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March 12, 2020

Thousands gather in Venezuela to protest Nicolás Maduro’s government

With coronavirus understandably being the focus of most people’s thoughts these days, it’s not surprising that other important events might escape our attention. Consider, for example, the fact that tens of thousands of Venezuelans took to the streets on March 10 this week in their nation’s capital, Caracas, as well as other cities to demand an end to the Chavista dictatorship of President Nicolás Maduro which has driven the country into an economic black hole from which it shows no signs of emerging. Continue Reading...
March 12, 2020

Why culture matters for the economy

This article first appeared on February 24, 2020, in Law & Liberty, a project of Liberty Fund, Inc., and was republished with permission.   In many peoples’ minds, economics and economists remain locked in a world of homo economicus—the ultimate pleasure-calculator who seeks only to maximize personal satisfaction from the consumption of goods and services and whose occasional displays of seemingly altruistic behavior really only function as a means of self-satisfaction. Continue Reading...
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...
John Foster Dulles and Dwight Eisenhower