Free Republic

With national unemployment hovering above 9 percent, a leading House Democrat is pushing to establish a "supercommittee" for creating jobs. Rep. John Larson (Conn.), chairman of the Democratic Caucus, wants to amend the recently passed debt-limit package to establish a joint select committee on job creation to operate alongside the already mandated Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction. In a "Dear Colleague" letter sent to House members earlier in the week, Larson argued that the nation's jobs crisis is only exacerbating its long-term fiscal problems and therefore demands Congress's immediate attention.

Having a job is more important to people than how much they are paid, according to the first official inquiry into what makes Britons happy... ...The Prime Minister launched the programme in November, in an attempt to create a broader measure of Britain's success than the performance of the economy. Mr Cameron said governments had a role in helping people "feel better" and that the national wellbeing index should help politicians and wider society "build a better life". Paul Allin, director of the wellbeing project at the ONS, said the initiative would combine objective data, such as crime, employment and...

The body of an elderly woman that was taken from a plane in Gatwick Airport and unofficially driven to Co Kerry by her son for burial is thought to be back in the UK. Gardai believe the woman's body may have been driven to the UK via Northern Ireland by her son after he was warned by a coroner that if he did not bury the body it would be confiscated and put in cold storage at his expense. The matter came to light when Kerry Coroner Terence Casey was contacted by the gardai after the landlord of a rented...

Have the American people outlived their usefulness to the rich minority in the United States? A number of trends suggest that the answer may be yes. In every industrial democracy since the end of World War II, there has been a social contract between the few and the many. In return for receiving a disproportionate amount of the gains from economic growth in a capitalist economy, the rich paid a disproportionate percentage of the taxes needed for public goods and a safety net for the majority. In North America and Europe, the economic elite agreed to this bargain because they...

Anne Wortham is a member of the American Sociological Association and the American Philosophical Association. She has been a John M. Olin Foundation Faculty Fellow, and honored as a Distinguished Alumni of the Year by the Nation al Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education. In fall 1988 she was one of a select group of intellectuals who were featured in Bill Moyer's television series, "A World of Ideas." The transcript of her conversation with Moyers has been published in his book, A World of Ideas. Dr. Wortham is author of "The Other Side of Racism: A Philosophical Study of...

When Glenn Beck urged his listeners, “Please, pick it up. The Road to Serfdom. Make it part of your essential library,” sales of Austrian Economist Frederick von Hayek’s book at Amazon.com pushed it to Number 1 the next day. Prior to the election of President Obama, “The book sold respectably at a clip of about 600 copies a month,” according to Bruce Caldwell, editor at the University of Chicago Press. “But then, in November 2008, sales more than quadrupled, and they haven’t slowed down since.” When John Stossel, host of Fox Business, featured the book on his show on February...

Hayek is #1... on Amazon.com right now, with Road to Serfdom topping the Internet bookseller's charts right now, apparently because of Glenn Beck's program last night, where he called it a "Mike Tyson right hook to socialism."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLYtHHxTTmc

A wealth of unnecessary and petty [regulations] here engenders a whole army of clerks, each of whom carries out his task with a degree of pedantry and inflexibility, and a self-important air solely designed to add significance to the least significant employment. He refrains from speaking, but you can see him thinking, more or less: "Make way for me; I am a cog in the mighty machine of state." -- Astolphe Louis Leonor, the Marquis de Custine, Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia (1839) “If I’m the bad guy to the average citizen … and their taxes...

Government is taking us a long way down the Road to Serfdom. That doesn't just mean that more of us must work for the government. It means that we are changing from independent, self-responsible people into a submissive flock. The welfare state kills the creative spirit. F.A. Hayek, an Austrian economist living in Britain, wrote "The Road to Serfdom" in 1944 as a warning that central economic planning would extinguish freedom. The book was a hit. Reader's Digest produced a condensed version that sold 5 million copies.

