By now even many people who didn’t watch the Oscars have seen or heard Matthew McConaughey’s acceptance speech for Best Actor. The Texas actor thanked God for all the opportunities in his life, thanked God some more (cut to Academy members squirming in their seats), and then he told a story about when he was a teenager and was asked who his hero was. The answer he gave at the time: his hero was Matthew McConaughey in ten years. Then...

The massive federal student loan program is creating a gargantuan higher education bubble and unsustainable levels of student loan debt, but at least all that borrowed money is going primarily to educate people, right? Apparently not. Yahoo Finance reports on yet another way that the nanny state is creating moral hazard and impoverishing the culture: A number of factors are behind the growth in student debt. The soft jobs recovery and the emphasis on education have driven people to attain...

When looking for solutions to humanity’s problems, conservatives and libertarians tend to prefer turning first to free markets rather than government. The reason for such a preference is often misunderstood, and can be difficult to explain since it appears paradoxical: free markets are often better at serving human needs than governments because free markets make it easier to fail. As Arnold Kling explains, the best way to deal with failure depends on the institution. An individual needs to fail with...

Offering yetanother contribution to a series of recentdiscussions about the religious liberties of bakers, florists, and photographers, Jonathan Merritt has a piece atThe Atlantic warning that the type of protections Christians were fighting for in Arizona e back to hurt the faithful.” “These prophets of doom only acknowledge one side of the slope,” Merritt writes. “They fail to consider how these laws could be used against members of their munities. If you are able to discriminate against others on the...

In 2005, religious shareholder activists of various stripes jumped aboard the bandwagon filing resolutions against Chevron for an environmental disaster it allegedly caused. Chevron asserted its innocence, but the activist shareholders put the squeeze on: Chevron’s Ecuador environmental disaster, considered by experts to be the worst oil-related ecological problem on the planet and currently the subject of a high-stakes law suit estimated to cost pany upwards of $6 billion, will be high on the agenda of pany’s 2006 annual shareholder...

In an excerpt from the splendidPovertyCure series, Michael Fairbanks offers a helpful bit on why our attitudes petition matter for economic development: I can predict the future of a developing nation better than any IMF team of economists by asking one question: “Do you believe petition?” When I go to Venezuela and I say, “do you believe petition?,” they say petition means the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” They say petition is the unnecessary duplication of effort...

The Supreme Courts is hearing a case that involves a First Amendment challenge to an Ohio law that makes it a crime to “disseminate a false statement concerning a candidate, either knowing the same to be false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false.” During the 2010 elections, the Susan B. Anthony List, a pro-life advocacy group, published ads in Ohio claiming that then-Rep. Steven Driehaus supported taxpayer-funded abortions (because he had voted for the Affordable Care Act)....

As Egypt moves through the process of establishing a new, stable government after not just one but two revolutions, the security of the Coptic Orthodox munity in Egyptian society has at times been in doubt. Dr. Magdy El-Sanady, an Egyptian Coptic Christian, has worked for over 30 years in health planning, management munity development, and in non-governmental organization institutional strengthening in Egypt. Dr. El-Sanady holds postgraduate degrees in pediatrics and public health from Egypt and an M.B.A. and Ph.D. from...