Now that we know what the fiscal cliff is all about, what are the plans for dealing with it? Below are the four approaches that have been proposed: The Democrats’ Plan Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner offered the White House’s fiscal cliff proposal to Republicans in the last week of November. Although the proposal wasn’t released to the public, news reports say it was basically a reprise of Obama’s most recent budget request and contained the following items: • End the...

Groberg Films has produced “First Freedom: the Fight for Religious Liberty”, which will be airing on local PBS stations during the month of December. The film is described as portraying the “radical” break America’s Founding Fathers made from religion-by-law to a society that depended upon the morality of its citizenry. Noting that this was a “fundamental shift in human history”, the film seeks to portray the establishment of freedom of religion as a fundamental human right. A preview of the...

How can we trust a government to tell us what’s best for our healthcare when it’s subsidizing a corn industry that produces a food additive researchers believe may be tied to rising levels of obesity and disease? Anthony Bradley looks at a new study that raises moral questions about the consequences of the corn subsidy.The full text of his essay follows. Subscribe to the free, weekly Acton News & Commentary and other publicationshere. Government Subsidies Not So Sweet for Health...

Currently, there are forty cases against the Obamacare HHS mandate. The Affordable Care Act of 2010 requires employers to provide, as employee health care, “preventative services” such as abortion and sterilization. John Daniel Davidson, in First Things, says that the president and his administration have grossly misjudged this entire situation. In Davidson’s view, the administration “in their conceit” seemed to think that millions of Americans would simply put aside their deeply held religious and moral convictions and play along with...

Celebrated fiscal policy scholar Ed Asner, best known for pretending to be a television news producer on the 1970’s classic The Mary Tyler Moore Show, is the narrator of a new “educational” cartoon produced by a Teachers Union in California called “Tax the Rich.” Where to begin! This video was produced with the intent to indoctrinate children with an anti-capitalistic understanding of everything from levels of taxation to how wealth is created to the relationship between a free-born citizen and...

Acton President Rev. Robert A. Sirico appeared in a a video interview released yesterday by Catholic News Service, following a press conference in Rome last week held to introduce his new book “Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for the Free Economy” to the local media. CNS Rome bureau chief Frank Rocca interviewed Siricoregarding his own moral defense of market economics and asked his opinion of the libertarian novelist and intellectual Ayn Rand, whose philosophy of objectivism and rational-self...

Acton’s Director of Media, Michael Matheson Miller, discusses the current state of American thought on state, Church, family and liberty in Legatus Magazine. He focuses on the work of two Frenchmen: Alexis de Tocqueville and Jean Jacques Rousseau. Many of the differences can be boiled down to what we mean munity. Rousseau’s vision munity is what the sociologist Robert Nisbet called the munity.” For Rousseau, the two main elements of society are the individual and the state. All other groups...

Earlier this week we noted that Patrick Brennan posted a paper, “Subsidiarity in the Tradition of Catholic Social Doctrine,” which unpacks some of the recent background and implications for the use of the principle in Catholic social thought. As Brennan observes, “Although present in germ from the first Christian century, Catholic social thought began to emerge as a unified body of doctrine in the nineteenth century….” Brennan goes on to highlight the particularly Thomistic roots of the doctrine of subsidiarity,...

Cardinal Edwin F. O’Brien, Grand Master of the Knights of the Holy Sepulcher, talks about the need for vigilance in defending religious liberty around the world. ...

In the recent issue of Reject Apathy, an off-shoot publication of RELEVANT Magazine, Tim Hoiland explores what he believes to be a tension between “serving justice” and “saving souls”: This [young] generation’s passion for justice is, without doubt, something to celebrate. It’s a breathtaking sign that the Spirit is at work, leading young men and women into lives marked by the reigning belief that all of life matters to God, not just the parts we might call “spiritual.” But in...