Category: Publications

We’re happy to announce that the latest print issue of the Journal of Markets & Morality is available online.

The Spring 2009 issue includes a noteworthy study by Alan T. Y. Chan and Shu-kam Lee. In “Christ and Business Culture: Another Classification of Christians in Workplaces According to an Empirical Study in Hong Kong,” Chan and Lee outline four types of Christians at work: Christian soldiers, panic followers, strugglers, and Sunday Christians. Following the classification, Chan and Lee “develop a model of potential, evolutionary processes that these Christian types may follow using game-theory analysis” and conclude with “an empirical data set, which was conducted in Hong Kong, to illustrate our classifications and suggest potential strategies to efficiently allocate resources within Christian churches.”

Also included in this issue:

• Andrew Abela: “Subsidiarity and the Just Wage: Implications of Catholic Social Teaching for the Minimum-Wage Debate”
• Kim Hawtrey & Stuart Dullard: “Corporate Virtue and the Joint-Stock Company”
• Steven Loomis & Jacob Rodriguez: “The Violence of Aggregation: Amartya Sen’s Possibility of Social Choice”
• Stefano Solari & Daniele Corrado: “Social Justice and Economic Order According to Natural Law”
• Jennifer Dirmeyer & Paola Revelo & Walter E. Block: “Poverty, Dignity, Economic Development, and the Catholic Church”
• Maurizio Ragazzi: “Concordats Today: From the Second Vatican Council to John Paul II”
• Keith Aaron Boozer: “Magnanimity: Aquinas’ Examination of the Aristocratic Virtue”

Keith Aaron Boozer is a doctoral student at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and the journal encourages submissions from graduate students.

This issue also contains a wealth of helpful and incisive reviews of the latest books in Christian social thought, ethics and economics, and the philosophy, history, and methodology of economics. The timely editorial by executive editor Stephen Grabill, “Protestant Social Thought,” and article abstracts of current issues are freely available to nonsubscribers. And as per our “moving wall” policy of two issues, the most recent publicly-available archived issue is volume 11, number 1 (Spring 2008).

Access to the electronic versions of two latest “current” issues is available for individuals on a subscription basis. An electronic-only subscription is available for $10, and there are a number of other options for those wishing to receive the journal in hard copy form. We also encourage you to recommend the journal to friends, schools, and institutions.

The new issue of Religion & Liberty features an interview titled “Debating the Depression” with noted columnist and author Amity Shlaes. Shlaes does a superb job at reminding us about some of the consequences associated with massive government spending and regulation. First and foremost among these consequences is the burden of debt and taxes we are heaping upon future generations. This kind of expansion, without the means to pay for it, will sadly have a negative impact upon the quality of life of future Americans.

Another tremendous contribution comes from Grand Rapids orthopedic surgeon Dr. Donald P. Condit. Religion & Liberty has published an excerpt from his Acton monograph, A Christian Prescription for Health Care Reform. As we have seen, health care is an issue that inspires passion, activism, and tremendous debate, and it’s impossible to have a holistic understanding of this topic outside of a moral framework. The Acton Institute has been at the forefront when it comes to examining the moral implications related to our health care issues.

If you missed the book reviews that have already been previewed on the PowerBlog, we have a review of two books on Byzantium from Religion & Liberty’s Executive Editor John Couretas. I reviewed Dr. Jay Richard’s book Money, Greed, and God. I stated in the review some thoughts, which are essential for defending and expanding the influence of free markets:

Richards understands that for capitalism or free markets to succeed and flourish they must have a moral framework and hold a moral value for the believer. Even if one is, however, not a person of faith, it’s hard to argue against a need for a moral component for business and industry given the current economic crisis.

There is more content in the issue, including commentary on Pope Benedict’s encyclical Caritas in Veritate. Lester DeKoster was profiled for the “In the Liberal Tradition” this issue. DeKoster was first and foremost a Christian man of faith, who while serving our Lord, defended the Church against Marxist liberation theologies. Which was just one of his many accomplishments.

Well, at least the book is, anyway. The End of Secularism is now in stock at Acton.org and should be available in stores, too. Help me, faithful readers.

