Do you ever walk into a business and see a license on the wall and wonder if that specific industry really needs to be licensed by the state? I know I have thought that, if just a few times. John Fund of the Wall Street Journal looks at how licensing laws hinders low prices petition in the marketplace. In a piece titled, License to Kill Jobs, Fund also explains how over regulation has stymied job growth and the ability of...

Fox News reports: The nation’s poverty rate dropped last year, the first significant decline since President Bush took office. The Census Bureau reported Tuesday that 36.5 million Americans, or 12.3 percent — were living in poverty last year. That’s down from 12.6 percent in 2005. The median household e was $48,200, a slight increase from the previous year. But the number of people without health insurance also increased, to 47 million. The last significant decline in the poverty rate came...

The City of Atlanta, and several other cities, have been debating whether or not to pass a law prohibiting saggy pants. Here’s the story from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Atlanta officials did not decide Tuesday whether they should e fashion police. However, they did agree to continue to debate whether the city should regulate whether folks can walk around Atlanta with saggy pants and exposed undies. Council members expect to create a 10- to 12-member task force soon to further the...

There are a number of problems with Paul Krugman’s NYT piece earlier this week, “A Socialist Plot.” pares the American educational system to its healthcare system, arguing that because Americans aren’t inclined to disparage the former as a socialist threat, we likewise shouldn’t consider universal healthcare as a “socialist plot.” “The truth is that there’s no difference in principle between saying that every American child is entitled to an education and saying that every American child is entitled to adequate...

When the sign for one of those payday lending stores went up on the corner a block away from my house, I have to say I was less than enthusiastic. The standard response in a market economy to “market failure” is for a nonprofit to fill the gap in services or meet the need. Today’s NYT reports on efforts in the short-term loan industry to meet that need. As it stands in the market system, “Payday loan stores, which barely...

It’s been at least a few months since I admitted abandoning all of my principles and ethics in favor of rolling around in great piles of filthy Exxon lucre, and I’ll be honest with you here – I haven’t even gotten so much as a thank you note from Rex Tillerson. Meanwhile, Al Gore appears to have offset his carbon emissions by planting a forest of magical money trees, and it’s HARVEST TIME, BABY! Not too long ago, a premier...

This summer I’m working on developing the syllabus for a class that I’ll be helping to lead in the Fall. The course will focus on readings in social ethics, with a general theme on church and culture, and a particular theme on church and poverty. I’ll be reading through the selections on this particular theme over the next few weeks. I’d like to post the readings for the week that I’ll be going through, so that you can read along...

Earlier this month, Washington Post columnist Robert plained about the lack of creative thinking concerning the issue of social security. “Washington’s vaunted think tanks — citadels for public intellectuals both liberal and conservative — have tiptoed around the problem,” he wrote. “Ideally, think tanks expand the public conversation by saying things too controversial for politicians to say on their own. Here, they’ve abdicated that role.” As though on cue, in the publications pipeline at the time was the latest in...

Ryan T. Anderson over at the First Things blog, takes a look at the Acton documentary The Call of the Entrepreneur and wonders: Countless movies and s portray businessmen as greedy, conniving, self-serving agents of exploitation who sully the air, melt the ice caps, and abuse the poor. The news media is even worse: Enron, Arthur Andersen, WorldCom—watching the nightly news and reading the morning paper, one gets the impression that businesses are run solely by the corrupt, the vile,...

The relation of the creation account and the narrative of the flood in Genesis is plex one. One of these es in the similarities of the mandates set forth by God in both accounts. The sixteenth-century reformer Wolfgang Musculus identifies three mandates in the creation account (in addition to the specific prescription regarding the tree of life). The first of these is the procreation mandate: “Be fruitful and increase in number.” The second is the dominion mandate, flowing from the...