Samuel Gregg

Samuel Gregg is the Friedrich Hayek Chair in Economics and Economic History at the American Institute for Economic Research, an affiliate scholar at the Acton Institute, and author, most recently, of The Next American Economy: Nation, State, and Markets in an Uncertain World.

Posts by Samuel Gregg

April 25, 2019

Student debt and moral hazard: To forgive or not to forgive?

During primary elections in the United States, it’s hardly unusual for those seeking their party’s nomination to make outlandish promises that aren’t likely to be kept. Thus we saw Senator Elizabeth Warren recently outlined her plan to abolish student debt, and pay for it by levying a tax on the super-rich (however that is defined). Continue Reading...
April 11, 2019

The immortality of bureaucracies

Both The Hill and The Washington Post reported this week that the Trump Administration has decided to dismantle the Office of Personnel Management. Unless you work for the Federal Government, you are unlikely to have heard of this particular bureaucracy. Continue Reading...
April 04, 2019

A Spaniard defends Conservative Liberalism

“Conservative liberalism” isn’t a term commonly used in the United States. Indeed, to American ears, it seems positively oxymoronic. In Europe, however, it constitutes a venerable tradition of political thought and embraces figures ranging from the French thinkers Alexis de Tocqueville and Raymond Aron to economists such as the primary intellectual architect of the German economic miracle, Wilhelm Röpke, and the French monetary theorist Jacques Rueff. Continue Reading...
March 28, 2019

The state of entrepreneurship in America

Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is primarily and rightly regarded as a work of political science. But the book is also replete with economic observations. One of the most significant was Tocqueville’s astonishment at “the spirit of enterprise” that characterized much of the country. Continue Reading...
March 18, 2019

China rewrites the Bible

It’s no secret that as the Chinese economy enters a slowdown, the Chinese government has been taking an ever-more authoritarian approach towards virtually every aspect of life in the People’s Republic. Continue Reading...
March 12, 2019

Faith and liberty in Guatemala

To say that the history of Latin America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is marked by sadness and disappointment is hardly a novel insight. Whether it’s the persistence of cronyism throughout the region, the constant presence of Marxist ideology among intellectuals and in popular culture, the challenge of poverty, the crime and political violence, or the rampant populism that rears its head at regular intervals, many Latin Americans will tell you that theirs is the continent in which many things went backwards throughout the twentieth century. Continue Reading...
March 11, 2019

Elites, markets and cronyism

It’s no great secret that France is facing social upheaval and has some longstanding deep-set economic problems. Nor is it revealing to say that France’s political class is despised across the spectrum as woefully out of touch. Continue Reading...
February 19, 2019

Saint businesswoman

I often notice that whenever we talk about faith and business, the discussion is mostly about businessmen and their faith. But what about women who seek to live a life of holiness in business? Continue Reading...
February 11, 2019

Peter Jackson’s World War I film is superb

In 1909, the British scholar and later Nobel Peace Prize winner, Sir Norman Angell, published a short pamphlet entitled Europe’s Optical Illusion. Subsequently republished a year later as The Great Illusion, Angell argued that the economic cost of a mass war in the industrial capitalist world would be so great, that, if it happened at all, it would be momentary. Continue Reading...
February 07, 2019

Cronyism and conservatives

A major problem with America’s economy is what’s often called “crony capitalism” or simply “cronyism.” In other places, I’ve defined cronyism as the situation in which free markets are hollowed out and replaced by political markets. Continue Reading...