Prof·it /ˈpräfit/ noun. A financial gain, especially the difference between the amount earned and the amount spent in buying, operating, or producing something.

The importance of profiting from one’s efforts ought to be an easy concept to embrace. It is why humans no longer live in caves. If an endeavor—any endeavor—produces more value than it consumes, it will not only pay for itself, but create the means for growth. In contrast, endeavors that persistently generate losses are destined to wither and die.

Africa has long been a place where charity goes to die. Developed countries have been pumping charity into Africa for as long as photos of starving children have been used to capture our sympathy. Tragically, most of this aid has been wasted, either stolen by corrupt local politicians or handed out in a way that traps people in a state of dependency that only generates more need for aid. The result? A continent mired in poverty, where economic growth seems an elusive goal.

To read the rest of this column click here.

What do polar bears, orangutans, the Walt Disney Company, Cheetos, recycled fundraising schemes, and corporate shakedowns have in common? It’s just another day on the social activism front.

Skillful fundraisers have long used charismatic megafauna–cool, cute, cuddly creatures whose pictures make you go squishy inside–to collect money from donors concerned about the environment who want to feel like they are doing something. Nothing wrong with that—voluntarism is a great American tradition and we all have our pet causes. But when the money is used to break the law in order to harass image-conscious corporations into making payoffs or driving their suppliers out of business, it stops being fun and games.

To read the rest of the column click here.

Compare this to what happens every time a stock market, currency, or national economy crashes. Teams of bankers, economists, and technocrats are dispatched by those in power—to deny responsibility and affix blame on rival bankers, economists, and technocrats. Financial engineers who examine the wreckage rarely agree on what caused the problem, and even when they do politicians ignore their recommendations if they find them unpalatable. Painfully acquired knowledge is usually dismissed because “this time is different.”

To read the rest of the column click here.

Every one of these items has been in the news lately, skirmishes in the perpetual culture war that defines too much of contemporary politics. (I’m sure you can add a dozen more.) Each has engendered legal action, legislative wrangling, kitchen table debate, and bloviating punditry.

Where do you draw the line, and why? More importantly, how do we draw the line for others, and by what right?

To read the rest of the column click here.

Join Crony Chronicles and students across the country in a tweet-up on Tuesday 12:30pm ET with entrepreneur and Forbes columnist @BillFrezza! #crony

Flight delays are piling up around the country because air traffic controllers are being forced to take days off due to budget cuts.

Those automatic cuts came as a result of the so-called sequester, when Congress could not reach a deal to trim deficit spending.

To watch Bill’s interview on this subject, click here.

The idea that government welfare programs could eliminate poverty, rather than temporarily alleviate its worst impacts during hard times, took root during Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiative. From modest beginnings, a panoply of federal welfare programs expanded and multiplied to the point where they now consume one-sixth of the federal budget—some $588 billion last year, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

To read the rest of the column click here.

A debate is raging among free market advocates regarding the proper posture to take with respect to Too Big to Fail (TBTF) banks. This has become an increasingly important issue as the financial sector has grown to take up an unprecedented share of our economy. While cleaving to tried-and-true libertarian defenses of finance as vital to the economy, some of us fear that the machinations of the crony capitalists running the TBTF banks—in cahoots with their allies in the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve—will result in not only another global financial collapse, but a populist anti-capitalist backlash that could destroy what’s left of our free enterprise system.

But before we can tackle this problem, we must figure out what is really going on. In all public policy debates, perceptions matter, and public perceptions are often driven by the leading narratives that gain cultural acceptance. Let’s look at what these are.

To read the rest of the column click here.

The controversy surrounding the $400-million Encode project’s dubious public relations claims surrounding the function of ‘junk DNA’ and the Battelle Institute’s defense of the $3-billion Human Genome Project (HGP) as an economic miracle make this a good time to examine President Obama’s recent attempt to bring more of American science under centralized direction and control.

Well-established and politically connected scientists are salivating over the $100 million down payment proposed by the president this week for his BRAIN Initiative, (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, previously referred to as the Brain Activity Map project). No surprised here given the $2 billion promised in his State of the Union address. But young scientists not yet aboard the federal gravy train should recognize this as a threat to their future as independent researchers.

