Acton Institute Powerblog

Promoting free societies characterized by liberty & religious principles

Report: Economic experts blast revised HHS mandate

On Jan. 20, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius ordered most employers and insurers to provide contraceptives, sterilization, and abortifacient drugs (the “morning after” pill) free of charge under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Continue Reading...

From Her to Here: Can Tech Cure Loneliness?

Recently, Sam Altman announced that OpenAI is considering allowing more personal—and even erotic—content for adult users, which reignited a broader conversation about the future of artificial intelligence. This might remind you of Her, the 2013 film in which a lonely man falls in love with his operating system. Continue Reading...

Live Not by Lies Is More than a Movie

Angel Studios is a rare enterprise in American film, trying to put together popularity, prestige, Christianity, and new media. They had a major hit with Sound of Freedom (2023), then aimed for the Oscars with Bonhoeffer (2024). Continue Reading...

The Road to Serfdom at 80

F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) is often portrayed as a mid-20th-century economist’s restatement of a 19th-century case for unreconstructed laissez-faire economics. Anyone who has read the text, however, knows that this is a serious misrepresentation of Hayek’s most famous book. Continue Reading...

The Quiet Revolution of Place

Sociologist Robert Nisbet declared our era to be “singularly weak” in social inventiveness. In a new book on local solutions to America’s social ills, author Seth Kaplan agrees—with some exceptions. “Our modern era is not the first one in which the U.S. Continue Reading...

Murray Rothbard on Christianity, Catholicism, and theology

A hidden gem of Murray Rothbard’s thinking on the “Whig Theory of History” was published by the Mises Institute here in 2010. This publication was excerpted from an edited transcript of “Ideology and Theories of History” (ITH), the first in a series of six lectures on the history of economic thought given by Rothbard in 1986, published here in 2006. Continue Reading...