Dan Hugger is Librarian and Research Associate at the Acton Institute.
Posts by Dan Hugger
January 23, 2020
During a Martin Luther King Day discussion with the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., made clear that she is not just a democratic socialist but a Marxian one. Evie Fordham of Fox Business has written a helpful summary of the remarks, including Ocasio-Cortez’s concise explanation of the Marxist theory of the exploitation of labor:
“No one ever makes a billion dollars.
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January 21, 2020
Note: An expanded version of this post was released as this week’s Acton Commentary.
This week, Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Bernie Sanders, I-VT, tweeted the following reaction to a story from
The Economist describing rising American rent payments:
This is a crisis.
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January 20, 2020
Book sales data is hard to come by. Publishers keep their sales numbers close to their chest. The information is valuable. It shapes which authors, designers and editors publishers cultivate as well as which topics, genres and formats they invest in.
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January 20, 2020
Last week I wrote about the basic economic illiteracy behind of Oren Cass’s case for industrial policy. So basic were the mistakes that I thought perhaps I had misread Cass’s argument.
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January 15, 2020
Oren Cass, author of
The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America, has written a deeply confused response to Samuel Gregg’s essay ‘How Economic Nationalism Hurts Nations.’
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January 13, 2020
Last week David Deaval, Visiting Professor at the University of St. Thomas and 2013 Novak Award winner, wrote a very thoughtful essay on Fredrich Hayek, the question of social justice, and Catholic social teaching at the
Imaginative Conservative.
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January 09, 2020
Since the passing of Gertrude Himmelfarb I have been reflecting on just how much she taught me through her voluminous historical scholarship. In this week’s Acton Line Podcast I interviewed Yuval Levin, Resident Scholar and Director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at AEI, who was also her student.
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January 08, 2020
On a recent episode of the excellent podcast
Conversations with Tyler the economist Tyler Cowen reflected on the direction his and co-author Alex Tabarrok’s blog Marginal Revolution has taken over the last ten years:
[I]n 2009 I was still experimenting in some fresh way with blogging as a new medium and what it meant.
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December 31, 2019
I just heard some devastating news. Gertrude Himmelfarb, historian, moralist, wife, and mother, has passed. David Brooks has written a touching obituary detailing the life and legacy of this fascinating woman:
Economists measure economic change and journalists describe political change, but who captures moral change?
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December 18, 2019
In a recent Acton Line podcast I began by asking Father Robert Sirico the very large question, what is Catholic social teaching and why is it important today? He answered that the Church has always had a social teaching but that when we usually discuss Catholic social teaching today we begin with Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical
Rerum Novarum.
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