Free Republic

Joe Biden was hardly the darling of the youth vote during the Democratic primaries. From the Iowa caucuses through the March 17 primaries, he won just 22 percent of the votes among those younger than 45 years old and far less among those aged 18-24. But despite his low levels of initial support and ongoing reports of a lack of enthusiasm for his candidacy, polls now show the former vice president boasting a 20+ point lead over Pres. Donald Trump among young voters. It’s little wonder why. Millennials (born 1981 to 1996) and Generation Z (born after 1996) identify or...

Of course we’re talking about the St. Louis couple who brandished firearms at “peaceful protesters” who knocked down a gate and marched through their private property. Plenty of lefties can’t believe that they haven’t been arrested yet for pointing guns at people, but as The Federalist reports, left-wing think tank president Jerry Taylor wouldn’t have waited for the police. In a now-deleted tweet, he says he would have rushed the couple, beaten their brains in, and not apologized either.

Republicans opposed to President Trump are quietly preparing to support Democratic front-runner Joe Biden, backing that could materialize in the primary as he attempts to fend off a surging Elizabeth Warren. Some Republican operatives active in Never Trump circles are discussing what form support for Biden might take and the timing. Groups such as Stand Up Republic, co-founded by prominent Never Trump Republicans Evan McMullin and Mindy Finn, could target disaffected GOP voters in key micro-battlegrounds with finely tailored advertising in a bid to boost Biden in the Democratic primary. Biden, 76, is the most likely Democrat to receive measurable...

Jerry Taylor believes he can change the minds of conservative climate skeptics. After all, he helped plant the doubts for many in the first place. He’s president of the Niskanen Center, a libertarian-leaning Washington, DC, think tank he founded in 2014. He and his colleagues there are trying to build support for the passage of an aggressive federal carbon tax, through discussions with Washington insiders, with a particular focus on Republican legislators and their staff. Lesson one: Pick the right targets Political scientists consistently find that mass opinion doesn’t drive the policy debate, so much as the other way around....

To the casual observer, the American right can appear an undifferentiated wall of denial and obstructionism on climate change, but behind the scenes there are signs of movement. A growing number of conservative leaders and intellectuals have come to terms with climate science and begun casting about for solutions. Led mainly by libertarians and libertarian-leaning economists, they've begun to coalesce behind a carbon tax, which they consider the most market-friendly of the available alternatives. Jerry Taylor, a longtime veteran of the libertarian think tank Cato Institute who recently founded his own libertarian organization, the Niskanen Center, is a vocal proponent...

On Monday, the Cato Institute published an open letter  [see below]  to the president regarding climate change. In that letter — which appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere — over 100 scientists questioned Barack Obama’s assertion that "Few challenges facing America and the world are more urgent than combating climate change. The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear."  Given that it was a big media week for those scientists not ready to cash-in their life insurance policies just yet (the New York Times’s profile of legendary physicist Freeman Dyson, who likewise is...

Price controls, however, come at a cost. Lower prices result in more demand for fuel than do higher prices. That’s why the first thing we notice about price controls is that they lead to shortages. Price to the left of the intersection of the supply-and-demand curve and you are guaranteed to vaporize whatever you are attempting to keep inexpensive. It happened in 1973 when President Nixon imposed price controls on oil — gasoline lines were the result. It happened in 2000/2001 when California Governor Gray Davis refused to lift retail price controls on electricity — blackouts soon followed. Empty shelves...