To read the rest of the column click here.

Alumni need to take a practical approach to ensuring safety

I’ve been a Chi Phi since a week after I arrived on campus in the fall of 1972. I can honestly say that ever since then Chi Phi has been the central institution of my life. It is the source of my greatest friendships, my strength in times of trouble, the avenue through which I’ve enjoyed a cornucopia of inter-generational relationships, and the organization to which I give the most back, currently taking my turn to serve as president of our house corporation.

Because the Greek system at MIT is so strong, I know that I’m not unique in any of this. But since some of the fraternities are less well supported by their alumni than others—and because undergraduates at even well supported groups sometimes forget what role we play—I thought I’d share a few thoughts about some of the responsibilities a fraternity house corporation carries in keeping their chapters healthy, thriving, and out of trouble.

To read the rest of this column click here.

GDP: Gross Distorted Product? BLS: Bureau of Lying Statistics?

Rick Santelli & Bill Frezza tell it like it is. To watch the video click here.

Let’s face it. We Baby Boomers made a total hash of democracy, hoisting it aboard a runaway train of unfunded entitlement spending with the throttles on full. Then, rather than address the problem, we got the engineer and conductor brawling over how much the first class passengers should tip the porter. But despite the mess we made, we sure have held on to one important skill. Man, are we good at suckering the young into impoverishing themselves to pay for our folly.

Courtesy TobyToons

To read the rest of the column click here.

Concerned scientists on the dole reacted with fury when an amendment to the Continuing Appropriations Act of 2013, offered by spending scold Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla), passed the Senate. It will limit the National Science Foundation’s ability to award political science grants to only those projects directly related to national security or the economic interests of the United States. “The amendment makes all scientific research vulnerable to the whims of political pressure,” shrieked the American Political Science Association in a press release.

The horror! Imagine what would happen if entrenched technocrats and the tenured professors they support were actually held accountable by the elected representatives of the taxpayers who pay their bills?

TO read the rest of the column click here.

As a chronic prognosticator of doom, I’m often asked, “Do you heed your own warnings?” I sure didn’t last time the stock market crashed. Despite forecasting the dot-com collapse in November 1999 (in an article titled, “Living in the Shadow of Vesuvius, The Dotcom Economy Parties On”) I froze like a deer in the headlights as I watched $2 million in newly earned wealth evaporate before my eyes, all the while chanting, “It’ll come back, it’ll come back!”

Never again. This time I am making contingency plans. Perhaps these will motivate you to make your own, if the recent unpleasantness in Cyprus isn’t reason enough.

To read the rest of the column click here.

There are not many things on which Harvard professor-turned-Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and I agree. Yet, to her credit she has been sounding the alarm about the threat that “Too Big To Fail” (TBTF) banks represent to our economy. However, that is where our agreement ends. Like most progressives, she vastly overestimates the efficacy and wisdom of regulatory bodies that invariably become captive to the corporations they are supposed to regulate as that great revolving door refreshes the influence of crony capitalists regardless of who is voted into office.

In fact, the regulatory policies she proposes would increase the TBTF behemoths’ threat to the economy by further entrenching the alliance of Wall Street bankers, the Fed, the Treasury Department, the White House, and Congressional enablers from both parties that brought us to this point. Until we figure out how to unravel this single biggest threat to our prosperity, the best we can hope for the next time the TBTF house of cards comes tumbling down is for the ensuing violence and privation to be contained long enough to avoid the emergence of totalitarian regimes both here and around the world.

To read the rest of the column click here.

Most people don’t give much thought to how our cultural institutions shape our world view, and the impact this has on politics, but I’m one of those who do. This can make it problematic to attend a modern art museum with me, a task my wife, a genuine and sophisticated art lover, approaches with a mixture of caution and bravado. While I’ve learned to stifle my public outbursts and gesticulations, her uncanny ability to read my mind invariably generates a burst of frisson best resolved by leaving the museum to take her to an expensive lunch.

