Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'benjamin franklin'

October 31, 2019

Benjamin Franklin’s advice on the Chicago schools strike

Their last remaining dispute in the Chicago schools strike could be resolved if both sides understood a basic economic concept taught by one of the nation’s Founding Fathers. Although the Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union announced a tentative agreement Wednesday evening, the Second City’s 300,000-plus students still began their eleventh day outside the classroom Thursday, because the CTU added a new demand Wednesday night. Continue Reading...
November 28, 2018

Demographic decline: Ben Franklin’s two cents

Not one of Benjamin Franklin’s better-known works, but one worth reading nonetheless, is a brief 1751 essay called Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c. Franklin covers a lot of ground in just a few pages, and brings up quite a few ideas worth commenting on, but I wanted to highlight one paragraph and its relevance for the “birth dearth” we see in the West today. Continue Reading...
June 07, 2016

Eric Metaxas’ golden triangle of freedom

We welcome guest writer Sam Webb to the PowerBlog with this review of If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty by Eric Metaxas (Viking, 2016). Webb is an attorney in Houston and studies at Reformed Theological Seminary. Continue Reading...
June 16, 2008

Encouraging a true culture of thrift

Picking up on themes we’ve touched on here, here, and here, last week NYT columnist David Brooks weighed in on the culture of debt in the United States. “The social norms and institutions that encouraged frugality and spending what you earn have been undermined,” he writes. Continue Reading...
October 03, 2006

Be Careful What You Wish For

Reading through the narrative of king Saul in 1 Samuel, it occurs to me that it is in part an object lesson of Lord Acton’s dictum about the corrupting influence of power, in this case political. Continue Reading...