Free Republic

American society’s schizophrenic attitudes about business could be the subject of a book. (Perhaps multiple volumes.) For example, in the months leading up to the 2012 presidential election, we heard constantly about the need to create jobs and bring down unemployment. And yet, media coverage and Hollywood depictions of business only reinforce the popular fiction that business owners are little more than greedy exploitative bloodsuckers (whose enterprises apparently exist for the sole purpose of being gouged for taxes to be spent by profligate lawmakers with no sense of their own fiscal responsibility). Regrettably, this is typical. But our culture’s conflict...

When I was in grade school, I remember going to birthday parties at the local bowling alley. Before the games would begin, the workers would install bumpers inside the gutters in order to prevent gutter balls and avoid "failure." When I was growing up, it was common for sports teams to award trophies to all the players so no little kid would have his or her feelings hurt at the end of the season. Today, there are school districts which no longer give out "F'" grades, and hundreds of high schools have removed class ranks so that my generation...

Some people say they do their best thinking while in the bathroom. But The Economist recently took that notion one step further, photo shopping Rodin’s The Thinker on top of a toilet and asking, “Will we ever invent anything this useful again?” Perhaps not. “The unsung hero of human history was, of course, the Brain of Drains, the Hub of Tubs, the Power of Showers, the Brewer of Sewers,” author W. Hodding Carter writes. “The humble plumber.” And it’s true. Indoor plumbing has helped humankind prevent communicable disease and thus saved countless lives. The 21st century isn’t promising such life-changing...

Guatemala -- Where is that, you ask? Generally this column comes to you from Washington, D.C. or New York City. Occasionally it comes from London or Paris. Today it carries the dateline of a seaport in Guatemala, and if it were written a day ago or two days hence it would carry the dateline of Belize. It is freezing up north. The inclement weather has driven me to tropical parts. Global warming sounds more and more agreeable to me and, frankly, if you have your wits about you, to you, too. The frozen remains of palm trees have supposedly...

In the days of the late Mike Wallace, "60 Minutes" was known for hard-hitting, aggressive journalism that asked the questions viewers wanted answered and held the powerful accountable. The Jan. 27 program on which Steve Kroft interviewed President Obama (at his request, no less) and outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton fell far short of that high standard. It was the kind of softball toss you might have expected if Oprah Winfrey or Barbara Walters had conducted the interview. The president said of Clinton, "...a lot of the successes we've had internationally have been because of her hard work." Kroft...

The New York Times mobile app sent me a breaking news update Wednesday morning: "U.S. Economy Unexpectedly Contracted in Fourth Quarter." Based on high government third-quarter spending and government policies and politics occurring during the fourth quarter, the slowdown should come as no surprise. The third quarter final gross domestic product growth was 3.1 percent. That relatively high number (compared to full year 2011 at 2 percent) was driven primarily by an increase in inventories and an increase in government spending. While the growth number was hailed by many as a reason to cheer, it had to have been...

Imagine a day President Obama enters Oprah Winfrey's public confessional: Oprah: As you know Mr. President, I was one of your supporters. This is a difficult interview for me. Americans have many questions. Let's begin by going back to the start of your second term. It was a time of partisan division--the fiscal cliff and the debt limit fights. The economic recovery was anemic at best. Your calls for unity in confronting those challenges were fervent. You talked about a "balanced" budgeting approach but, as we came to see, your "balanced" cuts weren't cuts at all. When the unfunded off-budget...

Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman has approved his state’s portion of the Keystone XL pipeline, explaining that its revised route avoids areas that critics had earlier claimed were environmentally sensitive. The Alberta-to-Texas pipeline would create more than 5,500 Nebraska jobs during its construction period and support 1,000 permanent jobs through 2030. During the project’s lifetime, KXL would generate $950 million in labor income, $130 million in property, sales and other state and local taxes, and $679 million for the state’s gross domestic product, by bringing Canadian oil sands petroleum to Texas refineries.President Obama’s second term agenda, continued viability of Medicare and...

WASHINGTON - House Republican leaders seized the high ground this week in the furious battle to curb federal spending, forcing Senate Democrats to produce their first budget in nearly four years. It was a political high wire act, but House Speaker John Boehner pulled it off without a hitch. In one master stroke, he reunited most of his rebellious Republicans behind his budget strategy, and divided the Democrats. When the smoke cleared in the latest budgetary skirmish Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who has dictatorially ignored previous House budgets, agreed to accept the GOP's limited debt ceiling suspension as...

The National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) Summary of Operations for fiscal year 2012, released last week, shows an agency that is significantly over-funded. In 2010, the Obama Administration increased the agency’s budget even though it previously operated with a fiscal year-end surplus. Now, the operating report reveals that the agency’s business continues to erode with the decline of unionization in the private sector making its increased appropriation even more unnecessary than it was in 2010. According to the report, issued by Acting General Counsel Lafe Solomon, total case intake decreased by three percent; unfair labor practice case intake decreased by...

