Well, that wasn’t a serious title: After an hour of reflection, I am forced to admit that pizza qua pizza is a morally neutral proposition. We might have thought it was politically neutral too, until Congress decided this week that pizza sauce still counts as a serving of vegetables in public school lunch lines.
Read more on Pizza qua Vegetable: Acton Finds the Moral Dimension…
Dr. Donald Condit joined host Drew Mariani on the Relevant Radio Network to discuss the positives aspects of end-of-life planning as well as the troubling issues surrounding end-of-life care under government health care systems. Dr. Condit is an orthopedic surgeon and the author of Acton’s monograph on health care reform, entitled A Prescription for Health Care Reform and available in the Acton Bookshoppe; he has also authored a number of commentaries on health care for Acton and other organizations; his most recent commentary can be read right here. And don’t forget to check out Acton.org’s special section on Christians and Health Care for a wealth of related information.
Read more on Audio: Dr. Donald Condit on End of Life Planning and Health Care Reform…
Another election has come and gone, and once again the balance of power has significantly shifted in Washington, D.C. and statehouses across America. Tuesday’s results are, I suppose, a win for fans of limited government, in that a Republican House of Representatives will make it more difficult for President Obama and his Democrat colleagues in the Congress to enact more of what has been a very statist agenda. But even with the prospect of divided government on the horizon, we who believe in individual liberty and the principles of classical liberalism still have much to be concerned with. Perhaps the primary concern is whether or not those Republicans who were swept into office—not due to any real love of the electorate for the Republican Party, but rather due to anxiety over the direction the Democrats have taken the country—will be able to hold to the principles of limited government and individual liberty that so many of them claimed to espouse during the campaign, or whether those principles will be abandoned in a mad pursuit of power. Forefront in the mind of every lover of liberty should be Lord Acton’s famous maxim: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Read more on Video: Sirico on Christian Anthropology (and some thoughts on Election 2010)…
Among the warnings sounded as the Democratic health care reform bill was being debated was that the federal insurance mandate included in the bill—even though not national health care per se—would essentially give the federal government control of the insurance industry. The reason: If everyone is forced to buy insurance, then the government must deem what sort of insurance qualifies as adequate to meet the mandate. This piece of Obamacare promises to turn every medical procedure into a major political fight, with special interest lobbying rather than objective medical expertise being more likely to determine what kind of health care gets covered and what kind doesn’t.
Check out the links from this piece by Joe Knippenberg at No Left Turns, which make the case that “small-scale support for private slum schools—through scholarship programs, backing for school-voucher schemes, or subsidized microfinance—might do far more good than a big aid push directed at government-run education.”
