Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Economics

October 23, 2025

Aren’t Nobel Winners Supposed to Be Living?

We live in an amazing time. As David Kotter recently noted in The Washington Times, we have flipped “extreme global poverty” in just the past 250 years: When the USA was founded, roughly 90% of earth’s population lived in—by today’s standards—extreme poverty. Continue Reading...
August 06, 2025

Hobbesian Horrors and Walmart Wonders

Have you ever felt like the fate of the world was riding on one assignment? In the 1989 comedy Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, high school students Bill S. Preston (Alex Winter) and Ted Logan (Keanu Reeves) didn’t know it, but the fate of the world was riding on their report. Continue Reading...
June 25, 2025

The Enduring Value of Weber’s Protestant Ethic

Max Weber published two essays in 1904 and 1905 in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik that became one of the most famous books in 20th-century social science: Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismusor The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (hereafter referenced as PE). Continue Reading...
June 24, 2025

An Economist’s Summer Reading List

It’s that time of year again! Longer, warmer days hopefully bring a little more downtime for summer reading. Whether you’re reading them in a hammock or at poolside, these books are exciting and relevant and will keep your mind engaged during the dog days of summer. Continue Reading...
May 08, 2025

America’s New ‘Reshoring’ Policy: A Warning from Hungary

When Donald Trump campaigned on the grand promise to bring blue-collar manufacturing jobs back to the United States, I knew I had seen and heard this before. As a former Hungarian Member of Parliament from a small town, mainly boasting factories with assembly lines that serve car manufacturers, I had seen how this brand of campaign rhetoric serves only a short-term political interest but does not serve the country’s future. Continue Reading...
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...