Government

January 28, 2020

Churches, tax exemption, and the common good

Are churches tax exempt as a matter of privilege or right? What does tax exception cost communities and churches? Christianity Today has been hosting an interesting debate on these issues. Paul Matzko, Assistant Editor for Tech and Innovation at the CATO Institute, argued in the cover story of this month’s issue that tax exemption comes at a high a cost to the communities in which they are located: This feeling that churches don’t contribute to the common good is not uncommon in America. Continue Reading...

January 23, 2020

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s crass Marxist materialism

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. Continue Reading...

January 21, 2020

Bernie Sanders tweets a recipe for exacerbating the housing crisis

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. Continue Reading...

January 20, 2020

Donald Boudreaux on why Oren Cass’s comparative advantage is not discussing comparative advantage

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. Continue Reading...

January 15, 2020

If government can dream it, can it do it?

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.’ Continue Reading...

January 13, 2020

Hayek, Catholic social teaching, and social justice

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. Continue Reading...

January 10, 2020

The NHS: The god that failed

In 1949, half-a-dozen ex-Communists wrote a book about their former faith, dubbing socialism The God that Failed. As the UK’s revered National Health Service enters its worst spiral on record, it seems to have earned that title. Continue Reading...

January 09, 2020

Gertrude Himmelfarb: Teacher of the Free and Virtuous Society

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. Continue Reading...

January 08, 2020

Tyler Cowen’s “State Capacity Libertarianism”: A Straussian Reading

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. Continue Reading...

December 23, 2019

The government funds U.S. farmers – and their competitors

When government becomes sufficiently large, its impact on private citizens is not just harmful; it’s self-contradictory. U.S. policy toward dairy farmers offers a poignant example. Joseph Sunde recently explored one aspect of U.S. Continue Reading...

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