We’ve had a busy couple of weeks at the Acton Institute, hosting a number of events here in Grand Rapids including a couple of Acton Lecture Series presentations. The first of those came on October 15, as we ed John Blundell, Visiting Fellow at the Heritage Foundation and Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs. His talk was titled “Ladies for Liberty: Women Who Made a Difference in American History,” and provided a fine overview of a the...

In today’s Wired, Microsoft founder Bill Gates shares his thought on how busines, government and philanthropy can make positive changes in the world. Gates makes it clear that he is pro-capitalism: I am a devout fan of capitalism. It is the best system ever devised for making self-interest serve the wider interest. This system is responsible for many of the great advances that have improved the lives of billions—from airplanes to air-conditioning puters. However, Gates also sees a role for...

Class struggle. Racially-charged rhetoric. Anti-capitalist diatribes. Sounds like the lineup to a “Fantasy Diversity” team from a sociology professor at Wellesley College, right? Alas, I’m merely referring tothe controversysurrounding ex-Miami Dolphins players Jonathan Martin (black) and Richie Incognito (white). For those who haven’t been paying attention – and thank your lucky stars that you haven’t – Martin left the team for personal reasons and his fellow offensive lineman Incognito was released by the Dolphins for allegedly being the bully who...

[The contest is now closed. The winners are Juan Callejas, Jacqueline Isaacs, and Jeff Wright. Congratulations! Please send your mailing address to [email protected]] John Bolt’s new book, Economic Shalom, is now available from Christian’s Library Press. The book, which is the final in a four-part series of tradition-specific primers, offers a Reformed approach to faith, work, and economics. To celebrate, CLP will be giving away three copies of the book.The rules are listed below, and you ment on this blog...

James O’Keefe with Project Veritas, the videographer who brought about the end of ACORN, has now turned his attention to the folks who are supposed to help sign us up for Obamacare: the “navigators.” In Texas, O’Keefe and his crew went to a navigator site run by the Urban League. There, navigators instructed people to lie about their e, their health status, told them their personal information would not be shared with any other organization, and that the program was...

In a wide-ranging discussion of the Progressive Era in her new biography of Calvin Coolidge, Amity Shlaes quotes a striking excerpt from a little-known speech by President William Howard Taft. Given in the middle of the 1912 election, in which peted (poorly) against Woodrow Wilson and former President Teddy Roosevelt, the speech focuses on the predominant themes and schemes of his opponents, handily highlighting their limits. In a particularly snappy swipe at Roosevelt, who had just recently split from the...

Students For Life, an organization for high school, college and grad students, has produced an undercover video showing two women posing as young teens buying Sudafed and Plan B. Guess which one they were allowed to buy? <![endif]–>Here are mon and infrequent side effects of Sudafed: chronic trouble sleeping, head pain, feeling restless, drowsiness, dizzy, involuntary quivering, loss of skin color, fast heartbeat, feel like throwing up, difficult or painful urination, nervous, feeling weak. Here are the side effects of...

Someone should tell university administrators and educators that their primary purpose is to guarantee that graduates will have better es than those who are not fortunate enough to attend college. In addition, colleges and universities are now, it seems, supposed to be places where everyone equally es one of the “Joneses.” In an article titled, “Rethinking the Rise of Inequality“, Eduardo Porter of the New York Times writes that college education is about solving the e disparity problem. Porter opens...

The HHS contraceptive-abortifacient mandate lost another round last week. “This is a significant victory for protecting the religious beliefs of individuals and corporations,” said Edward White, Senior Counsel of the ACLJ who is representing a family-run business in Illinois. In a 2-1 decision issued Friday by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, the court reversed the federal district court’s denial of a motion for a preliminary injunction and remanded the case for the district court to enter...

In every stage of my formal schooling – from high school to college to graduate school – I’ve taken courses in economics. Yet with all that education I still struggle to understand a seemingly simple question: How does the economy actually work? Sure, I can still draw supply and demand curves or give the equation for GDP (Y = C + I + G + (X − M)). But when es to picturing a reasonably functional model of how it...