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In the wake of socialism, Venezuela’s black-market capitalists meet community needs

The Venezuelan people continue to struggle and sufferunder the weight of severe socialist policies—facing increased poverty and hunger, swelling suicide rates, and widespread social unrest. Yet even as its president admits to anationwide economic emergency, the government continues to celebrate the very drivers behind the collapse,blaminglow oil prices and “global capitalism,” instead. Meanwhile, amid the turmoil and desperation, Venezuela’s localcapitalism is beginning to emerge as a solution to the woes of socialism. According to Patricia Laya at Bloomberg, the country...

Radio Free Acton: The story of Arthur Vandenberg; Russell Kirk’s horror fiction

On this episode of Radio Free Acton, Gleaves Whitney, Director of Grand Valley State University’s Howenstein Center for Presidential Studies, talks with Hank Meijer, Co-Chairman and CEO of US supermarket chain Meijer, about the story of Arthur Vandenberg (1884-1951), a US senator from Michiganwho became one of the founders of modern US foreign policy. Then, Bruce Edward Walker speaks with Ben Lockerd, Professor of English at Grand Valley State University, about the horror fiction of Russell Kirk. Check out these...

PBS carries an anti-socialist documentary…from Sweden (video)

Americans tend to see Sweden as a democratic socialist utopia, although the nation changed course decisively two decades ago. A White House report, “The Opportunity Costs of Socialism,” debunked the notion of enduring Nordic socialism, and now PBS has aired a documentary produced by a Swedish free-market leader intended to dispel popular American falsehoods about his home country. Johan Norberg, a Stockholm native and senior fellow at the Cato Institute, produced the program Sweden: Lessons for America to clear the...

Rev. Robert Sirico on the eternal significance of work

At Acton’s 28th Annual Dinner, Rev. Robert A. Sirico, co-founder and president of the Acton Institute, spoke about the eternal significance of work. Sirico states that serving God and participating in the market are not separate efforts. Rather, engagement in the market can lead to generosity, service, and the reduction of poverty. Work, too, should be seen as bringing more than just profit to people’s lives. “This mundane existence,” says Sirico, “whereby people earn sufficient resources to support their families,...

5 facts about Reformation Day

While most people know today as Halloween, for millions of Christians October 31, 2018 is also the 501st anniversary of Reformation Day. Here are five facts about the Protestant holiday: 1. Reformation Day celebrates Martin Luther’s nailing his ninety-five theses to the church door Wittenberg, Germany on October 31, 1517. (Some scholars debate whether he posted them to the door then, later in November, or whether he even posted them at all.) By posting them to the church door—which was...

Are we undercounting the number of unemployed?

Note: This is post #99 in a weekly video series on basic economics. The official unemployment rate in the U.S. only counts adults who are without a job and have actively looked for work within the past four weeks. Does this mean that unemployment is undercounted? In this video by Marginal Revolution University, economist Alex Tabarrok explains that while the official unemployment rate may not be perfect, it does provide us with a good indicator of the state of the...

The economy is booming! Or is it?

The economy is booming. Since the market crash in 2008, the rate of unemployment is at an all-time low, with the latest study showing an unemployment rate of 3.7 percent. In the second quarter of 2018, GDP increased 4.2 percent and in the third quarter, 3.5 percent. While all of these are sure signs that the economy is doing well, some problems remain, and it doesn’t look like they’ll go away any time soon. In a new article written for...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

Up from the Liberal Founding

During the 20th century, scholars of the American founding generally believed that it was liberal. Specifically, they saw the founding as rooted in the political thought of 17th-century English philosopher John Locke. In addition, they saw Locke as a primarily secular thinker, one who sought to isolate the role of religion from political considerations except when necessary to prop up the various assumptions he made for natural rights. These included a divine creator responsible for a rational world for...

