Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Economics

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...
August 23, 2024

Three Cheers for Color-Blindness

Until the philosophy which holds one race Superior and another inferior Is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned Everywhere is war, me say war. —Bob Marley, “War”   In his compelling new treatise on race, The Virtue of Color-Blindness, Andre Archie laments that no one has made the “conservative case for the virtue of American color-blind principles in a manner that addresses our present turmoil.” Continue Reading...
August 06, 2024

Four Economic Lessons from Plato’s Republic

When we consider the origin of the fundamental principles of economics, most of us think of Adam Smith and his Wealth of Nations. Smith arguably pioneered economics as its own discipline with this groundbreaking articulation of the workings of the free market. Continue Reading...
July 23, 2024

Bigness: American Dream or Nightmare?

Alexander Hamilton, one of America’s Founding Fathers, envisioned a nation not just agriculturally strong but also one that proved to be an industrial powerhouse. His plan centered on a strong private sector with competitive businesses and a supportive, not restrictive, government. Continue Reading...