Year: 2012

July 02, 2012

Feeding the Poor, Bureaucracy Style

From India comes this tragic headline: As India’s kids starve, $1.5 billion worth of grain rots How does a country have starving people while it is producing so much food that it is literally rotting from being left outside in the open? Continue Reading...
July 02, 2012

Samuel Gregg: The Prophet of Europe’s Crisis

Online today at The American Spectator is an article from Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg. The article highlights the forethought of German economist Wilhelm Röpke, who predicted Europe’s present economic downturn in the middle of the twentieth century. Continue Reading...
July 02, 2012

The Debt-ridden American Dream

Fresh out of college and full of ideals, young Americans are finding that, in this economy, the American Dream comes at a steep cost. Just ask Michelle Holshue: At 30 years old, Holshue exemplifies a key tenet of the American dream: exceeding one’s parents’ education and income. Continue Reading...
July 02, 2012

The True Social Contract

Uncontrolled public debt threatens to rupture society, says Niall Ferguson, as the older generation thrives at the expense of the young. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Edmund Burke wrote that the real social contract is not Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s contract between the sovereign and the people or “general will”, but the “partnership” between the generations. Continue Reading...
June 29, 2012

Bastiat’s Vision

This Saturday, June 30, is the 211th birthday of Frédéric Bastiat, one of the greatest political philosophers of the modern era. Considered among the founding fathers of classical liberalism, Bastiat is known for his simple and direct explanations of political and economic realities, his arguments against oppressive economic regulations and his clear and concise vision of a government of limited, enumerated powers, operating under the rule of law and unencumbered by favoritism or distributionist policies. Continue Reading...
June 29, 2012

Obamacare ruling ‘a turn to tyranny’

On the Observer blog (and picked up on Catholic Online), Antiochian Orthodox priest Fr. Hans Jacobse predicts that the Supreme Court’s Obamacare ruling will, “by the middle of the next generation” lead those who worked for this program — or ignored the threat — to be “cursed” by their own children. Continue Reading...