Jul 9, 2025

Creating an Economy of Inclusion

The poor have been the main subject of concern in the whole tradition of Catholic Social Teaching. The Catholic Church talks often about a “preferential option for the poor.” In recent years, many of the Church’s social teaching documents have been particularly focused on the needs of the poorest people in the world’s poorest countries. The first major analysis of this topic could be said to have been in the papal encyclical Populorum Progressio, published in 1967 by Pope...

Jul 9, 2025

C.S. Lewis and the Apocalypse of Gender

From very nearly the beginning, Christianity has wrestled with the question of the body. Heretics from gnostics to docetists devalued physical reality and the body, while orthodox Christianity insisted that the physical world offers us true signs pointing to God. This quarrel persists today, and one form it takes is the general confusion among Christians and non-Christians alike about gender. Is gender an abstracted idea? Is it reducible to biological characteristics? Is it a set of behaviors determined by...

Jul 9, 2025

Lord Jonathan Sacks: The West’s Rabbi

In October 1798, the president of the United States wrote to officers of the Massachusetts militia, acknowledging a limitation of federal rule. “We have no government,” John Adams wrote, “armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, and revenge or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.” The nation that Adams had helped to found would require the parts of the body...

Jul 9, 2025

Spurgeon and the Poverty-Fighting Church

Religion & Liberty: Volume 33, Number 4 Spurgeon and the Poverty-Fighting Church by Christopher Parr • October 30, 2023 Portrait of Charles Spurgeon by Alexander Melville (1885) Charles Spurgeon was a young, zealous 15-year-old boy when he came to faith in Christ. A letter to his mother at the time captures the enthusiasm of his newfound Christian faith: “Oh, how I wish that I could do something for Christ.” God granted that wish, as Spurgeon would e “the prince of...

Jul 9, 2025

Mistaken About Poverty

Perhaps it is because America is the land of liberty and opportunity that debates about poverty are especially intense in the United States. Americans and would-be Americans have long been told that if they work hard enough and persevere they can achieve their dreams. For many people, the mere existence of poverty—absolute or relative—raises doubts about that promise and the American experiment more generally. Is it true that America suffers more poverty than any other advanced democracy in the...

Jul 9, 2025

How Dispensationalism Got Left Behind

Whether we like it or not, Americans, in one way or another, have all been indelibly shaped by dispensationalism. Such is the subtext of Daniel Hummel’s provocative telling of the rise and fall of dispensationalism in America. In a little less than 350 pages, Hummel traces how a relatively insignificant Irishman from the Plymouth Brethren, John Nelson Darby, prompted the proliferation of dispensational theology, especially its eschatology, or theology of the end times, among our ecclesiastical, cultural, and political...

Jul 9, 2025

Jesus and Class Warfare

Plenty of Marxists have turned to the New Testament and the origins of Christianity. Memorable examples include the works of F.D. Maurice and Zhu Weizhi’s Jesus the Proletarian. After criticizing how so many translations of the New Testament soften Jesus’ teachings regarding material possessions, greed, and wealth, Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart has gone so far to ask, “Are Christians supposed to be Communists?” In the Huffington Post, Dan Arel has even claimed that “Jesus was clearly a Marxist,...

Jul 9, 2025

Conversation Starters with … Anne Bradley

Anne Bradley is an Acton affiliate scholar, the vice president of academic affairs at The Fund for American Studies, and professor of economics at The Institute of World Politics. There’s much talk about mon good capitalism” these days, especially from the New Right. Is this long overdue, that a hyper-individualism be beaten back, or is it merely cover for increasing state control of the economy? Let me begin by saying that I hate “capitalism with adjectives” in general. This...

Jul 9, 2025

Adam Smith and the Poor

Adam Smith did not seem to think that riches were requisite to happiness: “the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for” (The Theory of Moral Sentiments). But he did not mend beggary. The beggar here is not any beggar, but Diogenes the Cynic, who asked of Alexander the Great only to step back so as not to cast a shadow upon Diogenes as he reclined alongside the highway....

Jul 9, 2025