Last month Turing Pharmaceuticals felt the backlash after a medication they sold for $1 a pill in 2010 increased overnight to $750 a tablet. Politicians like Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bernie Sanders were quick to claim that this is why we needed more government intervention in the healthcare system. But at the time I pointed out that the reason Turing was able to raise the price so spectacularly was not because of a failure of the free market but because...

Calling a political candidatea “socialist” used to be a political slur. In almost every U.S. election over the past hundred years there have been conservatives who have claimed a major political party candidate running for president was—whether they admitted it or not—a socialist. But our latest presidential race includes someone who calls himself a socialist, Bernie Sanders. Faced with the prospect, albeit unlikely, that an avowed socialist may actually e the Democrat’s nominee for president, many apolitical Christians are asking...

Hey McFly! Put on your self-drying jacket and your self-tying shoes, because I’ve got a job offer you can’t refuse! Hi, I’m Griff Tannen and my business, Griff Tannen’s Hoverboard Emporium is looking for part-time sales clerks. You probably know me from that time I smashed into the courthouse and was instantly sentenced to jail: That’s me. I wasn’t really framed. You might think of that as my lowest moment. It was certainly humbling. But now I look back at...

What is the pastor’s role in affirming the various callings within hiscongregation? How might churches empower the people of Godin pursuing vocational clarity and economic transformation? How can webetter encourage, equip, and empower othersin engaging theircultures munities? In a talkfor theOikonomia Network, theologian and author Charlie Self explores these questions and more, relaying many of the themes ofFlourishing Churches and Communities, his Pentecostal primer on faith, work, and economics. “Faithful churches create munities,” says Self, “bringing the joy, peace, and...

A week ago, we reported here the puzzling remarks made by Chicago’s Archbishop Blase Cupich regarding Catholic membership in labor unions. Acton’s director of research, Samuel Gregg, has plenty more to say regarding Cupich, the formation of one’s conscience and membership to unions. In Crisis Magazine, Gregg first tells readers what Cupich recently said when questioned about someone being in the state of sin and receiving Communion: While recently discussing the question of whether those who have (1) not repented...

“There is a kind of religious conservatism that can simply be another form of nostalgia,” says Russell Moore, “There is a kind of religious conservatism that can easily present itself as time travelers from the past. Those who are seeking to bring forward the values of the 1950s. We are not time travelers from the past. We are pilgrims from the future.” Moore, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, recently delivered a...

A new film set on Mars taps into the quintessential American story, says Dylan Pahman in this week’s Acton Commentary. After the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to travel to outer space in 1961, Nikita Khrushchev remarked, “Gagarin flew into space, but didn’t see any god there.” The Soviets would not pass up an opportunity to deride religion, even though, reportedly, Gagarin himself was a Russian Orthodox Christian. Americans, by contrast, are the sort of people who...

During CNN’s Democratic debate, presidential candidate, senator from Vermont, and self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders promised that if elected he would work to “raise the [federal] minimum wage to $15 an hour.” From an economic point of view, this policy would run the risk of sparking a wage/price spiral, where wages are tied to a cost-of-living index and their increase, in turn, raises the cost of living, sending inflation out of control and ultimately working against the intended goal of helping...

Every year some pollster asks Americans what percentageof the federal budget goes to foreign aid. And every year Americans make a guess that is wildly off the mark. The average answer we give is 26 percent; only 1 out of 20 of us correctly guess that it’s less than 1 percent. Part of the reason we are wrong is that we’re just really bad at guesstimation. But another reason is that we rarely take the time to find out what...

Throughout itshistory, the American economy has transitioned from agrarian to industrial to information-driven. Given ournewfound status, manual labor is increasingly cast down in the popular imagination, replaced by white-collar jobs, bachelor’s degrees, and ladder-climbing. Whether due to new avenues and opportunities or a more general distaste for the slow and mundane, work with the hands is either ignored or discouraged, both asvocational prospect andconsumeristic priority. Amid this sea of new efficiencies, the art of craftsmanship is at a particular disadvantage....