This past week, The Huffington Post’s Paul Blumenthal offered up a piece of agitprop masquerading as trenchant political analysis. It seems – well, not seems inasmuch as Blumenthal pretty much declares outright – that he isn’t much of a fan of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s antipathy toward shareholder proxy resolutions promoting political spending disclosure policies. Likewise, writes Blumenthal, three other “usual suspects” – the Business Roundtable, the National Association of Manufacturers and The Wall Street Journal – are aligned...

Blaine Adamson is the owner of Hands On Originals, a pany in Fayette County, Kentucky. Like almost every printer since Gutenberg, Mr. Adamson believed he had the right to decide what items his conscience would allow him to print and which he’d have to reject. Indeed, pany regularly declines to print expressive materials because of the message that they display. When he was asked to print shirts promoting the Lexington Pride Festival, a gay pride event, Adamson politely declined and...

Even children intuitively understand that exchange can and often does mutually benefit those who trade, says Dylan Pahman in this week’s Acton Commentary. “As it turns out, that mutual benefit is often not only material but, at its base, moral as well.” I am unsure how it is that Rita ended up with a peanut butter and M&M sandwich in the first place. Certainly not under our current First Lady’s watch — that’s for sure. Perhaps Rita’s mother let her...

As Syria enters the fifth year of civil war, one of the worst humanitarian crises in recent history is unfolding with no end in sight. This bloody conflict has resulted in the deaths of more than 220,000 Syrians and displaced more than 11 million people, driving almost 4 million people to neighboring countries. Fully one-third of refugees are now in substandard housing and the UN Refugee Agency says the situation is“deteriorating drastically.” An estimated 600,000 refugee children, many of whom...

It’s not easy to make a living in Libya, one of the world’s poorest nations. However, Libya has one thing going for it: its proximity to Europe. This is making smugglers rich. Quentin Sommerville of the BBC reports his interaction with one of the smugglers. People smugglers don’t take too kindly to enquiries about their business but, after weeks of searching, one agreed to speak to me if he could remain anonymous. He’s grown rich out of the trade. “The...

Of all the disheartening scenes of ing out of Baltimore this week, few havebeen asdispiriting as the imageof a church project that was set ablaze. For the past eight years the Southern Baptist Church in East Baltimore has been working on a project that would provide munity center and e housing in the form of 60 senior-citizen apartments. The construction was expected to pleted in December. And last night it all burned to the ground. Those associated with the project...

The Great Society only made things worse, says Acton’s co-founder and executive director, Kris Mauren. He gave the final lecture during Northwood’s University’s series, “The Great Society at 50.” Mauren’s talk, titled “Alternatives to the Great Society,” argued that the programs of the Great Society have likely exacerbated issues of poverty and created a “culture of dependency.” A recent article from Midland Daily News summarizes this lecture: “I am not suggesting we do nothing, but what we are doing isn’t...

In his review of the Acton Institute’s film series, For the Life of the World: Letters to the Exiles, Andy Crouch noted itsartistic merits, observinghow well it conveyed “deeply Christian themes in widely accessible ways.” “I can only hope that many of us will indeed watch and learn,” he writes, “and that we will then give ourselves away, as skillfully, promptly, and sincerely as these filmmakers have done, for the life of the world.” Now, in response to the series,...

Victor Davis Hanson, writing for National Review, takes up the immigration issues facing the West. His assessment is that the West suffers from a “schizophrenia” of a sort, where those of us in the West accept “one-way” immigration as a given. Westerners accept that these one-way correspondences are true. Nonetheless, they are incapable of articulating the social, economic, and political causes for the imbalances, namely the singular customs and heritage that make the West attractive: free-market capitalism, property rights, consensual...

Do you remember trying to find that first job? You’d be told you needed experience by an would-be employer, but no one would hire you so you could get the experience. Finally, a burger joint or a summer ice cream shop or a retailer would give you a chance, usually beginning at minimum wage. At AEI, Mark J. Perry looks at the world of the minimum wage worker. Here are a few facts: While teens are the ones who typically...