<p>COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- About 1,000 American-born children are forced into the sex trade in Ohio every year and about 800 immigrants are sexually exploited and pushed into sweatshop-type jobs, a new report on human trafficking in the state said Wednesday.</p>

In 1944, Friedrich von Hayek wrote what was to become a seminal work in the history of modern Western liberty philosophy, The Road to Serfdom. In it, he argued that it is the inherent and inevitable nature of collectivism, as it takes to pieces the system of free-market enterprise that has brought so much good to so many people, to enslave individuals, destroy their personal freedoms, and subject them to tyranny. Socialism, by its very nature, would lead to the rise of a bureaucratic class that would receive greater "discretionary" powers, the authority to act outside of strictly constitutional or...

It was in 1774 that John Adams reminded how the "most sensible and jealous people are so little attentive to government that there are no instances of resistance until repeated, multiple oppressions have placed it beyond a doubt that their rulers had formed settled plans to deprive them of their liberties." And that's not merely to "oppress the individual or a few," he added, "but to break down the fences of a free constitution, and deprive the people at large of all share in the government, and all the checks by which it is limited." Mr. Adams, of course, would...

Socialism has come to mean many different things to many people, but regardless how it is defined, in the months immediately ahead it will be put to a rigorous test.  The test will be visible to everyone as countries around the globe run out of money and confront overwhelming debts that cannot be repaid as well as other wide-ranging financial promises that can no longer be met.  In short, the ideological bankruptcy of socialism will be laid bare by government insolvency.It had to come sooner or later.  The reasons are not hard to understand. The ideological bankruptcy is neatly captured...

(The) Independent Payment Advisory Board.. would be required.. to recommend (spending )changes to ..Medicare .. to limit the rate of growth in ..spending. Those recommendations would go into effect automatically...

The passage of sweeping national health care legislation by the U.S. House of Representatives has set the stage for the greatest intrusion of the State into the everyday lives of the American people in the nation's history. Across the Web, the groans and cries of the free-marketers, capitalists, and libertarians have begun to echo in response. Surprisingly, many of these voices condemn the Catholic Church for its "socialist" commitment to feeding the poor, caring for the sick, and doing the other things Jesus Christ commanded of us. "Without the support of you bleeding-heart Catholics," the refrain goes, "this socialist nightmare...

On Memorial Day, we honor our nation's warriors and their courageous defense of freedom. Their sacrifice is the highest and best, but it comes with an important caveat. Our soldiers defend freedom outside our borders, but it is the rest of us who must constantly strive to build and maintain it within. While America's troops patrol the mountains of Afghanistan, we must guard against encroachments on freedom here at home. It is up to us to ensure that our way of life is worthy of protection by our men and women in uniform. Our mission may not seem dramatic --...

When I read the portion of Frederick Douglass’ autobiography where he recounted arriving at his master’s house after a day of work in a ship yard caulking ships and having to empty his pockets, even being subsequently searched, for wages paid at the ship yard, I was enraged. No human being should be forced to turn his wages over to another. Anyone who fancies himself a supporter of liberty must read the autobiography of Frederick Douglass. (The complete title of this work is “ Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass [an American slave, written by himself].” After reading it,...

President Obama is rapidly replacing the Bush Doctrine with the Soros Doctrine, implementing the foreign policy tenets of the principal financier of the American left. When Charlie Gibson peered pedantically down his nose at Sarah Palin last fall, asking "Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?," I could not help but wonder whether anyone in our esteemed mainstream media would have the intelligence or the temerity to ask candidate Barack Obama whether he agreed with the Soros doctrines. Too late now. Soros doctrines reign in the Obama White House and we're about to learn firsthand whether they represent the ideology...

Maybe it's just me, but I find federal legislation titled "The GIVE Act" and "The SERVE Act" downright creepy. Even more troubling: the $6 billion price tag on these bipartisan bills to expand government-funded national service efforts. Volunteerism is a wonderful thing, which is why millions of Americans do it every day without a cent of taxpayer money. But the volunteerism packages on the Hill are less about promoting effective charity than about creating make-work, permanent bureaucracies and left-wing slush funds. The House passed the "Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education Act" -- or the GIVE Act -- last week. The...