This past Saturday marked the fortieth anniversary of Margaret Thatcher taking office as the prime minister of the United Kingdom. Thatcher served as PM for nearly a decade, during which time she became, along with Ronald Reagan, one of the West’s greatest champions of free enterprise, munism, and individual liberty. (Ronald Reagan called her the “best man in England” and she called him “the second most important man in my life.”) Here are five facts you should know about the...

Socialism, it seems, is back. But maybe the real question we should be asking is how far the United States has embraced various features of what might be called social democracy over the past 100 years. This is one of the points underscored in a well-written paper by the Heritage Foundation’s David Burton, entitled “Comparing Free Enterprise with Socialism” (April 30, 2019). Among other things, Burton also manages to: • bring clarity to the free markets versus socialism debate by...

Yesterday was May Day, a date which some people—mostly socialists munists—consider to be an observance of International Workers’ Day. Others believe instead of celebrating labor the day should be considered an international observance of Victims of Communism Day. Law professor Ilya Somin explains why we should use the day memorate the victims munist totalitarian tyranny: While the influence munist ideology has declined since its mid-twentieth century peak, it is far from dead. Largely munist regimes remain in power in Cuba...

The concepts of toleration espoused by theologians in the officially religious states of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries deserve closer examination. So argue Tobias Dienst and Christoph Strohm in their introduction to Martinus Becanus’s 1607 treatise, On the Duty to Keep Faith with Heretics. Becanus (1563–1624), a Dutch Jesuit theologian who became court confessor to the Holy Roman Emperor, lived in and supported an officially Roman Catholic state, but this did not prevent him from developing a concept of religious...

Korey D. Maas, associate professor of history at Hillsdale College, has written a timely warning to American Catholics at Public Discourse titled, ‘The Coming Anti-Catholicism.’ Maas begins his essay with a recounting of the early history of American anti-Catholicism, its mitigation in the 1960s, and its troubling resurgence in recent years: bined effects of Camelot and the Council were to make political anti-Catholicism gauche almost overnight. Nobody, therefore, is surprised today when conservative Catholics and liberal non-Catholics alike respond to...

On this episode of Acton Line, Caroline Roberts speaks with Andrew Kloster, deputy director of the Center for the Study of the Administrative State at George Mason University, about the student debt crisis. Kloster claims that the student debt crisis is the greatest moral hazard of our Nation and explains how he sees the crisis panning out in the future. On the second segment, Acton’s director of research, Samuel Gregg, sits down with Mustafa Akyol, senior research fellow at the...

When e across a think piece so catastrophically wrong as David Bentley Hart’s April 27 New York Times column, “Can We Please Relax About ‘Socialism’?” you marvel at the effort, intentional or not. Hart, an Eastern Orthodox theologian and, as the Times puts it a “cultural critic,” says he knows that, “in this country we employ terms like ‘socialism’ with wanton indifference to historical details and conceptual distinctions.” He’s right, but not in the way he thinks he’s right. After...

On May 1st, the feast of St. Joseph the Worker, a Catholic church named after the saintly carpenter and foster father to Jesus, tragically burned to the ground in Phoenix, Arizona. On the very same May 1st in Europe it was a state holiday. It was International Workers’ Day, also known as Labor Day, when the workforce traditionally enjoys a day of ‘non-work’. As Europeans picnicked and leisured, in the dark Arizona desert hell broke loose in the form of...

After the second weekend of release, the directors of Avengers: Endgame have declared that spoilers are fair game, and so it is time to pick up where some previous reflections left off and explore the villain Thanos’ development from Infinity War to Endgame. As I explored earlier, Thanos’ vision in Infinity War is neo-Malthusian: “His dogmatic adherence to the neo-Malthusian creed of limitation and extinction requires him to make a sacrifice, first of his own child and then of half...

Series Note: Jobs are one of the most important aspects of a morally functioning economy. They help us serve the needs of our neighbors and lead to human flourishing both for the individual and munities. Conversely, not having a job can adversely affect spiritual and psychological well-being of individuals and families. Because unemployment is a spiritual problem, Christians in America need to understand and be aware of the monthly data on employment. Each month highlight thelatest numberswe need to know...