Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'Social Issues'

February 14, 2014

Toward a Civilization of Love

In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, I offer this wonderful bit from Jennifer Roback Morse’s transformational book, Love and Economics, in which she observes a particular vacancy in modern discourse and policymaking: Economics has been a successful social science because it focuses on things that are true: human beings are self-interested and have the capacity for reason. Continue Reading...
January 20, 2014

Freedom Drove a Car: How Cars Helped Fight Racial Segregation

If you want to improve the material conditions of the poor and working classes, what is the one economic metric you should consider most important? For progressives the answer is income inequality, since a wide disparity between the incomes of the rich and poor is considered by them to be an obvious sign of injustice and a justification for using the force of the government to redistribute wealth. Continue Reading...
January 09, 2014

Whom Would Jesus Indebt?

Putting ourselves and our children further in debt, notes Timothy Dalrymple, is not the way to help the poor: One of the great difficulties of this issue, for Christians, is that the morality of spending and debt has been so thoroughly demagogued that it’s impossible to advocate cuts in government spending without being accused of hatred for the poor and needy. Continue Reading...
January 08, 2014

By the Numbers: The War on Poverty

Fifty years ago today, President Lyndon B. Johnson gave his 1964 State of the Union Speech, in which he launched the ‘war on poverty.’ Within four years of that speech, the Johnson administration enacted a broad ran of programs, including the the Job Corps, Upward Bound, Head Start, the Neighborhood Youth Corps, the Social Security amendments creating Medicare/Medicaid, the creation of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and over a dozen others. Continue Reading...
January 06, 2014

What is the Most Important Factor in Improving Education?

What is the key to improving education in America? Stuart Buck says that Barker Bausell’s book, Too Simple to Fail: A Case for Educational Change, provides the answer: His main thesis: that the only thing that improves education is spending more time on instruction at a given child’s level. Continue Reading...