While seeing is believing, being is best. Being who you are is a lifetime’s work. This has been in the forefront of my mind this past month, as each week I’ve been turning out reading lists on natural law, how to think like an economist, and how to think and talk about politics. Continue Reading...
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March 11, 2020
Acton Line podcast redux: Samuel Gregg on the life and impact of Michael Novak
It’s now been three years since Michael Novak passed away. Novak was a Roman Catholic theologian, philosopher, and author, and was a powerful defender of human liberty. In this episode, Acton’s Samuel Gregg shares Novak’s history, starting with his time on the Left in the 1960s and ’70s and recounting his gradual shift toward conservative thought that culminated in the publication of his 1982 masterwork, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. Continue Reading...
March 10, 2020
William Barr on how to resist ‘soft despotism’
Throughout the recent battle for the Democratic presidential nomination, the party’s drift from liberalism to progressivism has become abundantly clear, aptly representing our growing cultural divide between ordered liberty and what Alexis de Tocqueville famously called “soft despotism.” Continue Reading...
March 10, 2020
John Foster Dulles, the Cold War architect
John Foster Dulles was Dwight D. Eisenhower’s secretary of state from 1953 to 1959. In the tense, early years of Cold War politics, Dulles pursued a foreign policy designed to isolate the Soviet Union and undermine the spread of Communism. Continue Reading...
March 06, 2020
Bernie Sanders’ pagan view of charity
Bernie Sanders holds a pagan view of charity. I mean that not in a pejorative but in a denotative sense: Sanders’ preference for government programs over private philanthropy echoes that of ancient pagan rulers. Continue Reading...
March 06, 2020
The Green New Deal sits on a throne of lies
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez intended the Green New Deal to cement her position as the intellectual leader of the democratic socialist movement, but even passing scrutiny caused the $93 trillion proposal to fade into obscurity. Continue Reading...
March 05, 2020
Bloomberg and Sanders are both wrong about money in politics
Super Tuesday – the single day in the U.S. presidential primaries with the most delegates at stake – has come and gone, and so have quite a few presidential candidates.
Former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) both dropped out before Tuesday and endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden. Continue Reading...
March 05, 2020
Acton Line podcast: The biggest problems of national conservatism
In recent years, a rift has opened within American conservatism, a series of divisions animated in part by the 2016 presidential election and also by a right concern with an increasingly progressive culture. Continue Reading...
March 04, 2020
As it turns out, Lake Erie does not have ‘rights’
Last week, a federal district court judge in Ohio declared that the city of Toledo’s move to establish a Lake Erie Bill of Rights, or LEBOR, was invalid. Judge Jack Zouhary put it this way:
Frustrated by the status quo, LEBOR supporters knocked on doors, engaged their fellow citizens, and used the democratic process to pursue a well-intentioned goal: the protection of Lake Erie. Continue Reading...
March 04, 2020
Hubris old and new
Adam MacLeod, a law professor at Faulkner University in Alabama, wrote a couple of years ago in the New Boston Post of “chronological snobbery,” the idea that “moral knowledge progresses inevitably, such that later generations are morally and intellectually superior to earlier generations, and that the older the source the more morally suspect that source is.” Continue Reading...