I have mented on the failure of Republicans in Congress to exert any semblance of fiscal discipline, and have suggested that limited government principles do better when governmental power is divided rather than being dominated by one party, whether Democrat or Republican. Now, in a new book, Buck Wild: How Republicans Broke the Bank and Became the Party of Big Government , Stephen Slivinski draws on the data of the last twenty-five years to draw the same conclusion. Michael J....

How different is this… In a recent WSJ story, “A Novel Way to Reduce Home Energy Bills,” Sara Schaefer Muñoz writes about the possibility of adding windmills to homes in order to cut down on the cost of utilities. “While wind energy monly associated with massive turbines churning in desolate, windy areas, a new generation of smaller systems made for areas with moderate wind is hitting the market. The latest small turbines, which resemble a ship propeller on a pole,...

“Oh, the shark, babe, has such teeth, dear / And it shows them pearly white… Ya know when that shark bites, with his teeth, babe / Scarlet billows start to spread…” –Bobby Darin, “Mack the Knife,” 1959 He asked for it. You may be familiar with the games for social change movement, which attempts to bring the power of video games to bear on social problems, such as hunger and war (for more, see a previous post here). Well, the...

Here’s a summary of a piece over at Forum 18: Economics has a large effect on China’s religious freedom, Forum 18 News Service notes. Factors such as the need of munities for non-state e, significant regional wealth disparities, conflicts over economic interests, and artificially-induced dependence on the state e all provide the state with alternative ways of exercising control over munities. Examples where economics has a noticeable effect on religious freedom include, to Forum 18’s knowledge, the Buddhist Shaolin Temple’s...

In the midst of rising oil prices, massive energy bills, speculation about our supplies of oil – not to mention global warming – a small beacon lights up in Ireland. A pany named Steorn has made an announcement that it has discovered free energy. I’ll admit, like most others probably will at this point, that I’m a little skeptical, but Steorn says that it has created “test-rigs” that use only magnetic fields (with no ponents) to create energy out of...

Did you know that there is legislation in the works that would set up a databse making it possible for you and me to track how the federal government is (mis)spending our money? It is the subject of a mystery over at WSJ: In April, Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn introduced legislation that would set-up a database to track an estimated $1 trillion in federal grants, earmarks, contracts and loans. Americans would be able to perform Google-like searches to track how...

The Acton Institute was not making animated films in 1948, but if we were, this might have been what we came up with. Though it starts out a bit slow, keep with it; it’s actually a pretty coherent defense of the free market. ...

From the “why didn’t we think of that first” department: The trade which can lift peoples out of poverty is assailed from many directions. A motley assortment of protectionists and anti-capitalists use every argument they can lay their hands on to protect their interests. From the CAP to ‘food miles,’ the effect is to deny poorer people the chance to gain wealth by selling us what they produce. Those who embrace free trade as an instrument of good can now...

Today, Dr. Samuel Gregg of the Acton Institute delivered a lecture entitled “Why Love Matters: Understanding Pope Benedict XVI’s First Encyclical, Deus Caritas Est.” The address explored Pope Benedict’s first encyclical – the subject of which came as a surprise to many – and delved into the background of the pope’s encyclical on Christian love, outlining its implications for the Church’s social teaching and its engagement with the world. If you weren’t able to attend the lecture in person, you...

Regular readers may have already inferred that I am fascinated by demographics. So I enjoyed this piece at by Arthur C. Brooks, who uses survey data to show that conservatives have more babies than liberals. He presses the statistics, moreover, into the service of demonstrating that the trend bodes ill for Democratic Party political success. pletely seriously, there are problems with the analysis—for example, what “liberal” and “conservative” mean with respect both to survey answers and to politics—but taken light-heartedly,...