Michael Matheson Miller is a Senior Research Fellow at the Acton Institute
Posts by Michael Matheson Miller
August 28, 2019
I have been thinking a lot about all of the invisible things around us, important foundational things that we take for granted. Because they don’t immediately manifest themselves to our attention we can forget about them if we are not careful.
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July 31, 2019
One of my favorite contemporary writers is Theodore Dalrymple, whose essays I first discovered in The New Criterion about 20 years ago. He wrote that one of
his favorite writers, who also had a pen name, was the essayist and critic Simon Leys who died in 2014.
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July 31, 2019
Reuters reported today that a large portion of US farm aid went to the wealthiest farmers and advocacy group.
More than half of the Trump administration’s $8.4 billion in trade aid payments to U.S.
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July 30, 2019
Aristotle asked what made the good life? Was it pleasure, material wealth, honor, or virtue?
He argued that while pleasure, wealth, and honor were a part of a good life and human happiness, they could not constitute it.
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July 12, 2019
Those of us who deal with ideas can often throw words around without being sufficiently careful about their meaning or attentive to their impact. We can be tempted to use terms to make a splash or win an argument at the expense of complexity.
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June 28, 2019
Lord Acton famously wrote that “liberty is the delicate fruit of a mature civilization.”
Liberty, Acton argued was rare and required constant attention to be maintained. As many have noted, one of the challenges with political liberty is that it creates the conditions for its own demise from within.
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June 28, 2019
At the center of the economy are human persons.
Economics must first be a human discipline before it can be a technical one. One of the essential characteristics of the human person is that we are social beings.
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June 26, 2019
In his must-read book,
The Quest for Community, Robert Nisbet discusses the relationship of community and authority.
Communities provide human connection and sense of belonging, but they also come with limitations.
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June 17, 2019
There are many reasons to critique business these days. From crony capitalist practices to surveillance capitalism and data collection, from abuse of the environment for short term profits to siding with the fashionable for short term praise at the expense of religious freedom and long term cultural health.
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May 30, 2019
Here is a piece I wrote for Law and Liberty on 5 Insights that Christianity Brings to Politics
The relationship between Christianity and politics is a complex one. The Church has played a mixed role in the history of political liberty to be sure.
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