Kris Mauren, executive director of the Acton Institute, kicks off the second season of the Free Market Series, a television program for American and Canadian audiences produced by The World Show in partnership with the Montreal Economic Institute and broadcast on PBS affiliates. In Episode 1, Mauren takes apart the “fatally flawed poverty industry” and talks about Acton’s Poverty Inc. documentary. Interview notes: Many people imagine that free markets are synonymous with self-interest and greed, but for Kris Mauren, freedom...

The Acton Institute issued a video statement to the international press today from its Rome office, introducing the main topics that to be addressed at its April 20th Rome conference “Freedom with Justice: Rerum Novarum and the New Things of Our Time” at the Roma-Trevi Conference Center. Among the “new things” to be discussed for the 125th anniversary of Leo’s landmark social encyclical will be the Church and poverty, Europe’s faltering welfare states, globalization’s winners and losers, youth unemployment, our...

ABC Breaking News | Latest News Videos Well, it finally happened. The pope felt the Bern. Against expectations, Pope Francis and Senator Bernie Sanders, the Democrat candidate for U.S. president, met privately today in the Vatican hotel where thepontiffresides and where Sanders was staying as a guest. Bernie Sanders was in Romefor the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences meeting to discuss his economic, environmental and moral concerns (as summed up in Sanders’own words during the press scrum that followed). The...

The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, shareholder activists of the corporate God-fly variety, are gearing up for the May 25 ExxonMobil Corporation annual general meeting. The ICCR agenda isn’t about maximizing shareholder value, but seems far more intent on reducing it. For the record, your writer possesses no financial stake in ExxonMobil, but if he did it’s certain he’d be upset mightily at ICCR’s efforts to hobble the industry giant and send stock prices plummeting even further. The religious-left activists...

Pope Francis’ words to journalistson board the chartedflight yesterday to the Greek island of Lesbos struck an emotional chord:“It is a sad journey,” he said. “We are going to see the greatest humanitarian tragedy after World War II.” As Francis deplaned he was greeted by Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. The pope expressed his gratitude for Greece’sgenerosity to Middle Eastern refugees, many of e to Europe fleeing from desperate situations. Francis spent only 5 hours on the small Greek island...

Recently we considered a simple tool and metric for measuring economic well-being: real GDP per capita. Yet such metrics feel can seem materialistic. What about the things that money can’t buy, we wonder, like health and happiness? As economist Alex Tabarrok explains, while real GDP is an imperfect measure, it tends to be correlated with many of the non-monetary improvements that contribute to human flourishing. ...

In an attempt to trap Jesus, some Pharisees and Herodians asked him, “Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not? Should we pay them, or should we not?” In response, Jesus said, “Why put me to the test? Bring me a denarius and let me look at it.” And they brought one. And he said to them, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” They said to him, “Caesar’s.” Jesus said to them, “Render to Caesar the things that...

Acton Institute Director of Research Samuel Gregg is in Rome this week for Acton’s conference on the 125th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII’s ground-breaking encyclical Rerum Novarum.The conference – titled Freedom with Justice: Rerum Novarum and the New Things of Our Time – takes place on April 20th from 2-7:30 pm at the Roma-Trevi-Conference Center in Rome, Italy. Sam sat down for an in-depth interview with Vatican Radio about the encyclical and the conference, noting that “there are many things...

Across the globe, extreme poverty has been reduced by the advent and ubiquity of a simple tool: cell phones. As USAID says, mobile phones “fundamentally transform the way people in the developing world interact with one another and their governments, and access basic health, education, business and financial services.” Could the same technology that is alleviating extreme poverty around the world also be used to help solve America’s homeless problem? In an intriguing paperby the America Enterprise Institute, Kevin C....

At The Stream, Acton Institute Research Director Samuel Gregg does a crime scene investigation of Bernie Sanders’ take on Pope John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus encyclical. You might never guess, by listening to the Democrat presidential candidate, that John Paul actually had some positive things to say about the market economy. Gregg says that Sanders’ recent appearance at a Vatican conference “will be seen for what it is: grandstanding by a left-wing populist candidate for the American presidency.” Aside from...