Politics

January 28, 2020

Churches, tax exemption, and the common good

Are churches tax exempt as a matter of privilege or right? What does tax exception cost communities and churches? Christianity Today has been hosting an interesting debate on these issues. Paul Matzko, Assistant Editor for Tech and Innovation at the CATO Institute, argued in the cover story of this month’s issue that tax exemption comes at a high a cost to the communities in which they are located: This feeling that churches don’t contribute to the common good is not uncommon in America. Continue Reading...

January 28, 2020

Will Michael Bloomberg enact ‘tikkun olam’?

Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg recently tweeted that his political program grows out of a Jewish religious teaching giving him the “responsibility” to use the government to “‘repair the world’ in the tradition of Tikkun Olam.” Continue Reading...

January 27, 2020

The flawed statistic that lets AOC inflate the number of poor Americans

The United States has experienced years of record-breaking stock markets and unmatched levels of employment. Yet Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez presents her country as a dystopia in equal parts Dickensian and Hobbesian, where the wealthy few ground the poor masses into the dust. Continue Reading...

January 23, 2020

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s crass Marxist materialism

During a Martin Luther King Day discussion with the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., made clear that she is not just a democratic socialist but a Marxian one. Evie Fordham of Fox Business has written a helpful summary of the remarks, including Ocasio-Cortez’s concise explanation of the Marxist theory of the exploitation of labor: “No one ever makes a billion dollars. Continue Reading...

January 23, 2020

Drucker on Christianity and the ‘roots of freedom’

This is the seventh in a series of essays on Peter Drucker’s early works. In his 1942 book, The Future of Industrial Man, Peter Drucker pointed to the Christian anthropology of man as a promising building block for society. Continue Reading...

January 21, 2020

Bernie Sanders tweets a recipe for exacerbating the housing crisis

Note: An expanded version of this post was released as this week’s Acton Commentary. This week, Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Bernie Sanders, I-VT, tweeted the following reaction to a story from The Economist describing rising American rent payments: This is a crisis. Continue Reading...

January 17, 2020

The apocalyptic style in 21st century environmentalism

We’ve just put online the Fall 2020 issue of Religion & Liberty, which looks at environmental stewardship and current problems in conservation from a number of aspects (get over to Acton’s Facebook page to comment on the articles). Continue Reading...

January 09, 2020

How California’s new ‘gig-work’ law threatens local artists

Capitalism is routinely castigated as an enemy of the arts, with much of the criticism pointed toward monsters of profit and efficiency. Others fret over more systemic features, worried that commercialization and consumerism will inevitably detach artists from healthy creative contexts. Continue Reading...

January 09, 2020

Gertrude Himmelfarb: Teacher of the Free and Virtuous Society

Since the passing of Gertrude Himmelfarb I have been reflecting on just how much she taught me through her voluminous historical scholarship. In this week’s Acton Line Podcast I interviewed Yuval Levin, Resident Scholar and Director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at AEI, who was also her student. Continue Reading...

January 08, 2020

Tyler Cowen’s “State Capacity Libertarianism”: A Straussian Reading

On a recent episode of the excellent podcast Conversations with Tyler the economist Tyler Cowen reflected on the direction his and co-author Alex Tabarrok’s blog Marginal Revolution has taken over the last ten years: [I]n 2009 I was still experimenting in some fresh way with blogging as a new medium and what it meant. Continue Reading...

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