In today’s Detroit News, Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg talks about the sort of “moral, legal and political environment” that must exist if entrepreneurs are to flourish. He applies these precepts to the very serious economic problems in Michigan, where Acton is located:
Read more on Gregg on the Moral Environment of Entrepreneurship…
A new study from the Kauffman Foundation shows how Americans are increasingly turning to entrepreneurship to pull themselves out of an economic crisis. “When individuals are truly free to exercise their talents and trade the production of their labor, without oppression from tyrants or the entanglements of unnecessary government ‘oversight,’ the net effect is mutually beneficial for society as a whole,” writes Anthony Bradley in this week’s Acton Commentary.
Read more on Acton Commentary: From Crisis to Creative Entrepreneurial Liberation…
What’s behind the extremely high unemployment rates in black communities? Anthony Bradley traces the root of the problem to declining educational achievement. “Sadly, because of America’s exploding government program menu, the virtue of ‘getting an education’ has all but been eliminated in low-income black neighborhoods,” he writes.
“America has been cashing checks on the promise of future Social Security checks, and on the promise of an endlessly robust housing market,” writes Jonathan Witt in his commentary this week. “But somewhere along the way, too many of us stopped funding the checking account with its principal asset: young adults who work hard, pay into the Social Security system, and buy homes for the families they themselves intend to raise.”
Read more on Acton Commentary: Social In-Security and the Economic Crisis…
Sam Gregg marks the 150th anniversary of the death of Alexis de Tocqueville whose great work “Democracy in America” warned about the dangers of a comfortable servility. “The American Republic,” Tocqueville wrote, “will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”
In this piece John Pisciotta, a professor of economics at Baylor University, offers a number of sound reasons for getting rid of earmarks on appropriations bills, including their tendency to invite corruption. “Those who seek them are tempted to skirt the law to win favor with a legislator so as to be graced with an earmark,” he writes. “We should not be surprised that a handful of former members of Congress now receive free room and board at federal prisons.”
Read more on Acton Commentary – “Earmarks: Don’t Mend Them, End Them”…
The First Amendment rights of religious groups are under assault in the public square. As Kevin Schmiesing reminds us in today’s Acton Commentary, “History’s tyrants recognized the progression that some of us have forgotten: Where people are free to act according their conscience, they will demand the right to determine their political destiny.”
Read more on Acton Commentary: Religious Freedom Doesn’t Mean Religious Silence…
In this week’s Acton Commentary, I argue for simplifying the tax code. It should also be evident that any sort of tax reform should coincide with reforming the way Washington currently operates when it comes to spending.
“Power permits people to do enormous good,” Lord Acton once said, “and absolute power enables them to do even more.”
This wisdom from the nineteenth-century’s champion of state prerogative applies as well today. Politicians are crippled by the lack of the one thing they need to yank our hobbled economy out of the mire of recession: adequate power. It is our duty to grant it to them.
Yes, from time to time this commentary space has been critical of government meddling in economic affairs, surmising, for example, that trying to cure poverty by funneling more money through Washington would do less to assist the poor than to pad the salaries of middle-class bureaucrats. We have emphasized the effectiveness of private and faith-based charity, of its capacity at once to use resources efficiently and to respect the individual’s dignity. We have argued that persons, morally formed, acting freely, and operating within the context of a rule of law, will generate a bountiful and equitable economic environment without counterproductive interference by the state. We have posited that our current difficulties derive from a combination of moral turpitude and government bumbling.
We were mistaken. Read more on Acton Commentary: An Ode to Power…
Davos capitalism, managerial capitalism run by a transnational elite, has lost faith in free markets. But these technocrats and politicians still believe that they, and only they, possess the solutions that will “fix” global markets. “We have tried the illusory third way — it is called Davos — and it has failed,” Michael Miller writes.
Read more on Acton Commentary: Davos Capitalism: Adam Smith’s Nightmare…
