Samuel Gregg, Director of Research at the Acton Institute, joins host Al Kresta on Ave Maria Radio’s Kresta in the Afternoon to discuss the level of fort that some conservative Catholics have felt in recent months with the pontificateof Pope Francis. Is the pope a liberal, as he is sometimes portrayed by the media? Does he hold to longstanding teachings of the Catholic Church? Gregg and Kresta address these and other issues, and take calls from listeners in this half-hour...

Acton Institute Director of Research Samuel Gregg has a busy calendar of media appearances these days; late last week, he joined host Sheila Liaugminas on Relevant Radio’s A Closer Lookfor a full broadcast hour to discuss the ing year in politics and wider society. That interview is available for your listening enjoyment via the audio player below. He’ll also be appearing this afternoon during the five o’clock hour on Ave Maria Radio’sKresta in the Afternoon; streaming audio will be available...

Even before the Paris attacks, there were worries over a sharp rise in anti-Semitism in the UK and mainland Europe in 2014, says Caroline Wyatt of the BBC. In the past few years thousands of French Jews have fled the country to the one place they feel safe: Israel. “The French munity is gripped by a very deep sense of insecurity and that sense is often traced back to the attack in Tolouse in 2012,” says Avi Mayer, a spokesperson...

In this American Enterprise Institute Vision Talk, Chancellor of DC Public Schools Kaya Henderson talks about the state of public education reform. She says we have the opportunity to change everything we’ve been doing wrong in education for the past 100 years, but we are failing at the task. How, she asks, do we consistently produce quality education for all children? Can it even be done? It is interesting to note that one focal point of Henderson’s talk munity. Although...

At Wired, Issie Lapowsky says most of us are paying rent on our garbage. Not that we think of it that way. Millions of businesses are paying billions of dollars in rent on their garbage. They don’t think of it that way, of course, just as the fees they pay trash haulers to pick up their junk. But a significant portion of that money covers the cost of the landfill space itself. And what is a landfill if not a...

Not Abba Pistamon Today at Ethika Politika, I examine some ancient economic wisdom from one of the desert fathers: Abba Pistamon. Far from the newest of Nintendo’s Pokemon monsters (despite the sound of his name), Abba Pistamon was one of the first Christian monks. The dialogue between him and an unnamed brother that I examine from the Sayings of the Desert Fathers has a lot to say about production, labor, profit, and exchange. I write, Far from a gnostic allergy...

You may have heard of the puter game World of Warcraft (WoW), which recently released its fifth expansion, which adds more quests, dungeons, and other content, in November. WoW has over 10 million players and there are few signs of this slowing down, which is impressive for a game originally released in 2004. What you might not have known is that there plex economic and social structures in place everywhere in the game. But do these systems mirror real life...

What is the annual cost of regulations for America? The short answer is that no one knows for sure. The officially reported regulatory costs as reported by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) total up to $128.7 billion. But the real costs of regulation is impossible since, as the Nobel-winning economist James Buchanan said, “Cost cannot be measured by someone other than the decision-maker because there is no way that subjective experience can be directly observed.” Still, we can...

In light of the discussion about distributism in the ments, I’m posting John Zmirak’s excellent Religion & Liberty review of The Hobbit Party: The Vision of Freedom that Tolkien Got and the West Forgot by Jonathan Witt and Jay Richards (Ignatius Press, 2014) here on the PowerBlog. Note how he ends the review with a discussion of Tolkien and whether his work lent support to distributism. Have at it. In Praise of the Bourgeois, Liberty-Loving Race of Hobbits By John...

I think it is important to keep in mind that it is not the world of economics that is critical to human life on earth. When I left the field of economics for what I still believe to be a more important life agenda, it was because I regarded economics as driving cross-country at 80 mph with myeyes firmly fixed on the rear-view mirror. We do, in fact, live in a world defined by economic and political realities, just as...