Free Republic

MILAN (Reuters) - As the official death toll from Italy’s coronavirus outbreak passes 2,500, a silent surge in fatalities in nursing homes, where dozens of patients a day are dying untested for the virus, suggests the real total may be higher.

A Conservative Case against Capitalism and Industrialism The purpose of this paper will be a critique of capitalism and industrialization which I would call capitalism’s natural offspring. The very nature of this critique will come from a profoundly Catholic and Conservative perspective. Most people who have criticized capitalism and industrialism have often done so from a left-liberal political perspective and outlook. This can be seen from the writings of individuals such as Marx and Engel, as well as from ideas such as Socialism, Communism, and various other modern liberal ideologies. However in presenting this conservative critique of capitalism and industrialism...

As a boy, my brother used to keep baseball statistics.  Pages and pages of stats, all kinds of things, stuff that today you can get online.  He also kept track of the greyhounds that raced at the local dog track, again with lots of statistics.  He didn’t bet (actually he was a lead-out who was allergic to the dogs, so he didn’t do it long), but just loved working with numbers. It is only natural that my brother got a degree in Economics.  I minored in Economics myself. Thomas Piketty has a Ph.D. in Economics, and studied Mathematics.  I...

If you've been watching the news today, you know the stock markets are plunging. The markets have only been open about four hours, but the DOW has already plunged over 300 points, update, make that over 600 points.. Everyone knows this is because Standard and Poor downgraded the credit rating of the USA from AAA to AA+. Add in the fact that they downgraded the credit of institutions such as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae for being too reliant on government (shocker!), are mulling downgrades of Britain and France, and said they might downgrade the USA again in a few...

That I know of, I have been de-friended on Facebook four times. Curiously, all four have been Christians who have objected to my view that Christians shouldn't use the government to carry out the Church's charitable duties. Interestingly, the four have been an even mix of liberal and (morally) conservative Christians. The charge seems to be that economic systems are just economic systems and Christians are free to choose from them however they please. Moral issues are different- but economic systems (so I gather) are morally neutral. Worse is that (apparently) I equate Christianity with capitalism. In this essay, I'd...

Today's G-20 economic summit conference in London is virtually guarenteed to be a ghastly pro-Big Government orgy -- a veritable Lolapalooza for Leviathan. Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan -- not to mention John Locke and Adam Smith -- are going to be spinning in their graves. Nothing is more certain than that this tour de force of politico-economic stupidity and depravity is going to come out four-square against true free enterprize, capitalism, and laissez-faire. Sadly and almost incomprehensibly, the great conclusion of today's deepest thinkers (sic) is that the "Anglo-Saxon" version of political and economic liberty has proven to be...

It is now clear that this is the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and the worst economic crisis in the last 60 years. While we are already in a severe and protracted U-shaped recession (the deluded hope of a short and shallow V-shaped contraction has evaporated), there is now a rising risk that this crisis will turn into an uglier, multiyear, L-shaped, Japanese-style stag-deflation (a deadly combination of stagnation, recession and deflation). The latest data on third-quarter 2008 gross domestic product growth (at an annual rate) around the world are even worse than the first estimate for the...

The news media are in the process of creating a great new historical myth. This is the myth that our present financial crisis is the result of economic freedom and laissez-faire capitalism...

An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense - perhaps more clearly and subtly than many consistent defenders of laissez-faire - that gold and economic freedom are inseparable, that the gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire and that each implies and requires the other. In order to understand the source of their antagonism, it is necessary first to understand the specific role of gold in a free society. Money is the common denominator of all economic transactions. It is that commodity which serves as a medium...

The latest staggering atrocity from the cloaca of business-and-finance as reported by AP at the end of last week: Pfizer Inc.'s former chief executive, Henry A. McKinnell, who was forced into early retirement in part because of investor anger about his rich retirement benefits, will get a retirement package totaling more than $180 million, a new regulatory filing shows. McKinnell's package, which the company disclosed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday, included an estimated $82.3 million in pension benefits, $77.9 million in deferred compensation and cash and stock totaling more than $20.7 million. In other...

This is Mises's 1927 review of J. M. Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire, Ideas on the Unification of Private and Social Economy (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1926), 40 pages, translated for the first time here (by Joseph Stromberg). It originally appeared as Mises, "Das Ende des Laissez-Faire, Ideen zur Verbindung von Privat- und Gemeinwirtschaft". Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft. 82(1927) 190-91. A review of a lecture given by John M. Keynes in Berlin. This text reproduces an address given by the English economist John Maynard Keynes on June 23, 1926, at the University of Berlin. It makes a...

