A good give-and-take on the tea party movement on Our Sunday Visitor. Rev. Robert A. Sirico, president and co-founder of the Acton Institute, weighs in:

Many of the stances tea party activists have taken on political issues also would resonate with Catholic voters, Father Sirico said. For example, many practicing Catholics would likely agree with the tea party’s concern about the overreaching involvement of government in schools and health care, he said, and though the movement has hesitated to identify itself as pro-life, the majority of tea party activists appear to be in agreement with the Church’s stance on abortion.

Read more on Catholics and the Tea Party…

Take at look at Jonathan Last’s very good piece in the Weekly Standard about the real population problem that is confronting the world–people aren’t having enough babies. In America’s One Child Policy, Last explains how fertility throughout the entire world is declining and what the impact will be on society and the economy.

Read more on The Real Population Problem–Not Enough Babies…

Liu Xiaobo

In the International Herald Tribune, Fang Lizhi points to the experience of Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo over the last 20 years as “evidence on its own to demolish any idea that democracy will automatically emerge as a result of growing prosperity” in China.

Read more on Liu Xiaobo: Peace Prize, Prosperity and Liberty…

Political commentators have spilled a septic field of ink explaining what drives the Tea Party movement; and, sure, the movement is complex and varied, resisting any single attempt to blah blah blah. But the core of it boils down to the Saturday Night Live skit below. The analogy runs like this: The Steve Martin character and his wife represent the ruling political class in Washington; and the Tea Party is the book author.

Read more on SNL Skit to Congress: Don’t Buy Stuff You Can’t Afford…

Here is a link to a good summary of McKinsey’s report on business and Africa that can be found at Acton’s good friend Andreas Widmer’s blog Faith and Prosperity.

Andreas is a former Swiss Guard turned high-tech entrepreneur who is now focusing on promoting enterprise solutions to poverty throughout the developing world. He and his colleagues Michael Fairbanks et al. run the Pioneers of Prosperity Awards in different regions throughout the world. I have had the opportunity of attending two of them–one in Rwanda for Africa and one in Jamaica for the Carribean.

Read more on Faith and Prosperity…

Last week several colleagues and I had the opportunity to attend Partners Worldwide conference: Marketplace Revolution: Fighting Global Poverty through Business. Acton was delighted to be one of the sponsors of the event

Read more on Marketplace Revolution…

Last week I linked to Joe Carter’s On the Square piece, “What the Market Economy Needs to be Moral,” challenging his view that we need a “third way.” He has since clarified his position, and noted that what he wants is not really an alternative to the market economy but an alternative grounding, view of, and justification for the market economy. This is a position with which I wholeheartedly concur.

Read more on Of Miracles and Means…

In the “Wealth Inequality Mirage” on RealClearMarkets, Diana Furchtgott-Roth looks at the campaign waged by “levelers” who exaggerate and distort statistics about income inequality to advance their political ends. The gap, she says, is the “main battle” in the Nov. 2 election. “Republicans want to keep current tax rates to encourage businesses to expand and hire workers,” she writes. “Democrats want to raise taxes for the top two brackets, and point to rising income inequality as justification.”

Read more on The Main Battle…

An interesting call for papers from H-Net, “Almshouses in Europe from the late Middle Ages to the Present – Comparisons and Peculiarities”:

Within the field of poor relief and welfare, research interests have recently shifted towards the history of private charity and charitable foundations. Among these institutions, which contributed to the early modern and modern mixed economy of welfare, the almshouse played an important role as a particular form of social housing. Almshouses originated in the Middle Ages and many of them still exist. They offered elderly people at risk of impoverishment cheap or free accommodation, often alongside clothing, food, fuel and money – the actual alms. Many were founded by private benefactors. Almshouses usually consisted of a limited number of small apartments for one or two persons. Unlike other welfare institutions in early modern Europe (hospitals, orphanages etc.) almshouse apartments allowed their occupants to run an autonomous household under respectable living conditions and considerable privacy.

Read more on Almshouses in Europe from the Late Middle Ages to the Present…

Joe Carter discusses “What the Market Economy Needs to Be Moral” today over at First Things: On the Square.

He rightly points to the twin errors of collectivism and atomistic individualism, each of which have been soundly criticized in Catholic Social Teaching, for instance.

Read more on The Christian Market?…