job situation was getting better. That’s what we were...

For staggering sum of $47 trillion dollars, one would think that perhaps this administration could afford a soundtrack under their reckless spending, like the 1970’s Bionic Man had when his binary powers took over. An original-score sound bed would add drama and color to the spending. The theatrical effect would be that it would make us feel like the spending was doing something. Instead, all Obama got us was the royalty-free laugh track. Through 2023 the Office of Management and Budget reports that the accumulated spending by the federal government since the One took over will be $46.5 trillion under...

Lovers of Big Government and apologists for debt like Paul Krugman have tried to paint Milton Friedman as a contradiction. They say that Friedman’s insight that more Fed intervention might have mitigated the Great Depression is inconsistent with his view that the Depression would have been less severe without the Fed. Krugman can typically be discounted because his partisanship diminishes his perceptiveness. It is, however, disappointing when National Review joins the fray and publishes opinion claiming that Friedman “would likely have supported a much more aggressive monetary response to our economic downturn.” Professor Ivan Pongracic of Hillsdale College explains that...

Ninety years ago today, on August 2, 1923, President Warren G. Harding died at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, California. It was sudden, shocking, and has been fodder for conspiracy theorists ever since. His wife, Florence—described derisively by some as “The Duchess”—didn’t allow an autopsy, so we’ll never know exactly what caused the demise of the 29th President of the United States. It might have been congestive heart failure, or food poisoning, or even something more sinister. Seen in retrospect, through the prism of the scandals associated with his White House tenure, Harding is usually ranked well toward the...

When libertarian scholar Peter Ferrara asked rhetorically in Sunday’s issue of Forbes, “Economically, Could Obama Be America’s Worst President?” he relied heavily on statistics provided by the chief enabler of the Great Recession, the Federal Reserve. Noting that the policies of President Obama have done nothing to stimulate the economy but plenty to keep it from growing, he used recent economic recoveries as prime examples of what recoveries would look like if government would stay out of the way: The right measure and comparison for Obama’s record is not to compare the recovery to the recession, but to compare Obama’s...

Yesterday, my colleague, Marty Biancuzzo, explained why America is on a path to inevitable economic and government collapse. After reading Marty’s piece, another colleague asked me: What will America look like after a government collapse? It’s an important question, and I want to give a satisfactory answer. But I can’t do that in one short column, so I plan to return to this topic several times over the next few weeks. I hope that when I’m done, you will have a better understanding of where the country is headed. Now, consider our current situation… It’s clear that Barack Obama and...

<p>Europe in 2013 has recovered worse from its slump than Europe in 1935. Again, great work, guys.</p>