To read the rest of the column click here.

Lots of fun from the heart of the vast right wing conspiracy – please enjoy my ten minute video segment on The Blaze with Andrew Wilkow discussing the sequester, the Dems failed PR strategy, dysfunctional Republicans, my Mom, and the bleating goat.

To watch the video click here.

Reporting from the heart of the vast right wing conspiracy, surrounded by Tea Party luminaries like Jim DeMint, Michelle Malkin, and James O’Keefe, sponsored by the Charles Koch Institute to warn of the evils of crony capitalism, and extending a helping hand from Yankee libertarians, your intrepid Huffington Post contributor files this alarming report from the Conservative Leadership Conference in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Freedom is on the march.

To read the rest of this column click here.

President Obama has gone all-in trying to get Republicans to blink and serve up another round of tax increases in lieu of the looming spending sequester. Eschewing talks with Congress or any pretense of leadership, he is instead flying around the country burning $180,000 an hour on Air Force One laying out a parade of horribles that will descend upon us if the growth of federal spending were reduced by one iota.

Why is he doing this? Because the mainstream media are lapping it up. Poisoned meat coming to grocery shelves near you! Air traffic grinds to a screeching halt! Fires, murder, and mayhem in the streets as first responders are laid off! No visits to the Washington Monument! OK, it all makes for good copy.

But what would happen to the media narrative if the Republicans don’t collapse into a puddle of cowardice and the sequester were to actually stick?

To read the rest of the column click here.

My interview with Mark Martin and Wendy Griffith on the impact of the looming sequester. Click here for the video, I come in at the 2:20 mark.

One of the most persistent beliefs among proponents of alternative energy is that we are in danger of running out of fossil fuels. This economic theory, known as “Peak Oil,” was first articulated by geophysicist M. King Hubbert in 1956. It states that for any geographic region—indeed, for the world as a whole—the extraction of fossil fuels follows a bell-shaped curve that eventually hits a maximum and then must inevitably decline. It seems like a commonsensical, compelling theory—except for a few small problems. It ignores the role economics plays in shaping supply and demand, it completely discounts the power of human ingenuity to come up with novel ways to solve problems, and it has been repeatedly refuted by the facts.

To read the rest of the column click here.

Should a miracle occur and the pending sequester actually kick in to reduce the growth of federal spending—said slowdown derided as “draconian budget cuts” even as actual spending rises—the political playing field will shift to new ground. The moment big-spending Democrats wrap up their “save us from sequester” theatrics and dump this Obama-originated bipartisan idea squarely onto the Republicans’ laps, they will pivot to a new narrative. After four years of justifying the abysmal Obama economic recovery using the mantra, “It could have been worse!” they will shift the narrative, aided by the mainstream media, to “It’s all their fault!”

To read the rest of the column click here.

What was the National Cancer Institute (NCI) thinking when it decided to spend $678,952 to fund a notorious political activist to conduct a “scientific” research study designed to prove that the Tea Party was an invention of Big Tobacco and the Koch brothers, rather than a grassroots movement of disenfranchised Americans fed up with both the Republican and Democratic parties? Is the NCI so flush with taxpayer cash and so close to banishing cancer that it can indulge in petty partisan politics disguised as peer-reviewed science? Members of Congress on the hunt for ineffective discretionary spending programs to cut should take notice.

To read the rest of the column column click here.

Rejoice, one of Obamacare’s great mysteries has been solved: Namely, the question of how we are going to provide free medical care to 30 million uninsured Americans as we simultaneously reduce doctors’ pay, transforming them from 80-hour-a-week independent professionals into 40-hour-a-week salaried employees of consolidated regional healthcare conglomerates.

Inspired by the firm belief that we are all equal, President Barack Obama has found the answer. Retrain postal workers to serve as primary health care providers. In a pilot program to begin once mail delivery is reduced to five days a week, postal workers will fill in for doctors and nurses every Saturday working from behind the same counters they’ve used to delight customers for generations.

To read the rest of the column click here.

