The Free Exchange blog at (HT) concludes a long and thoughtful post on fair trade, specifically in response to this recent NYT article, “Fair Trade in Bloom,” by wondering: And how does this affect coffee supply? If a premium is available for fair-trade coffee, shouldn’t other growers enter the market to take advantage of it until the price of coffee is bid down to market levels, leaving total producer take–baseline coffee price plus premium–where it stood before? Such a scenario...

You are probably aware by now that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has published a memoir. The interview-avoiding judge has lately been giving, as Kathryn Jean Lopez puts it, “a lifetime of interviews.” Given the controversy surrounding his public life since his nomination to the Court, not much remains to be said about him, good or bad, that has not already been said. Suffice it to say that I draw attention to him now because: 1) My own view is...

Awhile back, I finished reading Armand Nicholi’s book, The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life. Dr. Nicholi is an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard and has taught a seminar on Freud & Lewis at Harvard for the past 35 years. The course eventually led to this book and a PBS series by the same name. The book is an interesting read for anyone modestly interested in one or...

The mammoth Congressional expansion of SCHIP is such a bad idea, even the normally big spending President Bush vetoed the bill. I wrote a piece titled, “Abandon SCHIP: Big Government Returns,” which is now available on the Acton Website. The political posturing concerning the program has reached a troubling level. Supporters are using using kids as props to usher in socialized medicine and government expansion. But one of the main problems with the bill is the regressive characteristic of the...

An interesting article in the Los Angeles Times detailing how badly wrong Robert Mugabe’s supporters in the West have been from the very beginning (requires “free” registration; may I suggest BugMeNot?): From the beginning of his political career, Mugabe was not just a Marxist but one who repeatedly made clear his intention to run Zimbabwe as an authoritarian, one-party state. Characteristic of this historical revisionism is former Newsweek southern Africa correspondent Joshua Hammer, writing recently in the liberal Washington Monthly...

Excerpts from Clifford Krauss’ article in the New York Times (cross-posted at )… The ethanol boom of recent years — which spurred a frenzy of distillery construction, record corn prices, rising food prices and hopes of a new future for rural America — may be fading. Only last year, farmers here spoke of a biofuel gold rush, and they rejoiced as prices for ethanol and the corn used to produce it set records. panies and farm cooperatives have built so...

This issue of the Journal of Markets & Morality features a scholia translation of Cardinal Cajetan’s (1469-1534) influential treatise On Exchanging Money (1499). Cajetan is the author of the officially mentaries on the Summa of Thomas Aquinas, which are easily available in the magnificent Leonine edition of this magnum opus. He is even more famous as the papal legate whom Leo X (1513-1521) dispatched to Germany in a futile effort to bring Martin Luther back into the Roman fold. Economic...

A quote from T. H. Green, refuting the view that the law’s “only business is to prevent interference with the liberty of the individual,” construed as doing what you like as long as it does not infringe on others’ rights to do what they want. Green writes: The true ground of objection to ‘paternal government’ is not that it violates the ‘laissez faire’ principle and conceives that its office is to make people good, to promote morality, but that it...

The new issue of Philanthropy Magazine features a cover story on Frank Hanna, vice chairman of the Acton Institute board of directors, and winner of the 2007 William E. Simon Prize for Philanthropic Leadership. The story is titled “Call of the Philanthropist,” a play on Acton’s Call of the Entrepreneur documentary, which features Hanna prominently. The lengthy profile by Christopher Levenick offers insights into Hanna’s philanthropic activities and his philosophy of giving. Rev. Robert Sirico is quoted extensively, as are...

Related to last week’s post about Reformed education and Pentecostalism, I point you to this post by Rod Dreher, who discusses his interview with Josiah Idowu-Fearon, the Anglican Archbishop of Kaduna state in Nigeria. Dreher relates the following: Pentecostalism is growing like wildfire, but there’s less to it than you might think. He said that in many cases, people are drawn to the emotional experience, and can tell you exactly when they gave their life to Jesus — but can’t...