Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Public Policy

February 27, 2009

The Perils of Planning

Somewhere in the United States today, government officials are writing a plan that will profoundly affect other people’s lives, incomes, and property. Though it may be written with the best intentions, the plan will go horribly wrong. Continue Reading...
February 19, 2009

Bureaucracy and Institutional Evil

It’s a truism that progressive Christians emphasize the pervasiveness of structural or institutional evil, often at the expense of individual or personal sin. The structures of the world are broken and they, not individuals, are responsible for the enduring injustices in the world. Continue Reading...
February 18, 2009

Reed’s classic piece on Hoover, FDR, and the Great Depression

Brief excerpts from Lawrence Reed’s classic 1981 article on the Great Depression, published in The Freeman and now republished by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy (which I just received in the mail)… Reed divides the GD into four phases: To properly understand the events of the time, it is appropriate to view the Great Depression as not one, but four consecutive depressions rolled into one. Continue Reading...
February 10, 2009

Debunking the New Deal

It’s long been my contention that the mythology surrounding the New Deal in large swaths of the popular imagination plays an ongoing, important, and harmful role in politics and policy debate. Continue Reading...
February 06, 2009

Of Men, Mountains, and Mining

Here’s a brief report from The Environmental Report on mountain-top removal mining, and the increasing involvement of religious groups weighing in on the question. One of these groups is Christians for the Mountains. Continue Reading...
February 02, 2009

The ‘P’ Word

This guy fails the ‘anthropological Rorshach’ test: Jonathon Porritt, who chairs the government’s Sustainable Development Commission, says curbing population growth through contraception and abortion must be at the heart of policies to fight global warming. Continue Reading...
January 27, 2009

Capitalism without Bankruptcy

On the first half of today’s installment of The Diane Rehm Show, Jerry Taylor, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute got off a good line in the midst of a discussion concerning federal regulation of emission standards. Continue Reading...
January 26, 2009

Worth a Reflective Chuckle (or Two)

Government is most surely a divinely-ordained reality, and a blessing that we must celebrate. But governments realize their task when they recognize their own divinely-ordained limits. Government exists as a form of common grace to preserve the world for Christ’s coming, when the government as an order of preservation will give way to a divine monarchy (“Every knee will bow.”). Continue Reading...