I don’t think I’ll disappoint you. Francis Beckwith, David Dockery, Russell Moore, Father Robert Sirico, Herb London, Jennifer Morse Roback, and Glenn Stanton all liked it. I hope you will, too.

Did you get the best part, by the way? FATHER ROBERT SIRICO. Here is his take on the book:

The task of discerning the alternative to practical atheism lived by many nominal Christians and the pretense of a neutral secularism has been made easier by this rich study. Once authentic Christians grasp the ramifications of the incarnation of Christ, then and only then will it be apparent that, as Baker argues, secularism only makes sense in relation to religion.

Amity Shlaes, a senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations, has an excellent primer on public choice in the August 3 edition of Forbes, “The New PC.” Shlaes is also the author of the 2007 book, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression.

Shlaes, who will be featured in the upcoming issue of Religion & Liberty, writes, “Government reformers view themselves as morally superior, but that is an illusion. They are just like private-sector operators, who do things that are in their own interest, not society’s. Those things include taking advantage of an economic crisis to aggregate power for themselves and their offices.” She goes on to point out five specific instances of recent government action that fits the public choice paradigm.

I have no doubt that many enter politics with good intentions. Some even follow through on those intentions and work for their constituencies. But a precious few remain uncontaminated and uncorrupted by the temptations that political power offers.

This reality is a strong argument in favor of term limits. Even though the individual constiuencies might lose out by replacing older, more senior representatives, who have garnered the most powerful appointments and consolidated the most influence, it has the happy consequence of putting caps on political clout. Every so often the slate is rubbed clean and alliances, power partnerships, and appointments need to be rebuilt.

Anything that puts an absolute ceiling on an individual politician’s power seems like a step in the right direction. Of course, an unintended consequence is that with the sundown of their political career always in view, an individual politician will be just that much more focused on greasing the skids to a comfy private sector job after the term limits come into effect.

John Hartley, the founder and editor of the International Journal of Cultural Studies, does for that journal something like what I did for the Journal of Markets & Morality awhile back. He takes his experience as an editor to reflect on the current state of the scholarly journal amid the challenges and opportunities in the digital age.

Hartley opens his study, “Lament for a Lost Running Order? Obsolescence and Academic Journals,” by concluding that “the academic journal is obsolete,” at least as regards to its “form – especially the print journal.”

There are a number of particular assertions made in support of this conclusion with which I would quibble. I stand by the prediction in my earlier piece, “Scholarship at the Crossroads: The Journal of Markets & Morality Case Study,” (PDF) in which I state, “for the foreseeable future electronic journals will not replace print journals, but both will exist together in a complementary fashion, each addressing different demands.”

But Hartley’s is an interesting and valuable perspective on the impact of digitization on academic journals. And I certainly agree with him that the complete digitization of journals and casting off the printed form “may reduce collegiate trust and fellow-feeling, increase individualist competitiveness, and inhibit innovation.”

He’s also certainly right in his preferred response to such possibilities: “In the face of that prospect, I’m going to keep on thinking about covers, running orders, referees and reading until the role of editor is obsolete too.”

One of the conclusions that resulted from the JMM case study was that instead of unlimited free access to all journal content, we would distinguish between “current” issues and “archived” issues. The former would require subscription to be accessed digitally, and the latter would be freely accessible (with some exceptions for special content). Thus far this solution seems to have worked well, despite the argument by some that in the “network” economy, “value is derived from plentitude” rather than scarcity.

To get access to current issues of the Journal of Markets & Morality, be sure to subscribe today.

Pope Benedict XVI’s much anticipated economics encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, is scheduled to be released early next week, according reports. For a good sense of this pope’s thinking on economics, we offer an article the then-Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger presented in 1985 at a symposium in Rome.  The Acton Institute published it under the title “Market Economy and Ethics.”  As indicated by the following quote, the pope believed in integrating morals into economics in order to have sound and successful economic policy:

This determinism, in which man is completely controlled by the binding laws of the market while believing he acts in freedom from them, includes yet another and perhaps even more astounding presupposition, namely, that the natural laws of the market are in essence good (if I may be permitted so to speak) and necessarily work for the good, whatever may be true of the morality of individuals. These two presuppositions are not entirely false, as the successes of the market economy illustrate. But neither are they universally applicable and correct, as is evident in the problems of today’s world economy.