Atheists such as myself look at the world and wonder, Why does religion have such power over men’s minds—power that has been used for both good and evil? Those of us who refuse to dismiss the phenomenon as a form of madness continue to search for a common thread that can both explain the beliefs and behaviors we observe and maybe–just maybe–offer something positive to non-believers.

What I’ve distilled from this exercise over the past four decades is something many call spirituality, which I define as the satisfaction of our yearning for a transcendent intimacy that connects us with our fellow man while reconciling us to the reality of our own impermanent existence.

To read the rest of the column click here.

Ayn Rand fans will be pleased to know that filming for the third installment of the Atlas Shrugged trilogy was greenlighted this past weekend. Thanks to a persistent publicist, I caught up with producer John Aglialoro, who shared a few stories about the challenges of bringing Rand’s epic novel to the screen. John also revealed a controversial surprise he is planning for the film, which is sure to roil Ayn Rand’s legions of acolytes monitoring the work for doctrinal purity.

To read the rest of the column click here.

CNBC’s Rick Santelli talks with Bill Frezza about why Republicans should back a plan to cut defense spending.

To watch video click here.

Here are a few clips from my appearance on the Wilkow show Friday night participating in a small business roundtable.

Click here and here.

For those who believe we can still recover from our fiscal and economic death spiral, the time for hard choices has come. I’m talking to you, staunch Republican defenders of the military-industrial complex. I am begging you to rethink your priorities. What good will it do to preserve a military second to none if there is nothing left worth defending?

Through a century of wars, both cold and hot, America’s brave men and women in uniform successfully protected us from the external threats of fascism and communism. But the greatest threats facing America today don’t come from foreign enemies. They come from within.

To read the rest of the column click here.

Question: When does a government agency chartered with collecting and disseminating economic data morph into a propaganda ministry?

Answer: When it allows unaccountable bureaucrats answerable only to the politicians who appoint them to make arbitrary “adjustments” that obscure the reporting of the underlying trends the data are supposed to show.

There once was a time when people tended to take Uncle Sam’s pronouncements regarding unemployment, housing starts, inflation, and countless other economic figures at face value. In the days before the blogosphere we simply didn’t have much choice. If the government said something was so and a tight circle of leading newspaper and TV news editors concurred, it was treated as gospel. Rarely did anyone dig further, even if they were so inclined.

To read more click here.

It is often said that to get a glimpse of our future we should study the lessons of the past. Or we can observe the fate of those marching a few steps ahead of us down a road we seem determined to travel. Take Greece. Long hailed as the birthplace of democracy, it is now a poster child for excessive government spending, bloated public sector unions, unfunded entitlements, and stultifying regulations.  What happens when the politicians frantically trying to stave off economic collapse finally run out of other people’s money?

To read the rest of the column click here.

As President Barack Obama begins his second term, democratically returned to office by a majority of Americans who seem to buy what he is selling, it would profit us to pause a moment and examine the discrepancies between the vision he expounded in his inaugural address and the economic reality that surrounds us. This leads to a pivotal question: What, exactly, is the underlying purpose of Obamanomics, and how would we know?

To read the rest of the column click here.

                                           courtesy TobyToons.

Only Mel Brooks had the comic genius to pull off an iconic movie scene that has become a staple of hardball negotiating strategies. And only the President and Congress of the United States could be dysfunctional enough to demonstrate that life really does imitate art, leaving the nation agog at the debt ceiling theatrics playing out on the Washington stage. You should be laughing if you’re not already crying.

As President Obama steps up to the inaugural podium to once again take an oath to protect and defend a Constitution that has long become nothing but a minor irritant to those seeking to expand federal power, his words paint a picture of a government on autopilot. Out of control, running low on fuel, leaderless and off course, rival politicians are engaged in a desperate battle not to solve our fiscal problems but to affix blame for a disaster caused by both parties.

To read the rest of the column click here.

Whenever you see a parade outside, you can count on politicians to jump out in front of it to demonstrate their leadership. Even better is when two parades cross paths, shouting opposing slogans that can be turned into campaign dollars at the drop of a sound bite. And best of all, if the issue they are shouting about is unlikely ever to be “solved,” you have the closest thing to a political annuity yet invented.

