Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Public Policy

June 19, 2008

The federal landlord map

A short time ago I posted a bit about the amount of land owned by the US government. My blog colleague, Jordan Ballor, located a lovely map displaying graphically the amount of land owned by the government in each state. Continue Reading...
June 18, 2008

Interventions target people, not robots

Shankar Vedantam on the problems of “social” governmental intervention, including increased moral hazard (HT: Arts and Letters Daily): While it seems like common sense to pump money into an economy that is pulling the bedcovers over its head, the problem with most social interventions is that they target not robots and machines but human beings — who regularly respond to interventions in contrarian, paradoxical and unpredictable ways. Continue Reading...
June 16, 2008

Encouraging a true culture of thrift

Picking up on themes we’ve touched on here, here, and here, last week NYT columnist David Brooks weighed in on the culture of debt in the United States. “The social norms and institutions that encouraged frugality and spending what you earn have been undermined,” he writes. Continue Reading...
June 12, 2008

Victory for government tinkering?

The WSJ reports, to the relief of the White House and Capitol Hill, no doubt: “U.S. retail sales increased in May, rising double the rate expected in a sign consumers were using stimulus payments and that the economy might not be as weak as feared.” Continue Reading...
June 12, 2008

Confusing capitalism with consumerism

Rebecca Hagelin of the Heritage Foundation picks up on my thoughts on consumerism and capitalism and expands on them helpfully in a Townhall.com column. We should all take her observations about stewardship to heart. Continue Reading...
June 10, 2008

The Pact

It might seem like ancient political history to younger readers, but once upon a time there was a Republican Speaker of the House named Newt Gingrich and a Democratic President named Bill Clinton. Continue Reading...
June 04, 2008

Budget hero

A good hump day timewaster: APM’s Budget Hero. Try to achieve the national security, efficient government, and economic stimulus badges all at the same time. I couldn’t on my first try, although I admit I was leaning much more heavily on the “efficient government” side of the ledger. Continue Reading...
June 03, 2008

Is this capitalism?

Is this supposed to be capitalism? Geoff Colvin writes that a motivating factor in the recent crash in corporate profits, as well as the sharp decline in home values, was the phenomenon that “people began to believe that the more they borrowed, the better off they would be. Continue Reading...
June 02, 2008

Warming wailing waning

Sometime Acton publications contributor and adjunct scholar Thomas Sieger Derr posts on the First Things blog under the title, “The End of the Global Warming Scare?” Derr identifies a trend that has not been ignored on this blog: increasingly vocal and widespread skepticism toward at least the most dire predictions emanating from the climate change disaster crowd. Continue Reading...