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"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Lord Acton
With the health care debate heating up once again, and a vote pending on the legislation on Saturday in the US Senate, here are a few bits of commentary on the process from Acton’s audio archives that will help you to understand some of the important issues at stake:
September 10, 2009: Dr. Kevin Schmeissing joins host Al Kresta to analyze President Obama’s address to Congress on health care reform:
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September 10, 2009: Dr. Samuel Gregg, Acton’s Director of Research, discusses how Catholic principles such as subsidiarity and solidarity apply to the current health care debate with Drew Mariani on Relevant Radio:
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This morning, Kishore Jayabalan - Director of Acton’s Rome office - joined hosts Melanie Morgan and Ernest Istook on America’s Morning News to discuss the ongoing controversy over abortion coverage in the hotly debated Obama/Pelosi/Reid health care bills currently under consideration by Congress, and to give some perspective on how the Catholic Bishops have dealt with the issue to date. You can listen using the audio player below.
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I was in the 8th grade in November of 1989, and I don’t think that the fall of the Berlin Wall had any immediate impact on my thinking at the time. I don’t remember if I watched the coverage on TV, or if there were any big discussions of the event in school during the following days. I was a history buff back then, to be sure - I still am - but I don’t think that I was engaged in contemplating the big issues of human liberty and individual rights at the time. Divided Berlin was simply a fact of life, and the source of interesting cold war tidbits like the story of the Candy Bomber during the Berlin Airlift, and the site of a Harlem Globetrotters game in early 1988 on ABC’s Wide World of Sports that I videotaped and watched again and again.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve had more time to reflect on the importance of human freedom and the evils of totalitarianism, and I’ve noted my tendency to take my freedom for granted. Over the last few weeks, as the anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall moved closer, I’ve had opportunity to take a fresh look at the history of divided Berlin, and the rise and fall of the barrier between the eastern and western sectors of that city. As I watched again the footage of jubilant Berliners streaming through the suddenly-opened gates, dancing atop the wall, embracing each other and weeping for joy, it occurred to me that the event seemed as if it had never really happened; after all, how can it be possible that during my lifetime, Berlin - now an utterly modern and cosmopolitan city - had been artificially divided in two with tyrannical rulers forbidding the residents of one half access to the other? Looking back from my 2009 perspective, it hardly seems real.
Rev. Robert A. Sirico - October 29, 2009
And yet here we are, already 20 years removed from one of the most spectacular links in the chain of events that culminated in the fall of communism in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
This year, the Acton Institute celebrated its 19th anniversary. At the dinner in celebration of that milestone, Rev. Robert A. Sirico - President and Co-Founder of the Acton Institute - gave an address that celebrated the great events of November 9, 1989, but also reminded us that the freedoms that we so often take for granted remain at risk in many ways. You can listen to his address using the audio player below.
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Radio Free Acton is back, this week featuring an interview with Dr. Glenn Sunshine. Dr. Sunshine is Chair of the History Department at Central Connecticut State University, and a Research Fellow at the Acton Institute. He’s also the author of a brand new book - available now at the Acton Bookshoppe - entitled Why You Think The Way You Do: The Story of Western Worldviews from Rome to Home. I had a chance recently to sit down with Dr. Sunshine and discuss his book, the importance of worldview, and some of the parallels between the declining Roman empire and modern society.
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If you aren’t subscribed to Acton’s podcast, here’s the link you’ll want to use to have podcast episodes automatically downloaded directly into your iTunes or other audio management software.
Washington is all atwitter about the “Stimulus,” which is currently being pushed through Congress (without being read by most members). Acton’s own Michelle Muccio has come up with a plan of her own, and did a bit of independent research to see if her proposal would find any support:
[I'd] sooner be governed by the first two thousand people in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand members of the faculty of Harvard University.
Forty-four percent (44%) voters also think a group of people selected at random from the phone book would do a better job addressing the nation’s problems than the current Congress, but 37% disagree. Twenty percent (20%) are undecided.
An interesting post over at First Things from Jonathan V. Last, who discusses why the left not just opposes, but hates Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. He identifies four particular issues, all revolving around her family, that provoke the left. It’s difficult to pull a quote out of the post; it’s all very good. But here’s a small taste to get you interested:
Governor Sarah Palin
…there is the left’s long-standing concern about overpopulation, which has become a staple of modern environmentalism, beginning with Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 best-seller The Population Bomb. Ehrlich preached a Malthusian near-future in which hundreds of millions would perish by famine as the world’s unchecked population growth spiraled to infinity. As it happens, Ehrlich’s predictions were entirely incorrect: Not only has increased food production reduced famine to a weapon of political conflict, but the world’s population growth has slowed to a crawl. Fertility rates around the globe are falling and world population will peak around nine billion by 2050. From there, we will experience population contraction.
