Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'socialism'

Samuel Gregg: The Left Resumes Its War on History

On The American Spectator, Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg examines how the left wages “a war of rejection and rationalization against whatever contradicts their mythologies.” Which explains why leftists get into a snit when you point out factual details like how Communist regimes “imprisoned, tortured, starved, experimented upon, enslaved, and exterminated millions” throughout the 20th century. Continue Reading...

Roger Scruton: No escaping morality in economics

Roger Scruton has written an excellent piece on the moral basis of free markets; it’s up at MercatorNet. He begins with the Islamic proscriptions of interest charged, insurance, and other trade in unreal things: Of course, an economy without interest, insurance, limited liability or the trade in debts would be a very different thing from the world economy today. Continue Reading...

Evelyn Waugh on Corporate Jets (sort of)

The recent English riots, soaked as they are in unrestrained Marxism, bring to mind one of the 20th century’s great anti-Marxists, the British novelist Evelyn Waugh. Waugh was a staunch—even curmudgeonly—defender of social order, and a derisive critic of Marxism, calling it in The Tablet “the opiate of the people.” Continue Reading...

Protect the Poor, Not Poverty Programs

My contribution to today’s Acton News & Commentary. Sign up for the free weekly Acton email newsletter here. Protect the Poor, Not Poverty Programs By John Couretas One of the disturbing aspects of the liberal/progressive faith campaign known as the Circle of Protection is that its organizers have such little regard – indeed are blind to — the innate freedom of the human person. Continue Reading...

Rev. Sirico on Helping the Poor

Rev. Robert A. Sirico was recently a guest on The Matt Friedeman Show where he discussed the difference between charity and socialism. He talks about not only how we should give, but also how we can best help the poor. Continue Reading...

Capitalist Anthropology

On RealClearMarkets, Mark Hunter dismantles “The End of Capitalism and the Wellsprings of Radical Hope,” by Eugene McCarraher in the Nation magazine. McCarraher’s article appears to be destined for the ash heap of Marxist utopian literature. Continue Reading...

Doing the Math on the Evil Rich

Bill Whittle at Declaration Entertainment uses a recent Iowahawk post, Feed Your Family on $10 Billion a Day, to figure out how an “Eat the Rich” economics program would work as a solution to our fiscal ills. Continue Reading...

Understanding Human Behavior

In “Human Nature and Capitalism” on AEI’s The American, Arthur C. Brooks and Peter Wehner look at three different “pictures” of what it means to be human and point to the one, foundational understanding that has undergirded the flourishing American culture of democratic capitalism: “If men were angels,” wrote James Madison, the father of the Constitution, in Federalist Paper No. Continue Reading...