The Republican Party is picking up the pieces. Speaking of the ticket's loss for the first time since the election, Rep. Paul Ryan noted that many voters "don't think or know that we have good ideas" on fighting poverty and "helping people move up the ladder of life." It's not surprising that Ryan, who got his start working for Jack Kemp and William Bennett at Empower America, sees the world this way. Though it's a total secret to members of the press and the Democratic Party, conservative intellectuals have been grappling with the problems of poverty in America for several...

The re-election of Barack Obama hasn't done anything to make more jobs available to Americans, and there is no indication that it will. America now has 23 million people who want a full-time job but can't find one. Obama doesn't think American citizens or businessmen create jobs. His Jobs Czar, Jeffrey Immelt, recently said on a television interview referring to China, where he has outsourced General Electric's light bulb plants, "state-run Communism may not be your cup of tea, but their government works." In his first presidential debate last year, Obama claimed that passage of free trade agreements with...

WASHINGTON - If you thought President Obama's first term was one long, uninterrupted political brawl, the next four years will make that period look tame by comparison. If you need any evidence for this prediction, Obama's in-your-face, second inaugural address is Exhibit A. It was a speech tailored to make the hearts of liberal Democrats beat faster, cheering what some in the Washington news media called "Obama unbound." It was a speech that sent an unmistakable message to his party's base that this time around, it's no more Mr. Nice Guy. The gloves are off, these are my issues, and...

Thanks, California! Thanks for your monstrous spending and absurd regulatory overreach! America needs you. We need Connecticut and Illinois, too! We need you the way we needed the Soviet Union, as models of failure, to warn us what happens if we believe those who say, "Government can." Moving to California was once the dream for many Americans. Its population grew at almost triple the national average -- until 1990. Then big government, in the form of endless regulation and taxes, killed much of the dream. In the last decade, 2 million people left California. Many of them moved to Alaska,...

Rarely have second terms lived up to the hopes and expectations of presidents or their electorates. FDR's began with an attempt to pack the Supreme Court by adding new justices and a second Depression of 1937. He was rescued only by the war in Europe in 1939 and the GOP's nomination of "the barefoot boy from Wall Street," Wendell Willkie. What can be called Harry Truman's second term was a disaster. In 1949, the Soviets exploded an atom bomb and China fell to Mao. In 1950, the Rosenbergs were convicted as atomic spies for Stalin and North Korea invaded the...

Although it certainly wasn’t Oscar material, I still love the 1989 film “Erik the Viking,” starring, among others, Tim Robbins, Mickey Rooney, Eartha Kitt and John Cleese. It’s a campy British comedy-fantasy about a band of misfit Vikings on a quest to reach Valhalla. In one scene, the motley mob finds its way to the island of Hy-Brasil, a happy, peaceful, sunlit land populated by white-robed, free-loving, uber-pacifist morons. You know, liberals. Through a series of immaterial events, the island begins to sink into the ocean. As it does, Erik and crew evacuate and re-board the ship while Hy-Brasil’s inhabitants...

“Land of the free.” It’s right there in our national anthem. As well it should be -- the personal liberties we enjoy are the envy of many around the world. But freedom is no accident. It requires constant vigilance. Takes economic liberty, an area where the United States has begun to slip quite a bit lately. How would you say the U.S. compares to other nations? No need to guess. We can pinpoint it exactly by using an annual guide known as the Index of Economic Freedom. Top three, you think? Top five? Nope. Last year at this time came...

WASHINGTON - President Obama's decision to name Jacob Lew, his chief of staff and former budget director, to be his Treasury secretary sent a depressing signal that the economy and jobs won't be his highest priority in a second term. With unemployment remaining stubbornly high in the fifth year of his presidency, the job of Treasury secretary cries out for a hard- driving, corporate chief executive with strong economic credentials. Instead, Obama intends to pick Lew who has reigned over his big spending budgets (and five consecutive trillion dollar deficits), and more recently has run the West Wing operation as...

Well, the Republicans caved and Barack Obama celebrated in Hawaii while planning his next step in creating an irreversible welfare state. Taxes will rise, spending will soar, and the media will cheer on Mr. Obama as he presses for even more as the debt ceiling deadline approaches. Instead of giving into despair or anger, conservatives need to plan for the long haul. Tea Party people, Christian conservatives, national security conservatives and fiscal conservatives (there’s a lot of overlap here) are already working to establish an actually conservative Republican Congress in 2014. It would be nice to have some conservative...

Matt Damon’s latest film “Promised Land” arrived in theaters nationwide yesterday with a focus on the controversial issue of fracking. Written by Matt Damon (who won an Oscar for co-writing “Good Will Hunting”) and John Krasinski (“The Office),” the story focuses on a small community that is asked to debate the merits of the process when a large corporation arrives in town wanting to buy much of the local land. In an article from the Wall Street Journal, reporter Daniel Gilbert described -- much more succinctly than the film does -- what the process of fracking entails. He noted that...