Archived Posts 2012 - Page 9 of 160 | Acton PowerBlog

A Brief History of American Prosperity
Guy Sorman, City Journal

An entrepreneurial culture and the rule of law have nourished the nation’s economic dynamism.

Bible doesn’t command wealth redistribution, presenters say at theological meeting
David Roach, Baptist Press

Scripture does not require governments to redistribute wealth to help the poor, presenters in a session at the Evangelical Theological Society’s annual meeting said this fall.

Called to Creativity and Significance
Art Lindsley, Institute for Faith, Work & Economics

Only God can create something out of nothing, but we can, and are called to, create something out of something.

Dem Senators Plead for Delay in ObamaCare Taxes
Arnold Ahlert, FrontPageMag

The unintended consequences of the the Affordable Health Care Act, aka Obamacare, strike again.

Video: UAW President Bob King thanks Planned Parenthood, environmentalists, clergy, et al., at anti Right-To-Work Protest

LifeSiteNews.com looks at the — at first blush as least — strange alliance between the United Auto Workers union and Planned Parenthood on the Michigan Right to Work issue. Elise Hilton of the Acton Institute, interviewed by LifeSiteNews reporter Kirsten Andersen, says that the UAW, Planned Parenthood and other like minded groups are afraid that right-to-work laws will help defund the progressive agenda.

“I don’t think people outside of maybe the leadership of the UAW or Planned Parenthood know about the strong ties between unions and Planned Parenthood,” Hilton told LifeSiteNews.com. “I don’t think they realize that the president of Planned Parenthood was the keynote speaker for the UAW conference, or that the UAW says on their own website that they ‘strenuously support a woman’s right to choose.’”

The ties between unions and the pro-choice movement go beyond mutual support. The leadership of the two groups overlaps, as well.

Last year, the UAW appointed Mary Beth Cahill director of its national political efforts. Cahill had previously spent five years running EMILY’s list, a political action committee (PAC) dedicated to electing pro-abortion politicians.

UAW President Bob King showered Cahill with praise for her efforts, saying, “During her five years at EMILY’s List, she helped turn the pro-choice PAC into an unrivaled political powerhouse—the largest in the country at the time.”

Read the entire LifeSiteNews.com article, with more analysis from Hilton, here.

It’s no secret that certain parts of the world have been losing population for some time. The tightly-controlled Chinese birthrate is the first thing that comes to most minds regarding this topic. However, large parts of Asia, Europe and now even the United States are beginning to see clear danger signs when it comes to economies and low birth rates.

Taiwan’s birthrate is “dropping like a stone…” says an editorial in the Taipei Times. The majority of people realize there is a demographic problem. It could hardly be otherwise, since the total fertility rate—the number of children per woman—is an anemic 0.9. Few are motivated to do anything about it, however. Taiwan is now heavily urbanized, and city folk tend to have very small families. When asked, younger Taiwanese say that they are not interested in having children because they cost too much money, or take too much time. Women are more motivated to get a college degree and seek professional employment than to marry and have children. In this highly secularized society, children are not seen not as a blessing, but as a burden tying down the women who bear them. Goodbye, Taiwan.

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If you haven’t joined us for this lecture series yet, there’s still time! The final live session for the Globalization, Poverty, and Development AU Online series, Fair Trade vs. Free Trade, has been postponed. This means that you now have a few extra days to catch up on the lectures that we’ve already held before joining us next week for Victor Claar’s lecture on Tuesday, December 18, 2012.

Also, if you’re interested in learning more about topics related to development, trade, globalization, or human flourishing, be sure to check out the recently released DVD Series from our friends at PovertyCure.

In France, more than half of the population benefits directly or indirectly from welfare payments. Not surprisingly, the result has been that that the poverty rate for the past twenty years has remained unchanged. “Despite its good intentions,” says Sylvain Charat, “welfareship has created a ‘poverty trap.’”
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One of the strongest arguments against Right to Work legislation is that such laws exasperates the “free rider” problem. In the context of unions, a free rider is an employee who pays no union dues or agency shop fees, but nonetheless receives the same benefits of union representation as dues-payers. While this concern should not override an employee’s right of free association, it was a concern that, I had always thought was worth taking seriously.

But yesterday I discovered that there is no free rider problem unless a union explicitly chooses to create free riders.

Policy wonk extraordinaire Reihan Salam pointed out a helpful explanation by James Sherk:
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This past Friday, I had the opportunity to present a paper at the Sophia Institute annual conference at Union Theological Seminary. This year’s topic was “Marriage, Family, and Love in the Eastern Orthodox Tradition.” My paper was titled, “What Makes a Society?” and focused, in the context of marriage and the family, on developing an Orthodox Christian answer to that question. The Roman Catholic and neo-Calvinist answers, subsidiarity and sphere sovereignty, respectively (though not mutually exclusive), receive frequent attention on the PowerBlog, but, to my knowledge, no Orthodox answer has been clearly articulated, and so it can be difficult to know where to begin. To that end, it is my conviction—and a subject of my research—that a historically sensitive, Orthodox answer to this question can found be in the idea of asceticism, rightly understood.

While I will not reproduce my paper here, I wanted to briefly summarize two of its main points that might have broader interest. First of all, what is asceticism? Second, how can asceticism be viewed as an organizational principle of society? Lastly, I want to briefly explore—beyond the scope of my paper—the relevance of this principle for a free society. (more…)