Douglas Wilson has an interesting take on Detroit’s bankruptcy: “like a drunk trying to make it to the next lamp post.” Why this analogy? Wilson says we first have to understand that Detroit is inevitably in a defaulting situation; the question now is what kind of default. The only thing we don’t know is what kind of default it will be. The only thing we don’t know is who the unlucky victim of our defaulting will be. Government does not...

Humility is probably one of the most difficult human virtues to achieve. For me, as a Hungarian intern at the Acton Institute, listening to Samuel Gregg’s June lecture in Grand Rapids on his new book, ing Europe about the Old Continent’s crisis is instructive. Relations between the United States and major European powers have been testy from time to time, of course, but Europe seems to lack self-criticism. Aging Europe, an unsustainable social model, a two-speed Europe: these are some...

A study out of Harvard University focusing on tax credits and other tax expenditures has caused 24/7 Wall St. to declare that America has 10 cities where the poor just can’t get rich. Among the reasons that economic upward mobility is so minimal in these cities: horrible public education (leading to high dropout rates) and being raised in single-mother households. What these cities share is an economic segregation: two distinct classes of people, with virtually nothing mon. However, it seems...

Undoubtedly, we live in an era where personal privacy is difficult to maintain. Even if you choose not to have a Facebook account or Tweet madly, you still know that your medical records are on-line somewhere, that your bank account is only a hack away from being emptied, and that cell phone records are now apparently government domain. But it gets worse. Enter the Federal Data Hub, which will give the government access to “reams of personal piled by federal...

Ed Stetzter thinks so. In a Christianity Today article, Stetzer says our fundamental rights – rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights – are getting abused. He says alarm bells should be sounding among Christians, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Our Founding Fathers saw the Bill of Rights as providing barriers against government overreach and abuse. People (particularly people in governments with power) could not be trusted to have no checks on their power. Why? Well, some...

The wide differences in economic freedom that we observe at the country level can exist at the subnational level as too (e.g., residents in Texas and Florida have greater economic freedom than those in California and New York). But until recently, there were no local parable to the national and global rankings. In a recently published study for the Journal of Regional Analysis & Policy, Dean Stansel, professor of economics at Florida Gulf Coast University, shows that greater economic freedom...

When es to household e, progressives tend to start with their intuitive understanding of fairness (i.e., some people have a lot more e than others), move to the solution (redistribution of e and wealth from those who have more to those who have less), and only then to develop a metric that justifies implementing their solution: e inequality. Because of this roundabout approach, you rarely hear progressives argue that e inequality is a problem since for them it just is...

The real estate crisis led to plenty of finger-pointing and blame-shifting, but for Phoenix real estate developer Walter Crutchfield, it led to self-examination and spiritual reflection. “The real estate crash brought me to a place of stepping back and evaluating,” Crutchfield says. “I could see where I lost sight of the individual intrinsic value of work, of individuals, munity…Rather than asking ‘is the demand reasonable?,’ we just serviced it, and now we had a chance to think about what we...

“Mmm…neoliberalism.” One of the more curious cultural movements in recent years has been the increasing interest in zombies, and in particular the dystopian visions of a world following the zombie apocalypse. Part of the fascination has to do, I think, with the value of thought experiments in speculation about such futures, however improbable. There may be something to be learned from gazing into a sort of fun house mirror, the distorted image of humanity as seen in zombies. But zombies...

It is a moral right of man to work. Pursuing a vocation not only allows an individual to provide for himself or his family, it also brings human dignity to the individual. Each person was created with unique talents, and the provision of an environment in which he can use those gifts is paramount. As C. Neal Johnson, business professor at Hope International University and proponent of “Business as Mission,” says, “God is an incredibly creative individual, and He said...