Dan Hugger is Librarian and Research Associate at the Acton Institute.
Posts by Dan Hugger
August 27, 2018
Corey Robin, professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, wrote an interesting and troubling piece last week in the New York Times titled, “The New Socialists: Why the pitch from Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders resonates in 2018.” It is part chronicle of the recent rise of self-identified socialist politicians in the United States and part meditation on what people in 2018 mean when they talk about socialism.
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May 07, 2018
Last month the Washington Post reported, “Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will announce a plan for the federal government to guarantee a job paying $15 an hour and health-care benefits to every American worker “who wants or needs one,”…” These jobs would be the product of hundreds of government projects initiated in, “…infrastructure, care giving, the environment, education and other goals.” The projects, their costs, and how they would be financed have yet to be disclosed.
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April 24, 2018
Mark Labberton, President of Fuller Seminary, recently addressed a meeting of Evangelical leaders held at Wheaton College and has released a reconstruction of his remarks. It is an interesting address which spends four paragraphs explicitly addressing questions of economics and economic policy.
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April 18, 2018
Richard H. Spady, research professor of Economics at Johns Hopkins, has recently published a piece at First Things entitled ‘Economics as Ideology’ in which he explores some contemporary trends among economists and their use of economics as a Procrustean bed to reshape society in its own image,
A body of thought is “ideological” when it willfully projects its own first principles on its subject matter and actively seeks, perhaps unconsciously, material changes to bring social realities into conformity with these first principles.
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March 22, 2018
Lester DeKoster begins his book
Communism and Christian Faith, now out in a new edition from Christian’s Library Press, with a quote from Bishop Joseph Butler’s sermon ‘Upon the Character of Balaam’:
“Things and actions are what they are, and their consequences will be what they will be: why then should we seek to be deceived?”
At first it seems transparently simple, obvious really, but in our day-to-day lives it is as obscure as it was to Balaam himself.
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March 14, 2018
Once upon a time I was a teacher. A regular ‘according-to-Holye’ teacher of English, History, Government, and Economics in public high schools. The reasons I am no longer a teacher are relatively simple and boring.
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March 12, 2018
Elizabeth Bruenig, columnist for the
Washington Post, yesterday published an opinion piece entitled, ‘Let’s have a good-faith argument about socialism’ responding to some critics of her earlier piece, ‘It’s time to give socialism a try’.
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March 07, 2018
Elizabeth Bruenig, columnist for the
Washington Post, yesterday published an opinion piece entitled, ‘It’s time to give socialism a try’. The title is a bit misleading as the piece makes no positive case for socialism but rather chronicles her own and several others convictions that something in our society has gone terribly wrong.
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March 06, 2018
At this year’s LibertyCon Byran Caplan, Economist at George Mason University, and Elizabeth Bruenig, columnist for the Washington Post, debated the perennial question of ‘Socialism vs. Capitalism.’ Both Caplan and Bruenig have posted their opening statements and it is an interesting and engaging exchange.
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April 24, 2017
The Acton Institute recently donated a number of titles on faith, work, and economics to the Theological Book Network which will distribute them to its partner institutions in what it calls the ‘Majority World’ (‘Majority World’ is a term coined to replace earlier sometimes anachronistic or misleading terms like ‘Third World’ or ‘Developing World’).
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