I seldom use the words, “moral imperative,” and, when I do, they carry behind them an urgent necessity for rational individuals to respond to an imminent threat to the inalienable rights of man. In this Presidential election, however, I see a clear moral imperative to defeat the power grab of a man who would endanger the sacred liberties of every man dwelling in America, but especially of the most autonomous and industrious among us. I shall enumerate, in brief, a horrid threefold menace that a would-be Kerry administration poses to our freedoms across the board. - Kerry’s national health insurance...

Rolling Back Government: Lessons from New Zealand If we look back through history, growth in government has been a modern phenomenon. Beginning in the 1850s and lasting until the 1920s or ’30s, the government’s share of GDP in most of the world’s industrialized economies was about six percent. From that period onwards – and particularly since the 1950s – we’ve seen a massive explosion in government share of GDP, in some places as much as 35-45 percent. (In the case of Sweden, of course, it reached 65 percent, and Sweden nearly self-destructed as a result. It is now starting to...

Fascinating and thought-provoking article that highlights an overlooked problem around the world. Conservatives understand that democracy has prerequisites, and Amy Chua's work draws our attention to some situations where promoting free-market deregulation and democracy at the same time can literally be a recipe for ethnic persecution and even genocide. As Chua notes, similar dynamics exist in some parts of the USA - she uses the American-Koreans in black neighbourhoods of L.A. as an example of this dynamic where a "market dominant" minority becomes a target for racial demagogues, leading to violence (and in the end, more poverty as investment leaves)....

Imagine a country within the Western world, in which elections are rigged like in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, private enterprises are expropriated as a matter of routine, land is farmed collectively, like in the days of medieval serfdom, and every workplace has been recently mandated to hold government-approved “ideological seminars.” Sounds like Orwellian fiction? Not quite. Or an all-dominating Stalinist behemoth? Closer, but still seventy years away. This country exists today, adjacent to the prosperous liberalizing lands of New Europe. It is Belarus, and it is governed by Europe’s last despot, Alexander Lukashenko. Following its separation from the Soviet Union in 1991,...

The Betrayal of Checks and Balances The philosophy of Ayn Rand has taught me and numerous other thinkers of the new intellectual Renaissance the moral groundwork for laissez-faire capitalism as the sole economic system which fully and unequivocally recognizes the individual’s objective prerequisites to survival, his natural rights of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, and property. With slight loopholes, this was the implicit philosophy behind the founding of America, and the principal force in its first one hundred fifty years of development. Yet, in the words of Aristotle, "The least initial deviation from the truth gets multiplied later a thousandfold.”...

If Sam Waksal had read Atlas Shrugged, he may have walked free. In a memorable scene in Atlas Shrugged, Hank Rearden, a self-made steel magnate, sat, like Waksal, in a courtroom, on trial. Rearden, like Waksal,had violated the law. Rearden's crime had been to sell four thousand tons of Rearden Metal, his own creation and property, the result of ten years of his arduous labor, to a customer of his choice, in violation of a law that dictated what quantities and to whom he could sell. Rearden, like Waksal, had "cheated the law" and "broken the national regulations designed to...

For a century after the Civil War, blacks in America's South were subjected to shameful acts of oppression and violence. Deprived of voice and vote, they had no choice but to suffer mutely as they were scurrilously attacked. Two California-based lawsuits indicate that a new minority scapegoat has been thrust, disarmed and disenfranchised, into the crosshairs. No, it is not a racial, ethnic, or religious minority. In Ayn Rand's words, now validated vividly by California's legal system, America's new persecuted minority is Big Business. Consider the suit filed recently by two tobacco giants, R.J. Reynolds and Lorillard, in an attempt...

On May 31, 1819, Walt Whitman was born in West Hills, New York. Many believe that Whitman was America's greatest poet and that his Leaves of Grass is the most influential poetry volume in American literature. According to the Columbia Encyclopedia, Whitman's poetry "celebrated the freedom and dignity of the individual." But that celebration was not limited to his poetry. It is also reflected in the all-but-overlooked prose he penned during an extensive career as a journalist and editor. Anyone who writes of individual freedom must consider the role of government, and Whitman was no exception. His views were well...

Recently I have had the privilege of embarking upon a guided tour of one of Illinois Tool Works’ 600 mini-companies, a strap manufacturing plant near the company’s headquarters in Glenview, Illinois. Signode Strap, a product invented within a firm owned by ITW, is the most prevalent of its sort in the market. It is furnished of entirely recyclable materials (pop bottle remnants) into gargantuan plastic sheets that are conveyed through rollers at phenomenal temperatures of over 300 degrees Fahrenheit. I was able to observe the plastic rolled into colossal coils, then unwound again to be sliced into uniform strips, while...