China’s social credit system seeks to tie each individual’s credit rating and privileges to his support for the Communist regime. Venezuela’s socialist dictator, Nicolás Maduro, has moved to import “perhaps the creepiest tool of repression” to his own country, writes Doug Bandow in this week’s Acton Commentary. Continue Reading...
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January 08, 2020
Acton Line podcast: Remembering Gertrude Himmelfarb with Yuval Levin
On this week’s episode, we pay tribute to Gertrude Himmelfarb who passed away last Monday, December 30th, at the age of 97. Gertrude Himmelfarb was a historian and leading intellectual voice in conservatism. Continue Reading...
January 08, 2020
Tyler Cowen’s “State Capacity Libertarianism”: A Straussian Reading
On a recent episode of the excellent podcast Conversations with Tyler the economist Tyler Cowen reflected on the direction his and co-author Alex Tabarrok’s blog Marginal Revolution has taken over the last ten years:
[I]n 2009 I was still experimenting in some fresh way with blogging as a new medium and what it meant. Continue Reading...
January 08, 2020
Richard Reinsch on Rubio’s ‘materialistic’ industrial policy
Last November, my colleague Dan Hugger critiqued comments by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) about his desire for “common good capitalism” informed by Roman Catholic social teaching. Generally speaking, this is an aspiration that many at the Acton Institute share, but the specifics of what that would look like are where the real differences lie. Continue Reading...
January 08, 2020
Alejandro Chafuen in Forbes: Corruption, not globalization, is to blame for poverty
When discussing globalization, advocates of the free economy usually start by stressing the large number of people who have risen out of extreme poverty in the last three decades. This period of poverty reduction showed a parallel growth in globalization. Continue Reading...
January 08, 2020
What are the unintended consequences of economic nationalism?
Protectionist policies are, on the surface, attractive. Through state means, they promise to protect industries and workers as well as boost a country’s industrial production. But like most top-down solutions, there’s a catch; the government has a knowledge deficiency. Continue Reading...
January 07, 2020
The NHS: Lie or we’ll fine you
The former UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson once said that “the NHS is the closest thing the English people have to a religion” – but as a new story shows, it is a religion that forces people to break the Ten Commandments. Continue Reading...
January 06, 2020
Capitalism, solidarity, and work: A view from the 16th century
Legal historian Wim Decock of the KU Leuven recently published a study of the economic thought of the Flemish Jesuit Leonardus Lessius (1554–1623). Last week the National Catholic Register posted an interview with Decock about his book and Lessius’s contribution to economics. Continue Reading...
January 06, 2020
Happy New Year: The minimum wage is practically irrelevant
This morning, as Americans go to work for the first Monday of the New Year, a growing number will see their wages rise to $15 an hour or more – thanks, not to higher minimum wage laws, but to the bustling free market. Continue Reading...
January 03, 2020
The 2010s: The decade we (nearly) won the war on poverty
As a new decade begins, it bears pausing to celebrate the strides the human race has made toward eradicating poverty at home and around the world. This is doubly important, as the television retrospectives not only omit our growing prosperity, but so many people believe things are actually getting worse. Continue Reading...