Latest Posts

April 26, 2017

Audio: Victor Claar on whether Trump’s budget is un-Christian

On Saturday, Victor Claar, Professor of Economics at Henderson State University and Affiliate Scholar at the Acton Institute, joins host Julie Roys and Jenny Eaton Dyer of Hope Through Healing Hands on Moody Radio’s Up For Debate to discuss how Christians should respond to President Trump’s first budget proposal, especially as it relates to proposed cuts in US foreign aid. Continue Reading...
April 25, 2017

Remembering Kate O’Beirne

Longtime Acton Institute friend and supporter Kate O’Beirne passed away this past weekend. Below are Father Robert Sirico’s thoughts on this accomplished woman: I feel like I have always known Kate O’Beirne, so the passing of this woman of keen intellect, sharp wit and fearless rhetoric in confronting the nostrums of our day leaves me feeling very, very sad. Continue Reading...
April 25, 2017

Taxes on unhealthy food do nothing but hurt the poor

Throughout history, societies have found peculiar ways to reinforce social hierarchies and class-based discrimination. A common way is to prohibit certain social classes from being able to purchase a good. These types of laws that regulate permitted consumption of particular goods and services are known as sumptuary laws. Continue Reading...
April 25, 2017

Price Controls and Communism

Note: This is post #30 in a weekly video series on basic microeconomics. What happens when price controls are used in communist countries? As Alex Tabarrok explains, all of the effects of price controls become amplified: there are even more shortages or surpluses of goods, lower product quality, longer lines and more search costs, more losses in gains from trade, and more misallocation of resources. Continue Reading...
April 25, 2017

Samuel Gregg on the fracturing of France

With the first round of the French election results in, and no major candidates even managing to get a quarter of the total votes, two candidates remain: Marine Le Pen of the National Front, a populist and nationalist party, and Emmanuel Macron, the center-Left candidate of the “En Marche!” Continue Reading...
April 24, 2017

Marine Le Pen’s economics unite populist Right and far-Left

Emmanuel Macron may have won the first round of the French presidential elections on Sunday, but Marine Le Pen won a political victory of her own. The statist undercurrent running through her nationalist and populist policies successfully bridged the gap between France’s “far-Right” and socialist Left, according to Marco Respinti in a new essay for Religion & Liberty Transatlantic. Continue Reading...
April 24, 2017

Acton books distributed to schools by Theological Book Network

  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’). Continue Reading...
April 24, 2017

Humans care about economic fairness, not economic inequality

A new study published in the science journal Nature Human Behaviour finds that in most situation people are unconcerned about economic inequality as long as distributions of wealth are fair: There is immense concern about economic inequality, both among the scholarly community and in the general public, and many insist that equality is an important social goal. Continue Reading...