Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Economics

March 11, 2015

Peace and Provision at a Pizza Shop

Rosa’s Fresh Pizza in Philadelphia has now given away more than 10,000 slices of pizza, using a unique “pay-it-forward” system where “customers can pre-purchase $1 slices for those in need.” The story is inspiring on a number of levels, illuminating the power of business to channel the best of humanity toward meeting complex needs in new and unexpected ways, often quite spontaneously. Continue Reading...
March 05, 2015

Hernando de Soto: Property Rights, Not Just Capitalism

The work of Hernando de Soto has been followed closely for years at Acton and more recently at PovertyCure. See the 2001 interview “The Poor are the Solution, Not the Problem” in Religion & Liberty and a short film clip of de Soto talking about property rights and rule of law at PovertyCure. Continue Reading...
March 04, 2015

Strong Opinions, Weak Statistics And Middle-Class Economics

Is the middle-class economically stagnant? And is “middle-class” a misnomer? Should we really be talking about the bottom of the economic pile? After all, isn’t the 1% controlling everything? Cato Institute Senior Fellow Alan Reynolds says the government’s claim of middle-class stagnation is based on faulty statistics. Continue Reading...
February 27, 2015

The Heresy of Corporation Theology

What makes a company great? To find the answer, Jim Collins’s 21-person research team (at his management research firm) spent five years reading and coding 6,000 articles, generating more than 2,000 pages of interview transcripts, and creating 384 megabytes of computer data. Continue Reading...
February 27, 2015

Net Neutrality News & Roundup

Yesterday the FCC reclassified Internet Service Providers (ISPs) as a telecommunications service under Title II of the Communications Act, with additional provisions from Title III and Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Continue Reading...
February 18, 2015

How U.S. Farm Subsidies Hurt the Global Poor

In the following clip from the PovertyCure series, Doug Seebeck explains how U.S. agricultural subsidies have significant negative consequences both at home and abroad — misaligning human action, distorting market signals, and diminishing opportunities for the least of these. Continue Reading...
February 17, 2015

New Report: Orthodox Monastic Communities in the United States

The Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of North and Central America has published a new report on Orthodox Monastic Communities in the United States (here). The report contains a lot of great information (“great” for nerds like me, anyway), including a whole section entitled, “‘Monastic Economy:’ Ownership of Property and Sources of Income in US Orthodox Monasteries.” Continue Reading...