A new study by Grand Valley State University professors Leslie Muller and Paul Isely suggests that the Affordable Care Act has already cost West Michigan 1000 jobs. Muller summarized the results in a Wood TV story: “Firms are actually holding off on hiring or their reducing their hiring that they were thinking they were going to be doing because of the ACA,” said Muller. The 1,000 jobs lost does not include the number of workers in West Michigan that have...

It was once mon practice of saloons in America to provide a “free lunch” to patrons who had purchased at least one drink. Many foods on offer were high in salt (ham, cheese, salted crackers, etc.), so those who ate them naturally ended up buying a lot of beer. In his 1966 sci-fi novel, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein used this practice in a saloon on the moon to highlight an economic principle: “It was when you...

Is America inherently unfair to females? Do we need to expand government programs and invest in new ones in order to get women out of poverty and keep them above the poverty line? Carrie Lukas, the managing director at the Independent Women’s Forum, believes the answer is a resounding, “No!” Lukas replies to the recent Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Pushes Back From the Brink. There are a lot of negative issues with this report, but Lukas says the primary...

The legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., like most mortals, evokes a certain ambivalence regarding what should be celebrated and what should be rightly critiqued. There are certainly parts of his life and thinking that warrant correction, rebuke, and challenge, but this will be true of all us if we live long enough. On this MLK holiday, however, I am thinking about my parents. My parents spent the first third of their lives being denied the equal application of...

The focus of Acton University is scholarship: the participants spend their days learning from a faculty that is wide-ranging, plished, and masters in their chosen fields. The Acton Institute is pleased that Judge Andrew Napolitano, currently a Fox News Senior Analyst, will be joining us to teach “Freedom of Conscience and the Constitution.” Judge Napolitano, author of numerous books including It Is Dangerous to Be Right When the Government Is Wrong: The Case for Personal Freedom and Theodore and Woodrow:...

Yesterday I mentioned that translating economic principles into intuitive concepts is one of the most urgent and necessary tasks to prevent such evils as harm to the poor. Today, William Poole provides an excellent example of what is needed with his mon-sense thought experiment” on minimum wage increases: Suppose Congress were to enact a minimum wage $50 higher than the current one of $7.25 per hour. Would a minimum of $57.25 reduce employment? I know of no economist who would...

Many people believe laws to protect ownership and private property primarily favor the wealthy. But as Prof. Dan Russell explains, lack of property protections can lead to abject poverty. (Via: Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics) ...

On Tuesday, in his first cabinet meeting of the year, President Obama indicated he is prepared to use executive actions more frequently to advance administration goals. “We are not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we are providing Americans the kind of help that they need. I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone,” Obama told his Cabinet. Over at First Things, Robert George, Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, provides a...

President Obama has called e inequality the “defining challenge of our time,” but is it strictly about paychecks? Ari Fleischer thinks there is definitely more to it; he believes it’s about the breakdown of the family and American rejection of marriage. “Marriage inequality” should be at the center of any discussion of why some Americans prosper and others don’t. According to Census Bureau information analyzed by the Beverly LaHaye Institute, among families headed by two married parents in 2012, just...

Martin Luther King, Jr. was fond of saying that the “arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” This was no thin, pragmatic account of rights-based egalitarian liberalism, says Derek Rishmawy, but rather a philosophically and theologically thick appeal to a divinely ordered and sustained cosmos. As Rishmawy notes, it is simply impossible to separate King’s denunciation of racism and segregation from his Christian confession and theological convictions about the nature of the universe: For King,...