Like many culture-war issues, attitudes about gun control pretty much evenly divide the electorate. As the political debate gets louder and nastier, it sucks all the air out of the news cycle, leaving other issues crying for attention. Now, if only the country’s looming bankruptcy could ignite that kind of passion! Instead, the runaway spending train continues hurtling down the tracks, with no one willing to get out in front of it.

To read the rest of the column click here.

P.T. Barnum may have said it best, but when it comes to hornswoggling suckers, few compare to the fast-talking peddlers of utopian technologies who have become the new kings of crony capitalism. Feasting on billions in federal grants, subsidies, tax breaks, loans, and mandates, there is hardly a single uneconomic, unsustainable, cure worse than the disease, violates-the-second-law-of-thermodynamics idea left out there that hasn’t been used to separate progressives from … other people’s money.

What makes it so easy to cheat these people?

To read the rest of the column click here.

              Courtesy TobyToons

It looks like the American people have been cheated out of a precious teachable moment. Demonstrating their ability to think two moves ahead, something their Republican opponents seem incapable of, the Democratic leadership has decided to stop dancing around the threat to issue a trillion dollar coin. The Treasury Department, Saturday, finally issued a flat out denial.

Pity. Daring them to do it would have been the perfect tool to demonstrate that the emperor has no clothes.

To read the rest of the column click here.

The Skeptical Outsider

The scientific method is arguably one of the key pillars of Western Civilization. Ironically, the power of science has become so well established that it is now taken as an article of faith by politicians and voters who wouldn’t know the difference between good science and bad if it bit them in the keister. As a result, no society in history has provided as much public, private, and corporate science funding as the United States.

Now, with runaway entitlement spending forcing politicians to search for savings amidst discretionary budget items, don’t be surprised if the tide begins to turn against the hundreds of billions of dollars Uncle Sam dishes out to scientists every year.

To read the rest of the column click here.

POLITICAL CAPITAL OP/ED

A Barrage Of Legal Threats Shuts Down Whistleblower Site, Science Fraud

 By Bill Frezza

Those of us concerned about the decaying credibility of Big Science were dismayed to learn that the whistleblower site Science Fraud has been shut down due to a barrage of legal threats against its operator. With billions of dollars in federal science funding hinging on the integrity of academic researchers, and billions more in health care dollars riding on the truthfulness of pharmaceutical research claims, the industry needs more websites like this, not fewer.

To read the rest of the column click here.

Brian Sullivan and Amanda Drury hold my coat and then sic CNBC senior economics reporter Steve Liesman on me to debate my Huffington Post piece “Too-Big-To-Fail Banks Gamble With Bernanke Bucks.” Watch the video here, our segment beginning at 1:25 as I try to keep my cool, and then read the blow-by-blow rejoinder on Zero Hedge. 

Dear Steve Liesman: Here Is How The US Financial System Really Works. Click here.

Too-Big-To-Fail Banks Gamble with Bernanke Bucks

By Bill Frezza

As Congress and the President wallow in finger pointing and fiscal gridlock, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke plows ahead with his plan to disguise the country’s economic ills by carpet bombing us with freshly printed money. Aided and abetted by the gnomes in the Bureau of Labor Statistics—who are doing their best to convince us that inflation remains at historic lows—Ben has promised to conjure up $1 trillion a year out of thin air until unemployment returns to a politically acceptable 6.5 percent.

Where is all that new fiat currency going, and why haven’t we seen it show up in double digit inflation? The answer should frighten you.

To read the rest of the column click here.

POLITICAL CAPITAL OP/ED

Fiscal Justice Trumps Fiscal Sanity, Progressivism Marches On

In his first New Year’s Eve address since taking office, French President François Hollande—progressive poster boy and role model for class warriors the world over—defended his efforts to increase the top marginal income tax rate paid by France’s millionaires to 75 percent by appealing to a concept he termed Fiscal Justice. I had never heard that catchy phrase, which Hollande succinctly defined as, “Those who have the most, will always be asked for more.”

