Dan Hugger is Librarian and Research Associate at the Acton Institute.
Posts by Dan Hugger
February 21, 2020
Everyone knows that there is a difference between knowing about something and knowing how to do something. The first is a superficial way of knowing, not a bad way to begin, but it is no substitute for the mastery which comes by integrating knowledge into experience.
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February 13, 2020
One of the occupational hazards of being a librarian is that people are always asking you for book recommendations. The truth is that recommending books is more difficult than it seems.
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January 28, 2020
Are churches tax exempt as a matter of privilege or right? What does tax exception cost communities and churches?
Christianity Today has been hosting an interesting debate on these issues. Paul Matzko, Assistant Editor for Tech and Innovation at the CATO Institute, argued in the cover story of this month’s issue that tax exemption comes at a high a cost to the communities in which they are located:
This feeling that churches don’t contribute to the common good is not uncommon in America.
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January 23, 2020
During a Martin Luther King Day discussion with the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., made clear that she is not just a democratic socialist but a Marxian one. Evie Fordham of Fox Business has written a helpful summary of the remarks, including Ocasio-Cortez’s concise explanation of the Marxist theory of the exploitation of labor:
“No one ever makes a billion dollars.
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January 21, 2020
Note: An expanded version of this post was released as this week’s Acton Commentary.
This week, Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Bernie Sanders, I-VT, tweeted the following reaction to a story from
The Economist describing rising American rent payments:
This is a crisis.
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January 20, 2020
Book sales data is hard to come by. Publishers keep their sales numbers close to their chest. The information is valuable. It shapes which authors, designers and editors publishers cultivate as well as which topics, genres and formats they invest in.
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January 20, 2020
Last week I wrote about the basic economic illiteracy behind of Oren Cass’s case for industrial policy. So basic were the mistakes that I thought perhaps I had misread Cass’s argument.
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January 15, 2020
Oren Cass, author of
The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America, has written a deeply confused response to Samuel Gregg’s essay ‘How Economic Nationalism Hurts Nations.’
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January 13, 2020
Last week David Deaval, Visiting Professor at the University of St. Thomas and 2013 Novak Award winner, wrote a very thoughtful essay on Fredrich Hayek, the question of social justice, and Catholic social teaching at the
Imaginative Conservative.
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January 09, 2020
Since the passing of Gertrude Himmelfarb I have been reflecting on just how much she taught me through her voluminous historical scholarship. In this week’s Acton Line Podcast I interviewed Yuval Levin, Resident Scholar and Director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at AEI, who was also her student.
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