Rev. Robert A. Sirico in Chicago

This afternoon, Acton President Rev. Robert A. Sirico took his most recent address from the 2008 Acton Lecture Series on the road to Chicago, Illinois.

Sirico addressed an audience at the University Club of Chicago on The Rise and Eventual Downfall of the New Religious Left. If you were in attendance and would like to listen again, or weren’t able to attend today either today or at last month’s ALS event, you can listen to today’s audio by clicking here (17.8 mb mp3 file).

Read more on Rev. Robert A. Sirico at the University Club of Chicago…

Last night as I was driving to an appointment, I was listening to our local NPR affiliate here in Grand Rapids, and specifically to the show Marketplace. I happened to hear a story about how the government and economists were concerned that the money given to taxpayers via the “economic stimulus package” may actually be used for purposes other than retail spending, thereby not causing the intended “stimulus.” Not the first story of this sort that I’ve heard over the last few weeks.

The difference in this story was that it was being reported that the IRS was now being proactive in ensuring that the stimulus money was being spent “properly” by actually spending the money in advance for a certain class of taxpayers who had been identified as likely to not spend their rebates.

Naturally, I found the story outrageous. So outrageous, in fact, that I was talking back to my radio, and in fact probably talked right over the most important part of the story.

So today, when I noticed that Jordan Ballor had written a post on spending the stimulus, my mind immediately jumped to the outrageous story from the radio. I found the story link on the web, grabbed a few quotes from the transcript of the story that (I thought) I had heard in full, and posted away.

Only to have Jordan direct my attention a few moments later to the last line of the story:

Oh, c’mon, check your calendars, everybody.

Wow, did I feel stupid. Still do, actually.

Anyway, I didn’t have time at the moment to add a correction to the post as we were all busy packing up after today’s Chicago event, so I pulled the post off the blog. Now that I’m off the road, however, I’m re-posting it so that I can really embrace my stupidity. After the jump, enjoy a laugh at my expense. Read more on Mea Culpa (or, How I Got Pwned By Public Radio)…

Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) has released their “Pig Book” for 2008, which is an “annual compilation of the pork-barrel projects in the federal budget. The 2008 Pig Book identified 11,610 projects at a cost of $17.2 billion in the 12 Appropriations Acts for fiscal 2008. A ‘pork’ project is a line-item in an appropriations bill that designates tax dollars for a specific purpose in circumvention of established budgetary procedures.”

Read more on CAGW Names Names…

In recent years the UK has emerged as a key player in both genetic experimentation and in corresponding legal battles over the extent to which the government ought to regulate such research. The latest news coming from across the pond involves passage of a bill legalizing the creation of human-animal hybrids with certain restrictions (regarding type and length of survival).

Read more on Humans and Hybrids…

Last month marked the 75th anniversary of the beginning of FDR’s “New Deal”.

The Great Depression is the most famous event in U.S. macro-economic history. Most or all of my students know that it happened in the first half of the 20th century. They have no sense of what caused it– except perhaps to lay blame on the 1929 stock market crash. And they have a vague sense that the New Deal policies of FDR were helpful in ending it.

Read more on New Deal for April Fools…

In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal Europe, Alberto Mingardi of Istituto Bruno Leoni (and long-time Acton friend) lists some of the reforms Italy needs to boost economic growth, which is forecast at a measly 0.6 – 0.8 percent for 2008.

Read more on The Burden of Italian Red Tape…

Last week the Providence Journal ran a piece by me on the forthcoming “rebate” checks from the government intended to be an economic stimulus, “The mandate is to ‘spend all you can’.” I take issue with the idea that the government gives us money that is our own in the first place, and then tells us how we ought to spend it: on consumables and retail goods to spur growth in the economy.

Read more on Spending the Stimulus…