There are 14 million Americans who are out of work yet don’t show up in the monthly unemployment statistics. The federal government spends more money each year on cash payments for this group than it spends on food stamps and bined. They are part of the hidden social safety net. They are the disabled former workers. NPR’s Planet Money has produced a fascinating report on the growth of federal disability programs and what disability means for American workers. Here are...

Tyler Cowen has an interesting column in last Sunday’s New York Times, arguing that despite run-of-the-mill objections to “cold” and “heartless” economic analysis, economics is, as a science, “egalitarian at its core”: Economic analysis is itself value-free, but in practice it encourages a cosmopolitan interest in natural equality. Many economic models, of course, assume that all individuals are motivated by rational self-interest or some variant thereof; even the so-called behavioral theories tweak only the fringes of a mon, rational understanding...

If a worker owes their employer thousands of dollars and refuses to pay the debt, should they be fired or have their wages garnished? What if the employer is the federal government? Astoundingly, more than 100,000 federal employees owe more than $1 billion in federal taxes. To provide an incentive for them to pay up, a mittee approved legislation that would require the firing of government workers who are “seriously tax delinquent.” The Federal Employee Tax Accountability Act of 2013...

The Dow Chemical Co., along with E.I. Du Pont de Nemours, e under fire from the Adrian Dominicans and the Sisters of Charity due to panies’ production of genetically modified organisms. No, the sisters aren’t mounting the barricades outside the two corporations to protest what they might term “Frankenfoods,” but they have submitted proxy shareholder resolutions to demand, among other things, panies review and report by November 2013 on: Adequacy of plans for removing GE [genetically engineered] seed from the...

The Hitachi Foundation is accepting applications for its 2013 Yoshiyama Young Entrepreneur Award, which identifies up to five young people striving to build “sustainable businesses” in the United States. Each awardee will receive $40,000 over two years, along with the tools and training designed to put a startup on the path to success. Deadline is March 28. The Hitachi Foundation says its Yoshiyama Young Entrepreneur Program “identifies and highlights leaders who are using the power of business to fight poverty...

(March is Women’s History Month. Acton will be highlighting a number of women who have contributed significantly to the issue of liberty during this month.) The lives and deaths of cities in America is certainly topical. Drive through Detroit if you don’t think so. On one hand, block after block of decimated homes create a landscape of, let’s be honest, death. On the other, people in the city forge ahead, turning empty city blocks into burgeoning urban gardens, seeking out...

Those who thought Pope Francis was going to be a “a jolly, badly-dressed, Gaia-worshipping baby-boomer from 1972 received a severe jolt of reality today”, says Sam Gregg, Acton’s Director of Research. In today’s National Review Online, Gregg is quick to clear up any thoughts of the new pope being a relativist or pop culture phenom. While Pope Francis has made it clear from the very beginning of his pontificate that he wishes to draw attention to the poor, he’s not...

“Every public gesture and word of the Holy Father tends to have meaning,” says Charles J. Chaput, the archbishop of Philadelphia. “So what was the pope saying with this symbolism as he began his new ministry?” Chaput believes Pope Francis focus is the persecuted church: The Chaldean and Syriac Catholic Churches of Iraq and Syria, while differing in rite and tradition from the Latin West, are integral members of the universal Catholic Church, in munion with the bishop of Rome....

In the Wall Street Journal, Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg turns to French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville to show how democratic systems can be used to strike a Faustian bargain. “Citizens use their votes to prop up the political class, in return for which the state uses its power to try and provide the citizens with perpetual economic security,” Gregg explains. This, of course, speaks to the current catastrophe that is the European welfare state. French workers, for example,...

(March is Women’s History Month. Acton will be highlighting a number of women who have contributed significantly to the issue of liberty during this month.) According to the religious liberties established under article 24, educational services shall be secular and, therefore, free of any religious orientation. The educational services shall be based on scientific progress and shall fight against ignorance, ignorance’s effects, servitudes, fanaticism and prejudice. All religious associations organized according to article 130 and its derived legislation, shall be...