Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'economics'

September 10, 2010

Samuel Gregg: Fiat Money and Public Debt

On Public Discourse, Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg looks at fiat money and how today it “represents the end of a long process of development whereby governments have used their power of legal tender to use money to pursue various policy goals.” Continue Reading...
September 07, 2010

Toward Sustainable Wealth and Profit

Today’s NYT has an op-ed by David Brooks that’s been getting good cyber-circulation, “The Gospel of Wealth.” Brooks highlights in particular Southern Baptist pastor David Platt, who is touted as the youngest mega-church leader in the country. Continue Reading...
September 01, 2010

Distributism is not Free-Market

Forgive the blunt title of this blog post, but the point needs to be made in no uncertain terms. The Zenit News Agency has interviewed John Medaille, author of Toward a Truly Free Market: A Distributist Perspective on the Role of Government, Taxes, Health Care, Deficits, and More, which calls for a direct if brief (more later, perhaps – I have yet to read the book) response from this Catholic defender of the market economy. Continue Reading...
August 18, 2010

Fair Trade and Good Intentions

A constant theme here at the Acton Institute is the idea that good intentions are not enough…they need to be connected to sound practice. In a reflection on fair trade at WORLDmag.com, Continue Reading...
August 05, 2010

Re: Broken Windows – University Funding Edition

As Kishore Jayabalan noted yesterday, the fallacy of “broken windows” is, unfortunately, ubiquitous in discussions of public finance and macroeconomics. Though we are told that government spending and public works have a stimulating effect on economic activity, rarely are the costs of such projects discussed. Continue Reading...
July 26, 2010

Re: Gregg on Gold

In a recent post Dr. Sam Gregg outlined several arguments in the case for returning to some kind of gold or commodity-based monetary system.  One of the advantages to a commodity standard, Dr. Continue Reading...
July 23, 2010

Humans are not Economic Automata

Courtesy Evangelical Outpost and the always-interesting 33 Things, here’s a video on the strangeness of the economics of incentives and punishments: The lesson here is that people in real life, body and soul, are not simple rational economic actors who respond only to material realities. Continue Reading...