Without developing the problem in its details here — which is not my task — let me merely underscore a sentence of Peter Koslowski’s that illustrates the point in question: “The economy is governed not only by economic laws, but is also determined by men…” Even if the market economy does rest on the ordering of the individual within a determinate network of rules, it cannot make man superfluous or exclude his moral freedom from the world of economics. It is becoming ever so clear that the development of the world economy has also to do with the development of the world community and with the universal family of man, and that the development of the spiritual powers of mankind is essential in the development of the world community. These spiritual powers are themselves a factor in the economy: the market rules function only when a moral consensus exists and sustains them.

Over at World Magazine, Lee Wishing cites a speech by Rev. Robert A. Sirico, president and co-founder of the Acton Institute, on the subject of putting our faith in God and our own abilities instead of the government to manage economies. He quotes Rev. Sirico: “Many thinkers throughout the ages have noted that we face a choice between holding a robust faith in God or putting faith in man and institutions such as the state.”  In such tough economic times, we are reminded that we need to put our faith and trust in God first.

The new issue of Religion & Liberty featuring an interview with South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford is available online, now in its entirety. From the very beginning, Governor Sanford has been a vocal critic of all bailout and stimulus legislation pouring out of Washington, regardless of who is occupying the White House.

For an update on the stimulus debate, and the governor’s role in the new stimulus law, The Wall Street Journal published Governor Sanford’s March 20 column titled, “Why South Carolina Doesn’t Want ‘Stimulus.'” Our interview is also unique in that Governor Sanford also talks about faith in the public square and the virtues related to spending restraint.

We have some excellent cultural analysis in this issue, which includes “Busting a Pop Culture Illusion” by S.T. Karnick. Karnick is the editor of the American Culture website. He calls the Disney “life without limits mindset, one of the main progenitors of modern, statist liberalism.” Bruce Edward Walker of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy offers a piece that uplifts the moral order over ideology. Walker declares:

For Eliot, the moral imagination derived from his Anglo-Catholicism; for Kirk, his Roman Catholicism. Devoid of moral imagination, all systems–political, social, economic, familial and spiritual–are bound to fail. True conservatives, both men believed, place moral considerations ahead of ideology. In fact, both held that true conservatism is the negation of ideology.

Two books are reviewed in this issue, Kevin Schmiesing reviews Philip Lawler’s The Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston’s Catholic Culture and I review Spiritual Enterprise: Doing Virtual Business by Theodore Roosevelt Malloch. Schmiesing’s review first appeared on the Powerblog in November.

In this issue we also pay tribute to one of the giants who was pivotal in the destruction of Marxist-Leninism. Alexander Solzhenistyn (1918 – 2008) is the “In The Liberal Tradition” figure for this issue. I was about 14 or 15 when my dad gave me a copy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, and in reading his book it was plain for me that the fundamental flaws of the Soviet System were moral in nature. Nobody has written and articulated that case better and more effectively than Solzhenitsyn did. His works offered the first critique of the Soviet system I had come across from a non-Westerner. It’s not the first time we have written about Solzhenitsyn of course, Religion & Liberty’s Executive Editor John Couretas published “Solzhenitsyn and Russia’s Golgotha” in the Spring issue of 2007.

In the next issue of Religion & Liberty, we are featuring an interview with South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford. Sanford has made national headlines for his principled opposition to all bailout and stimulus legislation coming out of Washington.

He was elected South Carolina’s governor in 2002 and re-elected in 2006, becoming only the third two-term governor in modern state history. In 2008, Sanford was also named Chairman of the Republican Governors Association.

Before becoming governor, Sanford served six years in the U.S. Congress after his election in 1994. For his consistent efforts to lower taxes and limit government growth he was ranked #1 in the entire Congress by Citizens Against Government Waste. He was rated similarly by the National Taxpayers’ Union, and Taxpayers for Common Sense inducted him into the Taxpayers Hall of Fame.

