Samuel Gregg

Samuel Gregg is Distinguished Fellow in Political Economy and Senior Research Faculty at the American Institute for Economic Research and serves as affiliate scholar at the Acton Institute.

Posts by Samuel Gregg

A Spaniard defends Conservative Liberalism

“Conservative liberalism” isn’t a term commonly used in the United States. Indeed, to American ears, it seems positively oxymoronic. In Europe, however, it constitutes a venerable tradition of political thought and embraces figures ranging from the French thinkers Alexis de Tocqueville and Raymond Aron to economists such as the primary intellectual architect of the German economic miracle, Wilhelm Röpke, and the French monetary theorist Jacques Rueff. Continue Reading...

The state of entrepreneurship in America

Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is primarily and rightly regarded as a work of political science. But the book is also replete with economic observations. One of the most significant was Tocqueville’s astonishment at “the spirit of enterprise” that characterized much of the country. Continue Reading...

China rewrites the Bible

It’s no secret that as the Chinese economy enters a slowdown, the Chinese government has been taking an ever-more authoritarian approach towards virtually every aspect of life in the People’s Republic. Continue Reading...

Faith and liberty in Guatemala

To say that the history of Latin America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is marked by sadness and disappointment is hardly a novel insight. Whether it’s the persistence of cronyism throughout the region, the constant presence of Marxist ideology among intellectuals and in popular culture, the challenge of poverty, the crime and political violence, or the rampant populism that rears its head at regular intervals, many Latin Americans will tell you that theirs is the continent in which many things went backwards throughout the twentieth century. Continue Reading...

Elites, markets and cronyism

It’s no great secret that France is facing social upheaval and has some longstanding deep-set economic problems. Nor is it revealing to say that France’s political class is despised across the spectrum as woefully out of touch. Continue Reading...

Saint businesswoman

I often notice that whenever we talk about faith and business, the discussion is mostly about businessmen and their faith. But what about women who seek to live a life of holiness in business? Continue Reading...

Peter Jackson’s World War I film is superb

In 1909, the British scholar and later Nobel Peace Prize winner, Sir Norman Angell, published a short pamphlet entitled Europe’s Optical Illusion. Subsequently republished a year later as The Great Illusion, Angell argued that the economic cost of a mass war in the industrial capitalist world would be so great, that, if it happened at all, it would be momentary. Continue Reading...

Cronyism and conservatives

A major problem with America’s economy is what’s often called “crony capitalism” or simply “cronyism.” In other places, I’ve defined cronyism as the situation in which free markets are hollowed out and replaced by political markets. Continue Reading...

The Economist, Catholicism, and Europe

When it comes to the sophistication of its coverage of religious affairs, the Economist is better than most other British publications (admittedly not a high standard) which generally insist on trying to read religion through an ideologically-secularist lens. Continue Reading...