Today’s new rich is the “government rich” according to Peter Schweizer. Massive centralization of money, resources, and regulation has allowed our public servants and many big businesses to thrive. The poor, new business start ups, the taxpayer, and the free market are punished. Washington and corporate elites profit from the rules and regulations they create for their own benefit and their cronies. As daily news reports currently reminds us, Washington is a cesspool of corruption and abuse of power.

Read more on Religion & Liberty: The Moral Crisis of Crony Capitalism…

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble is a frustrated man. With unemployment rates in Germany hovering at around 8 percent, and Greece and Spain at almost 60 percent, he believes the EU is on the brink of “revolution.” His answer is not to scrap the welfare model however; he wants to preserve it.

While Germany insists on the importance of budget consolidation, Schaeuble spoke of the need to preserve Europe’s welfare model.

If U.S. welfare standards were introduced in Europe, “we would have revolution, not tomorrow, but on the very same day,” Schaeuble told a conference in Paris.

Not everyone agrees. Italian Labour minister Enrico Giovannini says European youth are being asked to put their lives on hold, and that this is “unacceptable.” Werner Hoyer, head the European Investment Bank, acknowledged that there is no plan at this point to direct the spiraling downturn of the EU economy. There is, instead, a country-by-country “patchwork” approach. For instance, Greece is attempting to focus on job training and entrepreneurship for 350,000 young people, and France is working on a similar plan within its own borders. Read more on You Say You Want A Revolution? Count The EU Out…

Acton’s Director of Research and author of Becoming Europe, Sam Gregg, will be on TheBlaze TV tonight at 6 p.m. EST. The discussion will focus on the current economic situation in Cyprus, where some officials are saying bank depositors could lose up to 40% of their savings. Gregg’s book focuses on Europe’s entitlement culture, heavy taxation, government-regulated markets and over-bearing bureaucracy. He asks the question, “Is this America’s future?”

Read more on Samuel Gregg on TheBlaze TV: Europe is Getting Ugly Again…

Those who thought Pope Francis was going to be a “a jolly, badly-dressed, Gaia-worshipping baby-boomer from 1972 received a severe jolt of reality today”, says Sam Gregg, Acton’s Director of Research. In today’s National Review Online, Gregg is quick to clear up any thoughts of the new pope being a relativist or pop culture phenom. While Pope Francis has made it clear from the very beginning of his pontificate that he wishes to draw attention to the poor, he’s not simply concerned with money matters:

Read more on Samuel Gregg: Pope Francis and the Renaissance of Natural Law…

Michael Severance, operations manager of Acton’s Rome office, is asking the question on everyone’s mind, “Who will be pope #266?” In The Catholic World Report, Severance makes note of the “amateur assessments” first:

By now we have heard every hypothesis from scores of budget-pinching and rookie mass media stumbling on Piazza San Pietro’s uneven cobblestones. They multitask as correspondent-producer-fixers and are armed with the latest generation of smartphones, tablets, and other species of espresso-stained electronic gadgets that replace expensive backroom media techs.

You wonder when they have time to actually research their cases, much less post and broadcast their news.  But indeed time—moltissimo tempo—they have had.

They have spoken of the “Bergoglio comeback” (apparently he was a runner-up in 2005) and the mightily leveraged “Italian block” that will surely vote in one of their own to fill a 35-year power vacuum.

They have analyzed and lobbied for non-traditional but surely viable candidates from Latin America (Cardinal Scherer of Brazil), Africa (Cardinal Turkson of Ghana), and Asia (the “baby” 54-year-old Cardinal Tagle of the Philippines).

Severance, however, believes that there are more serious contenders. He interviewed several people with above-average insight into the conclave: Read more on Who Will Be Pope #266?…

The conclave to elect the new pope is scheduled to begin tomorrow afternoon after the public Missa pro Eligendo Pontifice (Mass for the Election of the Roman Pontiff) which is scheduled at 10am Rome time.   It was at this mass in 2005 after the death of John Paul II that the then Cardinal Ratizinger famously spoke of the “dictatorship of relativism.”   At 4:30 pm Rome time, the cardinals wearing full choir dress will enter the Sistine Chapel singing the hymn Veni Creator Spiritus (Come Holy Spirit).  Cardinals will enter into conclave (from the Latin cum clave, meaning “with key”) and they will be locked away from the world with no access to television, newspapers, or mobile phones until they have elected the new pope.

As the Conclave gets underway and the world waits to see who will be the next pope, here are some helpful hints for making your way through the media storm that is already underway.

1. The papal election is not a U.S.- or European-style political event.

In our hyper politicized world where almost everything is reduced to politics it is hard for our imagination to process a public event like the election of a new pope outside of the structures of politics.  That’s not to say there’s no politics in the Church.  There’s too much of it.  Way too much. And it’s always a factor.  Nevertheless trying to understand the papal election if the light of the American political system or interest and lobbying groups will not be of much help. Read more on A Guide to the Conclave…

There is always much to discuss after a State of the Union address, and Tuesday’s speech is no different. Sam Gregg, Director of Research at the Acton Institute, shared his thoughts:

Read more on State of the Union: The Government is Here to do Stuff for You…

Alan Wallace, editorial writer at the Pittsburgh Tribune, reviewed Sam Gregg’s new book Becoming Europe.

In his article, “Where America is, where it’s going,” Wallace notes that:

Americans increasingly say their nation‘s becoming more like Europe; the Acton Institute‘s research director, [Sam Gregg] tackles that trend and its dangers, which he thinks are greater than many of them realize. He explores the “Europeanization” of the United States via the welfare state, debt, government‘s share of GDP, crony capitalism, taxation, labor regulations, public-sector unionization, an aging population and what the publisher calls “the emergence of an ossifying political class” more concerned with self-preservation than with economic reform. Gregg also examines the role played by the values and institutions that inform our economic culture and priorities. He says America isn‘t Europe yet and sees a path to recovery in what distinguishes our economic culture, but warns that the more European the U.S. becomes, the harder that trend will be to reverse.

Read the entire article here. Becoming Europe: Economic Decline, Culture, and How America Can Avoid a European Future will be available on Tuesday, January 8. You can pre-order the hardcover or Kindle version here.

Read more on Review: Alan Wallace on ‘Becoming Europe’…

As noted already at the PowerBlog today, Sam Gregg has a fine piece on the complex relationship between law and morality, or constitutions and culture, over at Public Discourse.

As a follow-up (read the piece first), I’d like to point to an interesting aspect of James Buchanan’s advocacy of a balanced-budget amendment. As Gregg notes, Buchanan is an example of someone who thought that “America’s constitution required amending to bestow genuine independence upon a monetary authority,” or advocated for the “constitutionalization” of money. A related effort would be Buchanan’s efforts in support of a balanced-budget amendment to the American Constitution, as explored by James Alvey in his piece, “James M. Buchanan on the Ethics of Public Debt and Default.”
Read more on More on Constitutions and Culture…

Online today at The American Spectator is an article from Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg. The article highlights the forethought of German economist Wilhelm Röpke, who predicted Europe’s present economic downturn in the middle of the twentieth century. Röpke, Gregg says, was a “euroskeptic” before the term existed. Excerpt here:

Read more on Samuel Gregg: The Prophet of Europe’s Crisis…