Get it? The rich will always be asked for more. You see, in politics it’s the asking that matters, not the getting. Immaterial to the concept of Fiscal Justice is whether those whom politicians ask to pay society’s mounting bills actually end up forking over their money or instead flee the country, as numerous French millionaires seem to be doing. As in all things progressive, policies are evaluated based on intentions, not results. So if raising marginal tax rates causes a decrease in tax revenue thanks to a combination of legal tax avoidance, illegal tax evasion, and voluntary emigration, so be it. Fiscal Justice has been done!

To read the rest of the column click here.

One Fiscal Crisis Averted; Another Just Beginning

This week’s fiscal cliff agreement may have averted one crisis, but the work to avoid an economic disaster is only just beginning.

Experts say the $620 billion in higher taxes due over the next decade from wealthy Americas will barely touch deficits still to come.

“We’ve got nothing on the table right now talking about fundamental problems which includes too much spending, money printing, borrowing,” Bill Frezza, a fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said.

“Rome wasn’t destroyed in a day,” he continued. “It takes a long time to run down a large economy and run down a large empire. We are on that glide path now, and there is no reason to believe this is going to change.”

Watch all of Frezza’s comments, as seen on CBN Newswatch, Jan. 2 by clicking here.

From the BBC “World Have Your Say” program broadcast on New Year’s Eve 2012, this edited 27 minute audio clip covers that portion of the program where I am a guest discussing the fiscal policy meltdown in Washington, DC and the inability of either political party to come to grips with the bankruptcy of entitlement democracy.

To listen to the program click here.

December 31, 2012

My interview on the fiscal cliff theatrics and the end of the American Century begins at 7:45 in this audio clip.

Happy New Year, and good luck.

Does Democracy Change family Dynamics?

My TV interview with Rick Santelli on Squawk on the Street. Watch here.

Twas the night before Fiscliff, when all through the House

Not a statesman was stirring, not even to grouse.

Neither bills nor amendments have much of a prayer

Since hope and change fever brought gridlock to bear.

.

The citizens pondered in fear and in dread,

What will happen if off the cliff we go instead?

Obama was sure he set Boehner a trap

To force taxes higher, give rich folks a slap.

.

When on CNN there arose such a clatter,

I sprang to the set to see what was the matter.

Wolf Blitzer was shouting, he had a news flash,

Was a formula found that would scare up fresh cash?

.

The gloom had sent stock markets gyrating so,

While the luster of gold lured all those in the know.

When, what on the six o’clock news should appear,

But a fat helicoptering cash bombardier.

.

To read the rest of the poem click here.

POLITICAL CAPITAL      OP/ED        

Forget Sharia, The New Egyptian Constitution Enshrines Socialism

By Bill Frezza

It isn’t every day that the world gets to watch the birth of a new constitutional democracy. As the political drama in the land of the Pharaohs unfolds, the Western commentariat seems totally focused on the extent to which Egypt’s new constitution will be informed by Sharia law. Alas, nary a peep can be heard about a far greater threat to Egypt’s freedom and prosperity.

The drafters of the new Egyptian constitution are blessed with having the history of two centuries of constitutional democracies to study. Evidence abounds on what works and what doesn’t, of which economic policies lead to rapid growth and which to stagnation and bankruptcy. Yet with all this information at their fingertips, the Egyptian people appear set to go to the polls to endorse … socialism.

Let’s peel back the draft Egyptian constitution and count the ways in which it paves the road to ruin.

To read the rest of the column click here.

When Will Death Spiral States Impose Exit Taxes On Fleeing Citizens?

By Bill Frezza

One of the most fascinating characteristics of government borrowing—whether at the local, state, or federal level—is that debts contracted over time are obligations tied to specific geographical boundaries but not to the citizens living there when those debts were incurred. For example, while it’s customary to say that each of the 210,000 residents of Stockton, California, are on the hook for their share of the bankrupt municipality’s estimated $700 million in unpaid bills, the day one of them picks up and moves, personal responsibility for that debt drops to zero.

Imagine if that type of tax “evasion” were eliminated. How would it change America?

To read the rest of the column click here.