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April 18, 2018

Is big government a near occasion of sin?

It happens every day: The news tells us of some new government scandal. The executive branch uses dubious powers to circumvent the constitutional strictures of oversight. The judicial branch, in turn, creates law out of whole cloth and styles its invention the “law of the land.” Continue Reading...
April 18, 2018

New York City ideologues get indigestion over Chick-fil-A

America’s fastest-growing food chain has come to New York City. But as Hunter Baker notes in this week’s Acton Commentary, the “company’s success sticks in the craw of some who find it to be an alien presence due to the Christianity of the family who owns the company and their traditional values.” Continue Reading...
April 18, 2018

A polite rebuke of Pope Francis’ economic confusion

Review of Pope Francis and the Caring Society, edited by Robert M. Whaples; The Independent Institute, Oakland, CA; 2017, 234 pp. Having toiled in the free-market research universe for nearly two decades, perhaps the most common misperception I’ve encountered is “whataboutism.” Continue Reading...
April 18, 2018

Is economics an ideology?

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. Continue Reading...