Free Republic

“Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.” – Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged “A man’s ego is the fountainhead of human progress.” – Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead “The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.” – Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism “To love is to value. Only a rationally selfish man, a man of self esteem, is capable of love – because he is the only man capable of holding firm, consistent, uncompromising, unbetrayed...

Between October 2008 and October 2010, the European Commission approved 4,589 billion euros, the equivalent of 45 years of Romanian GDP, of state support to banks. And this may not include all of the funding for financial institutions, because our overly generous Commission has not been too eager to count the cost of this policy. One thousand billion euros were spent in 2008 and 250 million in 2009. At the same time, the total for state support to all other sectors of the economy was only 73 billion (less than one sixtieth of the sum for banks). The figure for...

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes"The Obama Administration's Department of Justice, with former RIAA lawyers occupying the 2nd and 3rd highest positions in the department, has shown its colors, intervening on behalf of the RIAA in the case against a Boston University graduate student, SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, accused of file sharing when he was 17 years old. Its oversized, 39-page brief (PDF) relies upon a United States Supreme Court decision from 1919 which upheld a statutory damages award, in a case involving overpriced railway tickets, equal to 116 times the actual damages sustained, and a 2007 Circuit Court decision which held...

Obama blames 'ethic of greed' for economy By: Jeanne Cummings March 27, 2008 06:55 PM EST Barack Obama went to New York Thursday and blamed lobbyists, greedy businessmen and complacent Washington politicians for creating “an ethic of greed” that led to today’s foreclosure crisis. Not long after he left the stage, the Democratic presidential hopeful attended a fundraiser held by his campaign in a room in the Manhattan headquarters of Credit Suisse, one of the major investment companies caught up in the subprime lending mess. While the fundraiser was not sponsored by the mortgage lender, Obama’s dual appearances highlight a...

Dick Durbin is leading the charge on the left to attack "Big Oil", using today’s Exxon earning reports as his evidence that the public is being screwed at the pump. We’ve all heard the lines of how ‘Big Oil’ earns around 9c per gallon while the government earns around 50c per gallon in gas tax, but where does Exxon’s $8 Billion come from? The following is an analysis of Exxon’s earnings reports and it destroys much of the accusations made by the left. First, some notes on their financial press release: …Upstream earnings were $6,383 million, up $1,329 million from...

Life is good!!! Dow --11,268 + 194.99 S&P --1.307 + 22.32 NASDAQ --2,356 + 44.98!!!!!

...Winfrey, 52, who is reportedly worth more than $1 billion, said she doesn't feel guilty about her wealth. "I was coming back from Africa on one of my trips," she said. "I had taken one of my wealthy friends with me. She said, 'Don't you just feel guilty? Don't you just feel terrible?' I said, 'No, I don't. I do not know how me being destitute is going to help them.' Then I said when we got home, 'I'm going home to sleep on my Pratesi sheets right now and I'll feel good about it.' "

dude... corporations have like, money.