But Ehrlich’s prognostications never fell far out of favor, particularly with environmentalists who take it as an article of faith that the planet is already overcrowded. To them, the prodigious Palin family is surely seen as taking more than its fair share.
I’m curious to see what PowerBlog readers think of John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin, and to have your thoughts on the Presidential race in general. I can say with certainty that this is shaping up to be one of the most interesting elections of my lifetime; what say you?
What is the “western” vibe? This is purely subjective, but to me it is the feeling of no-nonsense, self-reliant, egalitarian, outsiderism, sort of Barry Goldwater-ish. Is it libertarian? Not exactly, but it does have that sort of feeling to it, to me at least. It feels like Goldwaterism. And I think this trickles through to the worldview of the candidates and then to policy. It seems pretty clear to me (especially after last night) that John McCain sees himself as Gary Cooper riding into to town to single-handedly clean-up corruption and gun down the rascals…
…The only caveat to this is that McCain’s westernism is tempered by his military background. And frankly, this is what concerns me most about him–his mind seems like a command-and-control, top-down worldview. To put the matter more elliptically to many but more accurately to my thinking, I think he simply does not understand or trust the idea of spontaneous order. In his worldview, things happen (good or bad) because somebody makes them happen. This is not a worldview that is conducive to understanding spontaneous order. That’s a statist streak in him that offsets some of his westernism.
Acton Research Fellow and Director of Media Dr. Jay Richards was on The Frank Pastore Show on KKLA in Los Angeles last night. Frank and Jay discussed the attempt to redefine the term “pro-life” in such a way that a pro-abortion candidate can claim to be “pro-life” in spite of their support for abortion; they also took a look at Barack Obama’s legislation that would commit billions of dollars to the reduction of global poverty.
You can listen to the discussion by clicking here (3 mb mp3 file).
It must be tough to be Al Gore sometimes. We all know that the weather has a habit of not cooperating with his “major addresses” on global warming; how many times have his big pronouncements been accompanied by major snowstorms?
Presumably, it would be better to try doing one of these speeches in the middle of summer, when you’re less likely to be iced out by the weather. But wouldn’t you know it - just when Gore gets his sweltering summertime platform to trumpet the need to act on the basis of the Global Warming Consensus, a big fight breaks out in a scientific organization that makes said Consensus look more like a sham than ever.
First things first: In Washington last Thursday, Al “a modern Jeremiah” Gore delivered a “major address” on global warming where he asserted that “The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk… And even more — if more should be required — the future of human civilization is at stake.”
Flame on!
This assertion is based, of course, on the unshakable scientific consensus that human activities - specifically our carbon emissions - are causing potentially catastrophic climate change to occur. On the basis of that solid foundation of science, Gore went on to explain that we must:
…do away with all carbon-emitting forms of electricity production in the United States within 10 years, replacing them with alternatives like solar, wind and geothermal power, conservation and so-called clean-coal technology in which all carbon emissions from the burning of coal are captured and stored.
It’s entirely possible that Al Gore doesn’t believe what he’s saying here. Goodness knows that he’s not shy at all about taking liberties with the truth in order to advance his agenda. But really, the ridiculousness of this particular bit of puffery is breathtaking. Columnist Vincent Carroll took Gore to task in the Rocky Mountain News thusly:
Gore would subject 300 million people to an experiment in which baseload power that is needed 24 hours a day to keep the economy - and our livelihoods - humming is replaced willy nilly by power sources still susceptible to natural disruption (such as lack of wind or lingering cloud cover), that cost more (at least in the case of solar) and are far less plentiful in some regions than others (Colorado is lucky at least in that regard).
He’d inflict monumental utility price hikes on consumers who’d pay for both the shutdown of old plants and construction of the new - with who knows what economic fallout.
With such a short timetable, we’d have to shred this nation’s federal system of utility regulation in favor of national directives, presumably from Congress or a muscle-flexing Environmental Protection Agency charged with regulating greenhouse gases. Not since World War II have we seen anything remotely comparable in terms of central planning.
[Cue Superfriends announcer voice] Meanwhile, back in the real world… (more…)
Acton Research Fellow and Director of Media Dr. Jay Richards was on 
It must be tough to be Al Gore sometimes. We all know that the weather has a habit of not cooperating with his “major addresses” on global warming; how many times have his big pronouncements been accompanied by major snowstorms?
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