At the end of January I had the pleasure to speak with my friend of many years Ricardo Ball about the ongoing crisis in Venezuela. The conversation was livestreamed from the Acton Institute allowing an international audience to listen in as we discussed recent developments from the streets of Caracas. The conversation is still available for viewing on our livestream page. The tragic case of Venezuela is but one in a seemingly endless series of failures of socialism from which...

The Sexual State: How Elite Ideologies Are Destroying Lives and Why The Church Was Right All Along. Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D. TAN Books, 2018. 406 pages. Reviewed by Rev. Ben Johnson Keen-eyed analysts have probed every ideological trend threatening liberty – from socialism and fascism to the Alt-Right – with one glaring exception: the revolt against personal responsibility. Jennifer Roback Morse, the founder of the Ruth Institute,capably fills this void in The Sexual State. Building on her previous book Love...

Fox News and the Washington Post reported that actor Rob Lowe came under fire last week for making a joke on Twitter that poked fun at Senator Elizabeth Warren and her claims of Native American ancestry. After Senator Warren declared her candidacy for President, Lowe tweeted, Lowe was immediately scolded by fellow actors like Mark Hamill and journalist Soledad O’Brien. Lowe deleted the tweet with a half-hearted apology, and lamented people’s “inability to laugh at anything” anymore Critics lambasted Lowe...

I have a couple rules of thumb that I hope help me cut through some of the noise around various policy proposals and political debates. One has to do with budgetary reform (a topic I covered at some length last week): If the plan doesn’t engage with entitlements, then it isn’t really a serious proposal. The same goes for policies that have to do with environmental stewardship, and particularly those focused on lowering carbon emissions. If nuclear power isn’t a...

Official Washington is all atwitter today over the release of the “Green New Deal” by New York freshman Democrat Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey, also a Democrat. The proposal bundles many long-desired goals of the environmentalist movement into a neat legislative package, described by left-leaning Vox in this way: The resolution consists of a preamble, five goals, 14 projects, and 15 requirements. The preamble establishes that there are two crises, a climate crisis and an economic crisis...

The Venezuelan bishop of Merida and current apostolic administrator of Caracas, Cardinal Baltazar Porras Cardozo, stood tall and firm while rejecting the validity of President Nicolas Maduro’s recent appeal for Vatican diplomacy. Maduro had written to the pope this week seeking his help amid an escalating violent opposition to his socialist government which has all but destroyed the country’s economy and thrust millions of people into abject poverty. Cardinal Porras publicly denounced Maduro’s letter to Pope Francis – of which...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is running for president in 2020, and she has gained attention for proposing an “ultramillionaire” tax: a 2 percent tax on households with a net worth over $50 million and an additional 1 percent on households worth over $1 billion. Warren’s proposal has more popular support than Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) proposal to raise the marginal e tax rate on top earners to 70 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight. Indeed, Warren’s proposal has support among a majority of...

I recently highlighted California’s counterproductive restrictionson private efforts to feed the homeless. But the state’s policies aren’t just inhibiting the bottom-up activities of non-profits and charities. They’re also restricting potential solutions via entrepreneurial investment. Alas, many municipalities have severely restricted new residential development, causing the housing supply to diminish and the cost of living to soar. In a city like San Francisco, such an approach has led to the highest rents in the world and a housing market wherein 81%...

What exactly is the Green New Deal? Yesterday Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) released a proposed resolution titled, “Recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal.” The document is a simple resolution, a proposal that addresses matters entirely within the prerogative of the House of Representatives. It requires neither the approval of the Senate nor the signature of the President, and it does not have the force of law. Simple resolutions concern the rules of one...

In 1909, the British scholar and later Nobel Peace Prize winner, Sir Norman Angell, published a short pamphlet entitled Europe’s Optical Illusion. Subsequently republished a year later as The Great Illusion, Angell argued that the economic cost of a mass war in the industrial capitalist world would be so great, that, if it happened at all, it would be momentary. Angell also thought that the integration of capitalist economies across national boundaries which prevailed at the time made the likelihood...