Free Republic

With Obama promising Democrats that he is not leaving Washington, but will fight to retain his legislation and legacy, it pays to know what that consists of. In late 1995, a little-known Chicago politician named Barack Obama, who was running for the Illinois State Senate, attended a private coffee social meet-and-greet at a townhouse in Chicago’s Kenwood neighborhood. In attendance was departing state Senator Alice Palmer, who had handpicked Obama to be her successor. No one at that gathering could have imagined that the dynamic young leftist politician on the make, Barack Obama, would one day become president. But without...

Now that the dust has settled on the elections, the time has come (or so some of the punditry in the media assure us) to set aside political acrimony and unite under the new leadership of President-elect Donald Trump and the new House and Senate. Although it’s far from clear what President Trump will choose to prioritize, now that he will face the realities of entrenched political interests in Washington instead of his fired-up political base on the hustings, it seems at least possible that he will show much more sympathy for certain constitutionalist and Americanist causes — such as...

Included in a very long list of Things We Never Expect to See in American Politics is any scenario in which the leftist establishment Washington Post becomes a champion of the Constitution and the Founders’ original intent in framing it. Yet that is precisely what we find in a March 17 article by Pepperdine University School of Law professor Derek Muller, in which we are exhorted to restore the Electoral College system to some semblance of its original form — to prevent Donald Trump (shown on right) from becoming president.The bipartisan political establishment, be it remembered, has been subverting the Electoral...

It began as a series of explosive claims in a British newspaper on Tuesday, October 6, and quickly turned into an all-out rout of the already beleaguered U.S. dollar on international markets.  By early October 2009, the price of gold, off for several quarters from its all-time highs reached in March 2008, was back above the $1,000/ounce level, driven by concerns that the Federal Reserve’s inflationary activities might seriously undercut the dollar’s strength. Then the bottom fell out. The catalyst was a brief article, “The Demise of the Dollar,” by investigative journalist and longtime Middle East expert Robert Fisk, writing...

British General John Burgoyne must have been bitterly disappointed one day in July 1777 in the upper Hudson Valley — the day his army, hot in pursuit of the Americans they had just driven from Fort Ticonderoga, ran into a lake that wasn’t supposed to exist.  This part of upstate New York had already been thoroughly explored and mapped, yet the Redcoats, confident of speedily overtaking and finishing off the American force, suddenly found themselves blocked by a brand-new body of water where dry forest and field was supposed to provide swift passage. The British must have soon ascertained, as...

With bailouts and other unabashed socialist projects being embraced by both political parties to "save our economy," has free-market economics been proved faulty?  In the bailout-a-week political climate, it is all too easy to believe that free-market economics are as passé as powdered wigs. Everyone, it seems, is a socialist now, and the old gospel of laissez-faire and free enterprise has been discredited by a cascade of free-market failures that threaten to bring down the economy of the entire developed world. "For too long, the prevailing attitude in Washington has been that the market always knows best," Congressman Henry Waxman...

“The entire federal government,” laments Congressman Ron Paul in his newest book, End the Fed, “is one giant toxic asset at the moment. It certainly has no business telling the private sector how to run its affairs. It is in worse financial shape than all the companies in the private sector put together.”Hard words, but Congressman Paul knows whereof he speaks. It was Ron Paul, unique among congressmen for his understanding of how a free-market economy is supposed to work, who warned repeatedly of the coming economic calamity. It was Ron Paul, too, who warned both the Bush and Obama...

What began early last year as a "credit crunch" and an "economic downturn" is now being characterized as a "long, severe recession." Once upon a time, such a crisis was known as a "depression" before Americans became squeamish about such stark language.  As with our reluctant semantic retreat from "credit crunch" to "recession," the reality of another Great Depression will probably not be acknowledged until years after the fact. But America and the rest of the modern world, by doggedly pursuing the same mistaken policies of the 1920s and '30s, have made a full-blown depression — lasting years, not months,...

While WWII raged in 1944, 44 delegations met to create a world currency, bank, and trade organization. They fell short of that goal, but what will happen this time?   Even by the rarefied standards of wealthy New Englanders, the Mount Washington Hotel at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, is a luxurious retreat. Built in 1902 by 250 skilled artisans for the then-princely sum of $1.7 million, the sprawling Spanish Renaissance-style resort, nestled in the shadow of Mount Washington, the northeast's highest peak, has long been a favorite of celebrities and presidents. But even the man who built it, industrialist Joseph Stickney,...