Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'morality'

Public Life, Private Vice in American Life

In his latest book, Moral Vision: Leadership from George Washington to Joe Biden, Marvin Olasky, author of the highly influential Tragedy of American Compassion (and Acton affiliate scholar), examines American history in light of a Turkish saying, “the fish stinks first at the head,” meaning that moral decay at the highest echelons of society inevitably affects the whole. Continue Reading...

How Cars Can Keep Us Human

Truck drivers are cowboys. I work at a food warehouse. Truckers show up with 40,000 pounds of primal-cut beef, equivalent to maybe 50 head of cattle, driven from Nebraska, by a team of horses, bit, bridled, and reined by internal combustion. Continue Reading...

Should morality be legislated?

Should governments legislate morality? It depends on how we define our terms. If “legislate morality” is simply defined as “making laws that are moral,” then it is obvious that we should legislate morality. Continue Reading...

The moral weight of taxation

As Congress works on a $6 trillion spending bill that would be funded by higher taxes and increasing the national debt, Americans should be asking themselves: When is taxation morally permissible? Continue Reading...

Law and morality: not a simple affair

The role of the state, in spheres ranging from public morality to the economy, is one of several axes around which debates about the conservative movement’s future are presently revolving. In a 2020 article, I critiqued common-good constitutionalism for its misreading of how the natural law tradition treats the role of the state and law vis-à-vis morality. Continue Reading...

Walter Williams, RIP

The world has lost a voice for logic, liberty, and love of the U.S. Constitution. Economist Walter Williams died overnight at the age of 84. Williams worked his way out of grinding poverty in the Philadelphia housing projects to chair George Mason University’s economics department, author 10 books and more than 150 publications, and become one of the most recognized commentators of the last four decades. Continue Reading...

America remains

From the ancient Greeks and Romans – from Heraclitus and Polybius to Livy – Western civilization came to accept the idea that all governments, but especially free ones, go through distinct organic and biological stages. Continue Reading...