Marc Vander Maas

Posts by Marc Vander Maas

August 19, 2010

The Rebel Economist Strikes Again

It’s always nice to hear from old friends, even when said old friends are unsettling you with tales of insane government spending. When last we heard from former Acton colleague Michelle McAdoo here on the PowerBlog, she was taking Washington by storm with her proposal for an “alternative stimulus.” Continue Reading...
July 08, 2010

Acton Media Alert: Rev. Robert A. Sirico Reports From China

Acton President Rev. Robert A. Sirico took to the airwaves on the Great Voice of the Great Lakes this morning, joining host Frank Beckmann on News/Talk 760 WJR in Detroit to talk about an event he will be speaking at in the Motor City next week, and also shedding some light on the current state of affairs in China, where he is currently traveling; audio of the segment is available via the audio player below. Continue Reading...
July 07, 2010

Keynes vs. Hayek: Still the Main Event

Via the Volokh Conspiracy: Mario Rizzo and Gerald O’Driscoll point to dueling letters to the editor from 1932 in The London Times by John Maynard Keynes and F. A. Hayek on whether government spending can help cure contemporary economic woes. Continue Reading...
May 13, 2010

Digging in to the crimes of communism

Having recently finished reading Jean-François Revel’s Last Exit to Utopia – in which he excoriates leftist intellectuals for ignoring the crimes of communist totalitarianism and their efforts to resurrect the deadly ideology – and having just read a few more chapters of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago over lunch, it seems providential that I would stumble across this article at City Journal on the failure of researchers to seriously dig into the now-available archives of the Soviet Union: Pavel Stroilov, a Russian exile in London, has on his computer 50,000 unpublished, untranslated, top-secret Kremlin documents, mostly dating from the close of the Cold War. Continue Reading...
April 30, 2010

Last Exit To Utopia

U·to·pi·a [yoo-toh-pee-uh]- noun – an imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect. The word was first used in the book Utopia (1516) by Sir Thomas More. The opposite of dystopia. Continue Reading...
April 22, 2010

Acton Media Alert: Rev. Robert A. Sirico and Kishore Jayabalan on the Fifth Anniversary of Benedict XVI’s Election

Acton President Rev. Robert A. Sirico and Kishore Jayabalan, the Director of Acton’s Rome office, joined host Al Kresta on Kresta in the Afternoon on Friday along with another guest to discuss the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI as the world marks the fifth anniversary of his elevation to the papacy; audio of the segment is available via the audio player below. Continue Reading...
April 12, 2010

Finding Out What’s In The Health Care Bill is Fun!

Remember when Nancy Pelosi said that the House needed to pass the health care reform legislation so we could find out what was in it? Well, it turns out that she might have done Congress a big favor by slowing things down and allowing her House members to figure out what was in the bill before passing it. Continue Reading...