Rev. Robert A. Sirico appeared on the Frank Pastore Show Oct. 15 to discuss Vice President Joe Biden’s claim that the HHS mandate was not a threat to religious liberty and the quick rebuke he received from the Catholic bishops. Rev. Sirico also discussed broad faith and policy themes, including how best to reduce poverty, in this hour-long program.
Read more on Audio: Rev. Sirico on Faith, Politics and Joe Biden…
On National Review Online, Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg offers an analysis of last night’s debate between President Barack Obama and Gov. Mitt Romney. Gregg begins with the assertion by Melinda Henneberger of the Washington Post that the candidates are ignoring poor and working-class Americans. Gregg responds:
I think somebody needs to admit that the level of pandering to women in this election is over the top. Whether it is Ann Romney awkwardly yelling, “I love you women” at the Republican National Convention, or the ridiculous “War on Women” meme from the left. The examples are just too many to cite and evaluate for one post. So much of it is focus driven and poll tested and here with us to stay, but the issue still needs to be addressed.
Read more on The Presidential Debate and Pandering to Women…
Writing in National Review Online, Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg weighs in on Mitt Romney’s remarks about the “47 percent”:
Ever since the modern welfare state was founded (by none other than that great “champion” of freedom Otto von Bismarck as he sought, unsuccessfully, to persuade industrial workers to stop voting for the German Social Democrats), Western politicians have discovered that welfare programs and subsidies more generally are a marvelous way of creating constituencies of people who are likely to keep voting for you as long as you keep delivering the goods. In terms of electoral dynamics, it sometimes reduces elections to contests about which party can give you more — at other people’s expense.
Video: At the Democratic National Convention, delegates opposed to adding language on God, Israel’s capital to platform shout, “No!” in floor vote.
On Powerline, John Hinderaker quotes from a recent Rasmussen Reports poll to show that “Democrats, bluntly put, have become the party of those who don’t go to church.”
Ismael Hernandez responds to President Obama’s “You didn’t get there on your own” speech with a piece titled “Obama’s Assault on Entrepreneurship: An Economic Roadmap to Nowhere,” on Crisis Magazine’s website. Hernandez, founder of the Freedom & Virtue Institute and regular Acton lecturer, employs Catholic moral teaching to determine just how much credit the government deserves for an entrepreneur’s successes. The President’s statements, Hernandez reasons, fail to account for the freedom of the individual to make sound economic and moral decisions. For the sake of example, Hernandez looks to public schools:
That seems to be the story, based on what Veronique de Rugy has written at National Review Online. Calling for tax increases in an economic downturn doesn’t make any sense, even under Keynesian theories. So why do so many Keynesians seem to be supporting the idea of allowing tax increases for those earning more than $250,000 a year?
Reason Magazine expanded on this question on their blog. They argue that this trend reveals more about neo-Keynesians like Paul Krugman than it does about the actual accomplishments or shortcomings of John Maynard Keynes. Read more on When Politics Trump Economics…
On Friday, President Obama, during a campaign event in Virginia, told the crowd that people with successful businesses couldn’t give themselves a bit of credit:
Look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart….Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.
There are a number of people who might be startled to hear this. In The Call of the Entrepreneur, three men describe how they did “get there on their own”. For instance, Brad Morgan, a dairy farmer from Michigan, had to figure out how to save his failing dairy farm. And he did. HE did: not a government program, not a nebulous “somebody”, but Mr. Morgan himself.
Read more on “Somebody else made that happen”: tell it to an entrepreneur…
In response to the Supreme Court ruling on Obamacare’a individual mandate, National Review Online launched a symposium — a roundup of commentary — which posed the following question: “What’s next for both conservatives and the Republican party on health-care reform?” Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg contributed this analysis:
Read more on Samuel Gregg on the Supreme Court and the Individual Mandate…
In a recent speech, President Obama invoked Scripture to justify his ambitious spending plans. In this week’s Acton Commentary (published May 25), Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg notes that the president said nothing about the role of private communities and associations in helping our brothers and sisters in need. What’s more, “our leader hasn’t noticed that even some European governments, many of whom have been handing out as much pork as possible to politically-connected, politically-correct crony-capitalists over the past 15 years, are concluding many of these projects aren’t likely to be economically-viable either now or in the distant future,” Gregg writes. The full text of his essay follows. Subscribe to the free, weekly Acton News & Commentary and other publications here.
Read more on Commentary: So who is our Keeper, Mr. President?…
