Alejandro Chafuen, Acton’s Managing Director, International, writes this morning in Forbes about the relationship between economic freedom and corruption. Transparency International released its 2019 Corruption Perceptions Index last week, and Chafuen correlates these results with countries’ rankings in the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom. Continue Reading...
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January 28, 2020
Video: E.B. White’s forgotten story about the tyranny of good intentions
E.B. White, the author of Charlotte’s Web and co-author of The Elements of Style, once wrote a story that aptly demonstrates the folly of central planning. White, a Maine farmer who wrote for The New Yorker and Harper’s, saw the story turned into an animated short, which he narrated 36 years after its publication. Continue Reading...
January 28, 2020
Churches, tax exemption, and the common good
Are churches tax exempt as a matter of privilege or right? What does tax exception cost communities and churches? Christianity Today has been hosting an interesting debate on these issues. Paul Matzko, Assistant Editor for Tech and Innovation at the CATO Institute, argued in the cover story of this month’s issue that tax exemption comes at a high a cost to the communities in which they are located:
This feeling that churches don’t contribute to the common good is not uncommon in America. Continue Reading...
January 28, 2020
Will Michael Bloomberg enact ‘tikkun olam’?
Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg recently tweeted that his political program grows out of a Jewish religious teaching giving him the “responsibility” to use the government to “‘repair the world’ in the tradition of Tikkun Olam.” Continue Reading...
January 28, 2020
Amity Shlaes proves that LBJ’s Great Society was a “nightmare”
When President Lyndon B. Johnson unveiled the plans for his Great Society initiative at the University of Michigan in 1964, he promised to usher the United States into “a new age.” Continue Reading...
January 28, 2020
How an Argentine cooperative is empowering workers and entrepreneurs
Despite the once promising election of President Mauricio Macri, Argentina’s first non-Perónist leader in 13 years, the country has largely returned to its embrace of leftist economic policies, including recently imposed capital controls and interventionist price fixing. Continue Reading...
January 27, 2020
The flawed statistic that lets AOC inflate the number of poor Americans
The United States has experienced years of record-breaking stock markets and unmatched levels of employment. Yet Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez presents her country as a dystopia in equal parts Dickensian and Hobbesian, where the wealthy few ground the poor masses into the dust. Continue Reading...
January 24, 2020
Fact facts: President Trump’s new guidance on religion and prayer in schools
When students go back to school Monday morning, they will have more protections to exercise their constitutional freedom of religion than at any time in decades. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos issued updated federal guidelines requiring public schools to respect the religious liberty of students and teachers – or lose federal funding. Continue Reading...
January 24, 2020
‘Medicare for All’ is not pro-life
President Donald Trump made history on Friday when he became the first president to address the March for Life in person. As I watched the moment unfold, I was taken aback by a poster I saw held by one of the attendees: “Medicare for All. Continue Reading...
January 23, 2020
Global wealth inequality has been falling: Report
“Economic inequality is out of control,” according to Oxfam, which releases a dire-sounding report about inequality every year on the eve of the World Economic Forum in Davos. The 2020 edition faults the supposed “dominance of neoliberal economics, which values deregulation and reduction in public spending,” and the alleged existence of “monopolies,” for “accelerating economic inequality.” Continue Reading...