Dan Hugger is Librarian and Research Associate at the Acton Institute.
Posts by Dan Hugger
July 16, 2019
Sarah Kliff did some fine reporting on, ‘The Lessons of Washington State’s Watered Down ‘Public Option’’ for the New York Times last month,
For those who dream of universal health care, Washington State looks like a pioneer.
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July 12, 2019
One of the abiding joys of working at a think tank like the Acton Institute is that interesting people are always asking you big questions. I was recently asked, “Why should Christians support free markets?” The question is large, interesting, and necessitates the answering of a more basic question first, “Why should Christians be interested in economics?”
Adam Smith, and his many antecedents, began crafting the analytical tools which we would come to call economics in response to phenomena which they saw in their world.
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July 01, 2019
The British economist John Kay made a powerful argument in his 2011 book Obliquity: Why our goals are best achieved indirectly that the best way to achieve any complex of broadly defined goal is indirectly through a gradual process of risk taking and discovery.
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June 26, 2019
One of the highlights of my summers working at the Acton Institute is leading discussions with our interns over major ideas, thinkers, and issues. This afternoon we had a spirited and thought provoking discussion about conservative critiques of liberalism.
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June 14, 2019
The American science fiction author Philip K. Dick was a strange guy. In addition to being a prolific author of many science fiction classics like
The Man in the High Castle,
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Continue Reading...
June 10, 2019
Last week Joe Carter helpfully gathered many of the contributions to what John Zmirak has called ‘The Iran-Iraq War Among Conservatives’. This at times heated exchange is largely between liberal and illiberal American conservatives and it is an important and lively one.
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June 03, 2019
Alex Tabarrok, professor of Economics at George Mason University and co-author of the Marginal Revolution blog, has co-authored a new book with Eric Helland exploring why prices have risen so sharply in healthcare and education.
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May 30, 2019
The Detroit News has published an opinion piece by Fr. Robert Sirico on our increasingly contentious public discourse, socialism, and the religious left titled ‘The dangers of creeping toward socialism’:
The popes have traditionally condemned socialism in the strongest possible terms as being incompatible with Christianity, because its concept of society itself is utterly foreign to Christian truth.
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May 28, 2019
Sen. Cory Booker, then a Newark city councilman, made the case for school vouchers at an Acton sponsored October 2000 event at the Wealthy Theater in Grand Rapids saying, “The cost of not doing the program is having continuing generations of kids chained to failing schools when they could be easily liberated if the parents were given the right to choose where they go with their money.”
School vouchers were then a hot topic in Michigan as Michiganders were debating Proposal 1 (2000), the Michigan Vouchers and Teacher Amendment, a proposed state constitutional amendment:
The proposed constitutional amendment would:
1) Eliminate ban on indirect support of students attending nonpublic schools through tuition vouchers, credits, tax benefits, exemptions or deductions, subsidies, grants or loans of public monies or property.
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May 22, 2019
Today
The Atlantic has published a response essay from Fr. Robert Sirico to James Carroll’s call for the abolition of the priesthood, the magazine’s cover story this month:
James Carroll, the author of this month’s Atlantic’s cover story, “Abolish the Priesthood,” is famous in certain Catholic circles for his bitter denunciations of the Church.
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