Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'socialism'

November 12, 2009

Acton Commentary: After the Berlin Wall — the Enduring Power of Socialism

The Economist marked the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall by observing that there was “so much gained, so much to lose.” As the world celebrates the collapse of communism, who would have imagined that in less than one generation we would witness a resurgence of socialism throughout Latin America and even hear the word socialist being used to describe policies of the United States? Continue Reading...
September 02, 2009

Health Rationing for the Greater Good

[UPDATE BELOW] I discussed the creepy side of President Obama’s “science czar” here. But there are more creepy things in the cabinet. The Wall Street Journal reports that the president’s health policy adviser, Dr. Continue Reading...
August 18, 2009

Socialism in America

A great deal has been made in recent weeks about Ronald Reagan‘s critique of nationalized or socialized health care from 1961: We can go back a bit further, though, and take a look at an intriguing piece from 1848, a dialogue on socialism and the French Revolution and the relationship of socialism to democracy, which includes Alexis de Tocqueville‘s critique of socialism in general. Continue Reading...
August 04, 2009

Money, Greed and God at NRO

“We talk about what caused the financial crisis, whether ‘greed is good,’ and if ‘it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.’ Continue Reading...
July 29, 2009

Five Simple Arguments Against Government Healthcare

The argument from federalism: One of the great benefits of federalism is that the states can act as the laboratories of democracy. If a new public policy is tried in the states and works (as happened with welfare reform in Michigan and Wisconsin), then a similar program has a good chance of succeeding at the national level. Continue Reading...
July 28, 2009

The Healthcare Debate’s False Premise

Everybody realizes that the current healthcare system in the United States has problems. Unfortunately, much of the discussion about what to do rests on a false premise. The argument goes something like this: Our current free market system is not working: health care costs are astronomically high, and close to 50 million people aren’t insured. Continue Reading...
July 02, 2009

Venezuela’s New Man Has No Old Rights

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez says that “the world needs a new moral architecture.” He also has a clear idea of what that morality ought to look like. Speaking at a conference on socialism in May of this year, he said that “every factory must… produce not only briquettes, steel, and aluminum, but also, above all, the new man and woman, the new society, the socialist society.” Continue Reading...
February 12, 2009

Roepke was right

In my Winter 2007 article on economic globalization for AGAIN Magazine, I quoted economist Wilhelm Roepke. (AGAIN is published by Conciliar Media Ministries, a department of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Church of North America). Continue Reading...