Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty made a mistake of historic proportions at the 2017 Academy Awards, when they mistakenly awarded the Oscar for “Best Picture” to La La Land. They should have awarded it to The Founder, the new biopic about McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc which, alas,did not garner any Oscar nominations. I saw The Founder on February 8. By happenstance, that is the birthday of Joseph A. Schumpeter, the Viennese economist whose key contribution to his discipline was his...

People do not love markets,” says Pascal Boyer of the International Cognition & Culture Institute, “there is a lot of evidence for that.” Sadly, Boyer is right and I suspect he’s right about the cause too: People do not like markets because people seem not to understand much about market economics. We don’t fully understand this antipathy, Boyer notes, because there hasn’t been much research on folk-economics, a study of “what makes people’s economic modules tick.” But I think Boyer...

A disturbing new report from Freedom House shows how widespread religious persecution is in China. Titled “The Battle for China’s Spirit,” this report looks at “religious revival, repression, and resistance under [General Secretary of the Communist Party of China] XI Jinping.” The report reveals that “under Xi Jinping’s leadership, religious persecution in China has increased overall.” Despite this intensificationof persecution, the Chinese religious have remained resilient. “Religion and spirituality have been deeply embedded in Chinese culture and identity for millennia,”...

In a recent article for Public Discourse, Dylan Pahman, a research fellow at Acton, examines the ineffectiveness of trade protectionism and universal e guarantees. Pahman argues that regulating wages and restraining free trade will do more harm then good to the success of business. Pahman begins his critique by responding to Trump’s stance on protectionism. During his inaugural address, Trump said: One by one, the factories shuttered and left our shores, with not even a thought about the millions upon...

Embed from Getty Images The Christian season of Lent starts next Wednesday. Lent is a season of forty days, not counting Sundays, which begins on Ash Wednesday and ends on Holy Saturday. The period represents the forty days represents the time Jesus spent in the wilderness, enduring the temptation of Satan and preparing to begin his ministry. Lent is a time, says Margarita Mooney, when Christians engage in particular practices to remind ourselves of our nature as persons and our...

Embed from Getty Images If our new Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, is looking for a creative way to fix our public schools, she should look to homeschoolers. As Thomas Purifoy explains, homeschooling offers a model for how our schools can be run more effectively. “Public education is the fount of most problems in the United States, not simply based on content, but also on structure,” says Purifoy. “Simply put: it is economically impossible for American public education to be successful...

On this edition of Radio Free Acton, we speak with Acton Institute Director of Research Samuel Gregg about the life and impact of Michael Novak, who passed away on February 17, 2017. Novak, a Roman Catholic theologian, philosopher, and author, was a powerful defender of human liberty and made vital contributions to our understanding of the morality of the market economy. Novak’s influence was an important factor in Rev. Robert A. Sirico’s effort to found the Acton Institute, and he...

In this week’s mentary, Acton research fellow, Kevin E. Schmiesing, affirms the necessity of standing up for economic and religious liberty stating these are two liberties extremely necessary for limiting government and maintaining successful opposition to totalitarianism. A …reason for the link between [religious and economic] liberties is that both reflect at base mitment to the limits of state power. Where, for example, a right to seek employment in whatever field an individual chooses is recognized, it is implicitly held...

Leaders from the world’s two largest churches say that Christians in the West are facing “unprecedented” hurdles to living out their vocation according to their conscience. A statement from Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians says that as traditional Western culture – liberally influenced by Christianity – is replaced with relativistic secularism and radicalized Islam, Christians are facing new barriers to entering whole sectors of the workplace, as well as other forms of hard and soft persecution. A misunderstanding of...

One of the aspects that I left out of my article yesterdayon the fifth European Catholic-Orthodox Forum statement worth noting isits declaration on the origins of religious liberty. Freedom of conscience and the right to choose one’s own religion – two human rights extolled by the modern, secular EU – grew out of the Christian conception of human dignity. Specifically, they originate with second-century Christian writers, according to the fifth European Catholic-Orthodox Forum’s statement: We have endeavoured to recall the...