Go to this page to watch a short video highlighting the story of one man’s fight against Canada’s health system. The film is focused on the defects of socialized medicine and so, naturally, does not deal with the serious problems existing in other systems (such as the United States). But it is an effective display of a problem that every attempt to manipulate prices encounters: how to make supply meet demand. ...

The Acton Institute’s offices are right across the Grand River from the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum (and what will be Ford’s final resting place). Having passed these sites every day for several years on my walk to work, news of the ex-president’s death was especially poignant. National Review Online offers an interesting symposium on Ford’s presidency and legacy. From the other side of the ideological divide, Newsweek provides several retrospective pieces. A striking thing about Ford that I hadn’t...

Our series on the year in review continues with the second quarter: April “Surprise! Evangelical Politics Isn’t Univocal,” Jordan J. Ballor So from issues like immigration to global warming, the press is eager to find the fault lines of evangelical politics. And moving beyond the typical Jim Wallis-Jerry Falwell dichotomy, there are real and honest disagreements among evangelicals on any number of political issues…. May “How Do You Spell Relief?” Jordan J. Ballor If Congress really wants to address the...

Syracuse University professor Arthur Brooks challenges perceived mainstream social orthodoxy in his new book, Who Really Cares: America’s Charity Divide – Who Gives, Who Doesn’t and Why It Matters. For generations it has been assumed that political and social liberals are generous towards the poor while conservatives are proverbial tightwads. At least since the days of Charles Dickens’ Scrooge this has been the popular view. Liberals continually remind us that they are the ones who really care about welfare since...

The “10 years after welfare reform” articles of this past summer are old news, of course. Not surprisingly, indications were that, like any public policy, reform hadn’t been the all-time poverty solution, but that policies had, in fact, helped a significant number of people to move themselves to self-sufficiency. A recent Wall Street Journal series highlighted the broad range of issues related to moving out of poverty. panion piece to the December 28 entry, “Economists Are Putting Theories to Scientific...

Our series on the year in review continues with the third fourth of 2006: July “Isn’t the Cold War Over?” David Michael Phelps I’ve got an idea for a new . Titled, Hugo and Vladi, it details the zany adventures of two world leaders, one of whom (played by David Hyde Pierce) struggles to upkeep his image of a friendly, modern European diplomat while his goofball brother-in-law (played by George Lopez) keeps screwing it up for him by spouting off...

In this week’s mentary, I reflect on the past year’s developments for InnerChange Freedom Initiative, a ministry of Prison Fellowship. In June a federal judge in Iowa ruled against IFI’s work at Iowa’s Newton facility. In his ruling (PDF here), the judge wrote that the responsibility bating recidivism is “traditionally and exclusively reserved to the state.” This means that since reducing recidivism is a “state function,” anyone working bat recidivism is by definition a “state actor.” Panopticon blueprint by Jeremy...

Our 2006 year in review series concludes with the fourth quarter: October “Do You See More than Just a ‘Carbon Footprint’?” Jordan J. Ballor It’s a fair question to ask, I think, of those who are a part of the radical environmentalist/population control political lobby. It’s also a note of caution to fellow Christians who want to build bridges with those folks…there is plex of interrelated policies that are logically consistent once you assume the tenets of secular environmentalism…. November...

Several weeks ago now I was offered a review copy of Gore’s Inconvenient Truth. After watching it on a cross-country flight in November I elected to let Gore’s expos’e sink in a bit before I pasted my thoughts more or less permanently on the web. Thanks in advance to Rachel Guthermann of Special Ops Media for being patient with me on posting the review. It’s probably fitting to end the year with a nod to this influential movie; it’s pelling...

I have just returned from a week of holiday rest, and began tackling my 250 lb. email inbox. Flipping through a number of Christmas greetings and Fruitcake (Xmas spam), I came across a quick message from a dear friend, an email of the sort where the message is in the subject line, and the text is left empty (save mon signatures or disclaimers). My friend is a lawyer, I respect him very much, but I had to laugh at how...