The United States faces significant challenges when es to prisoner rehabilitation. According to a recent study, more than 700,000 prisoners are released annually from federal and state prisons. Unfortunately, “within three years, 40 percent will be reincarcerated.” To curb that trend, we’ve seen a range of efforts to improve correctional education and find better ways of supporting prisoners in their journeys toward social reconnection. Yet one of the most effective and inspiring examples is found in a country not typically...

Populism is gaining traction, both abroad and in the United States. In 2017, the Swedish libertarian think tank Timbro and the European Policy Information Center released their “Authoritarian Populism Index,” showing that populist parties have gained the highest percentage of the vote in nine countries, including Hungary (65.2%), Poland (46.4%) and Greece (45.1%). Zoltán Kész, co-founder of the Free Market Foundation in Budapest said in 2015 that “Populists are especially dangerous enemies, because they are strategizing in the terms of...

Economics is often dismissed as ideological, reductionist, and mendacious. In the United States we see these criticisms increasingly from both the political left and right. This e as no surprise as the lessons of economicshave implications for the prudential decisions that make up much of our political life. Ideologues of all parties chafe at constraints. Carl Menger, one of the driving forces behind the marginal revolution in economics, was no stranger to these sorts of criticism. His essay, ‘The Social...

Off the coast of California floats a Texas-sized island made out of garbage. prised almost entirely of humanity’s plastic waste. Where did this garbage mass in the middle of the Pacific Ocean came from? Plastic dumping. Plastic dumping is the practice of simply throwing away waste into rivers or lakes which eventually lead out into the ocean. Why isn’t this plastic being recycled? Why does this island of garbage continue to grow despite laws that prevent plastic dumping? The answer...

Between a summer heatwave in the United States and Europe and a recent speech by President Trump, the topic of climate and environmental policy and conditions has been even more prominent than usual lately. Having spent most of the past year as a Fulbright postgraduate scholar in Australia, including a very hot summer during which the Green New Deal proposal was announced, I’ve been recently reminded of a conversation I had with another scholar on the topic of climate and...

It’s not unusual for Europe—especially Western Europe—to be portrayed as a continent in which religion and, more specifically, religious practice is in decline. No doubt there’s much truth to that. When you start looking at the hard information, however, it soon es apparent that the situation is plicated. Take, for example, France. It is often portrayed as a highly secularized society. Again, there is considerable truth to that picture. Yet a recent study of the state of religion in France...

Boris Johnson, a champion of free trade and lower taxes, will serve as the next prime minister of the UK beginning on Wednesday, July 24. Officials announced on Tuesday that Johnson won 66.4 percent of the Conservative Party’s popular vote, besting rival Jeremy Hunt 92,153 votes to 46,656. In his victory speech, Johnson thanked his opponent, Jeremy Hunt, for being “a font of good idaeas, all of which I propose to steal,.” He also praised outgoing Prime Minister Theresa May...

What just happened? The White House Office of Management and Budget recently released a forecast that the federal deficit would exceed $1 trillion this year. As Fox News points out, this would be the first time since the four years following the Great Recession that the deficit reached that level. What is the federal deficit? The term federal deficit refers to the federal government’s fiscal year budget deficit. Such a deficit occurs when total outgoing expenditures (such as for buying...

The Acton Lecture Series resumed on July 18 with a lecture by Bruce Riley Ashford, provost and professor of theology and culture at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, speaking on the subject of how to maintain respect for religious liberty in a rapidly secularizing culture. The West has been going through a process whereby all references to God must be stripped from the public square, and religion itself is increasingly seen as implausible or obsolete. Ashford tackles the tough question of...

On Tuesday, the Jesuit-runAmerica magazine published an apology for Communism that would have been embarrassing in Gorbachev-era Pravda. “The Catholic Case for Communism” minimizes Marxism’s intensely anti-Christian views, ignores its oppression and economic decimation of its citizens, distorts the bulk of Catholic social teaching on socialism, and seemingly ends with a call to revolution. While author Dean Dettloff claims to own Marxism’s “real and tragic mistakes,” he downplays these to the point of farce. He admits, without elaboration, that “Communism...