The Heartland Institute and Consumers for Health Care Choices are sponsoring Health Care Roundtables across the country. Earlier this week, Acton development associate Charles Roelofs attended a roundtable and offers this report:

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Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez says that “the world needs a new moral architecture.” He also has a clear idea of what that morality ought to look like. Speaking at a conference on socialism in May of this year, he said that “every factory must… produce not only briquettes, steel, and aluminum, but also, above all, the new man and woman, the new society, the socialist society.” If Chavez manages to convince enough people that socialists are a new breed of humanity, a breed that has evolved beyond the old ideas of liberal democracy and individualism, then there is no compelling reason to acknowledge the rights of anyone else. Rights in the “new society” are not based on humanity, because the socialists are part of a new humanity. Rights are based on conformity.

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In a blow to international relief work, the Spring Lake-based International Aid has announced that it is ceasing operation, effective immediately.

CEO Dr. Gordon Loux cited a “perfect storm” of fiscal hardship: “We have tried to turn it around and we’ve sent out a number of appeals,” he said. “But because of the West Michigan economy and because of donor fatigue of most organizations trying to raise funds, we’ve got the perfect storm.”

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A recent NBER working paper, “Internationalization of U.S. Doctorate Education,” takes a look at trends in doctoral degrees awarded by American institutions in the physical sciences, engineering, and economics.

From the abstract, “The representation of a large number of students born outside the United States among the ranks of doctorate recipients from U.S. universities is one of the most significant transformations in U.S. graduate education and the international market for highly-trained workers in science and engineering in the last quarter century.”

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Acton University  has been over for almost two weeks now.  A testimony to what a great experience it is can be found on a blog, A Voice in the Wilderness, by R.J. Moeller.  Moeller was a student at Acton University this year and provides great insight to the experience he had.  If you are curious about Acton University or even Acton Institute please read his blog post.  He gives a great description about both that is very well written.

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Liberty is something we have valued for years in the United States, and the recent events that have occurred in Iran and Honduras demonstrate there are many people throughout the world who wish they were blessed to live in a country that protects and values liberty.  As we get ready to celebrate the Fourth of July, Kevin  Schmiesing, research fellow at the Acton Institute, writes a very timely commentary on liberty.

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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:

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