Latest Posts

May 20, 2016

French Catholic Bishop Dominique Rey: ‘Thinking Outside the Box’

Yesterday in the French section of the Vatican’s newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, an exclusive interview finally appeared with the outspoken Bishop Dominique Rey of Toulon-Fréjus. Bishop Rey provided the interview when in Rome last month to speak about the current challenges to religious and economic freedom in Europe at the Acton Institute’s conference “Freedom with Justice: Rerum Novarum and the New Things of Our Time“. Continue Reading...
May 20, 2016

Explainer: What is Going on in Venezuela?

What’s going on in Venezuela? Because of high inflation and unemployment, Venezuela has the most miserable economy in the world. The country currently has an inflation rate of 180 percent, but that’s expected to increase 1,642 percent by next year. Continue Reading...
May 19, 2016

David Bentley Hart and the ‘Pelagian Criticism of Wealth’

Following up on yesterday’s post “Samuel Gregg on David Bentley Hart and Murderous Markets,” Rev. Gregory Jensen, author of the Acton book The Cure for Consumerism, observes that “Hart’s assertion that ‘the New Testament treats such wealth not merely as a spiritual danger, and not merely as a blessing that should not be misused, but as an intrinsic evil’ is simply wrong.” Continue Reading...
May 19, 2016

5 Ways Obama’s New Overtime Rule Will Harm Workers

In announcing the Obama administration’s new overtime rule (for more on this news, see this explainer), Vice President Joe Biden says companies will “face a choice” to either pay their workers for the overtime that they work, or cap the hours that their salaried workers making below $47,500 at 40 hours each work week. Continue Reading...
May 19, 2016

Explainer: Obama’s New Overtime Rule

What just happened? On May 18, the Obama administration announced the publication of a new Department of Labor rule updating and expanding overtime regulations. Why did the overtime rule change? Since the 1930s some white collar jobs (i.e., Continue Reading...
May 18, 2016

The ‘Good Food Now!’ Olive Garden Crusade

Your writer lives beyond the outskirts of Midland, Michigan, a small Midwestern town that is buoyed fortuitously by a Fortune 50 company. It’s a nifty place: Population around 50,000, a plethora of parks and bike trails, three rivers converging west of town, relatively low crime rate, and plenty of establishments of both the local and national variety in which to dine out. Continue Reading...
May 18, 2016

How Does the Economy Actually Work?

In every stage of my formal schooling – from high school to college to graduate school – I took courses in economics. Yet with all that education I struggled to understand a seemingly simple question: How does the economy actually work? Continue Reading...