“Most of us enjoy an economy where we can purchase with ease the things we need and enjoy. However, there is no moral justification for the commercialization of some things; human beings are not products to be bought and sold,” writes Elise Hilton in the latest Acton Commentary (published October 3). The full text of his essay follows. Subscribe to the free, weekly Acton News & Commentary and other publications here.

Read more on Acton Commentary: Obama Administration Leaves Human Trafficking Victims Out in the Cold…

Jordan Ballor’s paper, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Two Kingdoms, and Protestant Social Thought Today,” just made the Social Science Research Network’s current Top Ten download list for Philosophy of Religion eJournal. From the abstract:

Read more on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Two Kingdoms, and Protestant Social Thought Today…

Dr. Pamela Casson, a pediatrician in Colorado Springs, knows what it means literally to be “On Call.” This week she shares with us in this video interview with Jon Hirst how she sees God working through her in her work with families, children and the world around her. Thank you Pamela for giving us an inside look at how you see your work as blessing the world.

Read more on On Call with Dr. Pamela Casson…

A Shifty Sojourner
Mark Tooley, The American Spectator

Is an Evangelical Left icon preparing for life after Obama?

The Economic Freedom Alliance Act
Devin Nunes, National Review Online

We need a new foreign-policy approach centered on free trade.

Read more on PowerLinks – 10.03.12…

The Congressional Research Service (CRS), a group that works exclusively for the U.S. Congress, issued a report with one of the greatest titles I’ve ever seen on a government document:

Receipt of Unemployment Insurance by Higher-Income Unemployed Workers (“Millionaires”)

Now the first nine words are nothing special, typical policy-wonk speak. But whoever added in the word “millionaires” with scare quotes and parentheses is a genius. Most people would have been nodding off around the word “Insurance” but seeing millionaires (that’s such a quaint word nowadays) in the title makes you wake up and ask, “Wait, are they saying that millionaires got unemployment insurance?”

The answer: Yes. Yes they did. Millionaires have indeed been getting unemployment insurance. In fact, almost 3,000 of them in 2008 were on the dole:
Read more on Did 2,362 Millionaires Get Unemployment Checks in 2009? (Answer: Yes they did.)…

At least Obamacare comes at us head on. The greater legislative threat may be the one that most Americans have never heard of. Economist Scott Powell and Acton friend Jay Richards explain in a new piece in Barron’s:

While Obamacare received more attention, the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, also known as Dodd-Frank after its Senate and House sponsors, … unleashed a new regulatory body, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to operate with unprecedented power.

Dodd-Frank became law in 2010 and is supposed to avert the next financial crisis. Yet banks are still too big to fail and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac remain wards of the state, while the CFPB has been given sweeping authority over consumer credit and other financial products and services that played no significant role in the crisis of 2008.

Powell and Richards then offer some specifics:
Read more on Dodd-Frank: The Other Serious Threat…

You cannot apologize to a fanatic, says Lee Harris. It only serves to convince him that he was right all along:

The last few weeks have witnessed a peculiar and disturbing spectacle: An American administration that has spent a great deal of time and energy apologizing for our liberties—in particular, for what many would regard as the foundation of all our other liberties, namely, the freedom to express our minds as we see fit. This signature freedom, of which Americans were once so boastful, has clearly become a source of befuddled embarrassment to the current administration and many of its liberal supporters. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the speech President Obama delivered before the UN Assembly yesterday. The president was bold and strong in making clear that there can be no excuse for the riots that have swept the Muslim world, but he was weak in his defense of our most fundamental freedom. The president came across as if he regarded the right to free speech as a bothersome and irritating nuisance that Americans put up with solely because it’s one of our quaint and bizarre local traditions, instead of celebrating it as a moral lesson to mankind and a blessing bequeathed to us by our ancestors. It did not seem to bother Obama in the least that he was apologizing to the world for the First Amendment, and that is very troubling.

Read more on Stop Apologizing for Our Liberties…

What’s a Christian Response to Poverty?
Thomas Purifoy, Economics for Everybody

We are in an odd spot when it comes to views on poverty. Today, many people blame poverty on the free market and personal liberty. But that’s like blaming malaria on modern medicine and environmental engineering.

Read more on PowerLinks – 10.02.12…

Alan Duncan, an aid minister in the UK, says his government is “forced” to hand over large amounts of money to the EU’s foreign aid budget, but has no say in how the money is spent. The problem is that much of the $2 billion+ “aid” money (one-sixth of the British budget) goes to projects such as making a Moroccan water park more eco-friendly, an art project in St. Petersburg, and building a hotel and leisure complex in Barbados. Britain’s International Development Committee reports that only 46% of the “development” donations go to “low-income” nations.

Read more on Is it really ‘aid’ if it goes to relatively wealthy nations?…

Want to help the poor? Promote a free market in health care. That’s the argument made by John C. Goodman, author of the new book Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis.

Timothy Dalrymple recently talked with Goodman about the best approach for restoring free-market pricing mechanisms into the market for medical care and health insurance:
Read more on Want to Help the Poor? Promote a Free Market in Health Care…