Free Republic

U.S. small business owners aren’t the only ones who think government is the worst part of doing business, according to a new 6-nation survey of more than 13,500 small-business owners released today by The Sage Group. In this survey, almost two thirds (63%) of U.S. owners rate government bureaucracy and legislation unfavorably. But the French (67%) and Germans (88%) are even harsher on this point.

The burden of regulation on Americans increased at an alarming rate in fiscal year 2010. Based on data from the Government Accountability Office, an unprecedented 43 major new regulations were imposed by Washington. And based on reports from government regulators themselves, the total cost of these rules topped $26.5 billion, far more than any other year for which records are available. These costs will affect Americans in many ways, raising the price of the cars they buy and the food they eat, while destroying an untold number of jobs. With the enactment of new health care laws, financial regulations, and...

This Past Tuesday the Republican Members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released a staff report that provides the reasons for the Housing Bubble Burst 2007. The Report finds that the housing bubble burst that led to a financial crisis can be traced back to federal government intervention, pushed by the Democratic party, in the U.S. housing market. “The spin on the financial crisis by those who favored government efforts to erode lending standards is that the housing bubble didn’t cause this recession,” said Rep. Darrell Issa the Committee’s Ranking Member. “The findings in this report should...

Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?By DANIEL OKRENTPublished: July 25, 2004 F course it is.The fattest file on my hard drive is jammed with letters from the disappointed, the dismayed and the irate who find in this newspaper a liberal bias that infects not just political coverage but a range of issues from abortion to zoology to the appointment of an admitted Democrat to be its watchdog. (That would be me.) By contrast, readers who attack The Times from the left - and there are plenty - generally confine their complaints to the paper's coverage of electoral politics...

As the chairman of Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, and subsequently as the chief economist of the World Bank during the East Asian financial crisis, Joseph Sitglitz was deeply involved in many of the economic-policy debates of the past ten years. What did this experience tell him? That much of what we think we know about the prosperity of the 1990s is wrong. Here is a revised history of the decade, by the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in EconomicsFull Article

Neither increases in government subsidies to corn-based ethanol fuel nor hikes in the price of petroleum can overcome what one Cornell agricultural scientist calls a fundamental input-yield problem: It takes more energy to make ethanol from grain than the combustion of ethanol produces. The Rest of the Story