Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Economics

April 07, 2025

There Is No ‘Just Tariff’

James Hartley provided a thought-provoking and insightful discussion of tariffs at a recent Acton Lecture Series event. Far be it from me to say he is completely off-base when it comes to tariffs. Continue Reading...
February 21, 2025

The Tattered History of Tariffs

Much like bell-bottom jeans, tariffs are making a comeback. President Trump imposed tariffs on about $380 billion in products in his first term. The Biden administration kept most of those tariffs, then expanded them for China-made goods, including computer chips, steel, and aluminum—and quadrupled tariffs, from 25% to 100%, on electric vehicles(EVs). Continue Reading...
February 11, 2025

Reflecting the Mind of God in Mere Economics

“The fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spanish Scholastics … correctly reasoned that God was not going to leave the social world a chaotic mess. They recognized a ‘humane science’ reflecting the mind of God while rendering the social world intelligible. Continue Reading...
December 03, 2024

The Long Financial Shadow of 2008

If you ask most people today what caused the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent “Great Recession,” my suspicion is that the answer would be something like “untrammeled and unregulated financial markets.” Continue Reading...
November 06, 2024

Why Are Some Countries Still Poor?

This year’s Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences has been awarded to Daron Acemoglu (MIT), Simon Johnson (MIT), and James A. Robinson (U of Chicago) for their work investigating why some countries flourish while others don’t. Continue Reading...
September 26, 2024

Creativity and the Entrepreneurial Promise of Italy

Any country not continually innovating, striving to create better material and civil conditions for the next generation, runs the risk of becoming economically impotent, politically irrelevant, and culturally ossified. This was the main issue discussed at this year’s Communion and Liberation meeting in Rimini, Italy. Continue Reading...
September 04, 2024

The Road to Serfdom at 80

F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) is often portrayed as a mid-20th-century economist’s restatement of a 19th-century case for unreconstructed laissez-faire economics. Anyone who has read the text, however, knows that this is a serious misrepresentation of Hayek’s most famous book. Continue Reading...