We would like to offer our PowerBlog readers an exclusive preview of the interview (the full interview will be available soon in the pages of Religion & Liberty):

You’ve taken a very principled approach in working for smaller government, lower taxes, individual liberty and fostering a culture of personal responsibility. Those principles are taking a battering in Washington today. Can anything turn the tide?

George Washington and his fairly battered band of patriots were facing far greater odds. The situation looked much more bleak. And yet they were resolved to creating the perfect union that they believed in. And they ultimately prevailed against incredibly long odds. So I think the answer rests in that silent and sleeping majority. Really making their voice heard. Not just for an election or election cycle but on a prolonged basis. And that’s what it will take to turn the tide. Really, that is the only thing that can turn the tide. However, if the status quo remains, we’re going to have profound problems coming our way that I think signal frankly the undoing of our Republic.

A lot of state governors are lining up for federal bailout money. Won’t this simply postpone the day of reckoning that some states need to face because of their own policies?

The answer is yes. That which is unsustainable is going to end. And so for instance California government grew by 95-percent over the last ten years. Federal government grew by about 73 percent. So you have state government that has grown at an even faster rate than the federal government. You have a state government that has gone out and issued long-term debt to cover the actual operations of government over the last couple years. It’s not sustainable. The idea is that you can just throw some federal money in to that unsustainable mix. But all you do is delay big structural reforms that are absolutely essential to California, for instance, being on firm financial footing. And this notion of mandating over a bad situation ultimately generally makes the situation worse. So, yeah, I do think it postpones the day of reckoning. And frankly makes the day of reckoning worse.

The line of business people asking for government bailout help seems to get longer by the day, how can you say no when jobs may be on the line?

The role of government is to promote, in my view, individual freedom. In other words, we have a governmental apparatus that is legitimate in nature in as much as it is to maximize one’s individual freedom. There are other folks who believe in the idea of a nanny state, and believe government is there to take care of your different needs, cradle-to-grave, chief among them being employment. Rather, government is there to create a foundation by which private sector can grow and create employment opportunities. Its job is not to create employment itself as I see it. And so I would say, yes, they’re lining up. There’s an article in today’s paper about car rental companies now lining up for a piece of the bailout funding. There was another article I saw where credit unions were getting money they’ve never gotten before. So, yes, there’s going to be an endless list. And it is again going to get to the point of the absurd before this thing is over and done. And the fact that the list is growing longer shows the fallacy it is to think that government can change economic laws.

As the media bombard us with misleading language describing the role of government in the economy (e.g., that a stimulus plan will “inject money” or “create jobs”), those who know better need to keep up a steady drumbeat of common sense concerning the potential and track record of the state’s involvement in economic affairs. Long-time Acton associate Paul Cleveland’s newly published Unmasking the Sacred Lies is a valuable contribution to the effort.

Professor of Economics at Birmingham-Southern College, Cleveland combines here a scholar’s appreciation of policy details with a down-to-earth style that will appeal to a wide audience. Cleveland is master of the telling anecdote, demonstrating in each of a series of policy areas—inter alia, monetary, transportation, education, and welfare—that government intervention often has pernicious consequences, whether intended or not. If, for example, you were not aware of just how contorted federal agriculture policy is, his chapter on that subject will be a disturbing revelation.

Academics will quibble with the simplified story lines of some of these analyses (e.g., this historian would dispute a few points in the treatment of Lincoln, slavery, and the Civil War), but the decision to sacrifice some complexity for the sake of readability is a trade-off any writer can appreciate.

Significantly, Cleveland concludes the book with a chapter titled, “The Lawlessness of Too Many Laws.” It is perhaps paradoxical, but in the present situation of pell-mell government expansion, I believe it is limited-government and (non-anarcho-) libertarian folks who are the defenders of the dignity and integrity of government. As Cleveland aptly observes, the generation of too many laws turns the normally law-abiding citizen into an unwitting law-breaker, with the result that the rule of law itself is severely compromised. Some would say we’re already there. At least in certain fields of economic activity, I think that’s hard to dispute.

If it is any longer possible to turn this ship around, it will be only by a massive intellectual and moral awakening. In that cause, this book can only help.