Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

News and Events

May 19, 2010

Berlinski Responds to Radosh

If you read this post about Claire Berlinski’s recent article in City Journal, and the follow-up post calling attention to Ron Radosh’s critique of the article, then you may be interested in Berlinski’s return volley here. Continue Reading...
May 18, 2010

Radosh Responds to Berlinski

I recommended a Claire Berlinski article last Thursday. Ron Radosh forcefully calls into question several elements of the Berlinski piece, though her central claim seems to me to remain intact: While the Nazis are widely and duly vilified, far too many in the West continue to excuse, minimize or ignore the activities of the Soviet communists. Continue Reading...
May 17, 2010

Wealth: What is it good for?

On the Economix blog at the New York Times, Uwe E. Reinhardt wrote a post titled “How Businesses Create Wealth.” That elicited attention from a commenter who wondered where he was “trying to go with this essay.” Reinhardt, an economics professor at Princeton, answers with “Companies: What Are They Good For?” He also cites an article from Acton’s Journal of Markets & Morality: “A Communitarian Model of Business: A Natural-Law Perspective.” Reinhardt: Actually, I was not trying to go anywhere with my analysis, other than to point out that businesses create value and wealth beyond the usually narrow slice that accrues strictly to the owners. Continue Reading...
May 17, 2010

Debt and Politics

Though the Greek Debt crisis may seem far away, here is a sobering article by Kevin Hassett at Bloomberg. Greece’s Bailout Heroes arrive in Leaking Boats Those countries coordinating the $1Trillion bailout of Greece find themselves in similar trouble. Continue Reading...
May 13, 2010

Digging In to the Crimes of Communism

Having recently finished reading Jean-François Revel’s Last Exit to Utopia – in which he excoriates leftist intellectuals for ignoring the crimes of communist totalitarianism and their efforts to resurrect the deadly ideology – and having just read a few more chapters of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago over lunch, it seems providential that I would stumble across this article at City Journal on the failure of researchers to seriously dig into the now-available archives of the Soviet Union: Pavel Stroilov, a Russian exile in London, has on his computer 50,000 unpublished, untranslated, top-secret Kremlin documents, mostly dating from the close of the Cold War. Continue Reading...