On this week’s episode, we pay tribute to Gertrude Himmelfarb who passed away last Monday, December 30th, at the age of 97. Gertrude Himmelfarb was a historian and leading intellectual voice in conservatism. Throughout her career, she wrote many books about Victorian history, morality and contemporary culture. The New York Post named her one of America’s greatest minds, and the National Review called her the “paragon of intellectual plishment.” What did her work contribute to the conservative movement and how...

Since the passing of Gertrude Himmelfarb I have been reflecting on just how much she taught me through her voluminous historical scholarship. In this week’s Acton Line Podcast I interviewed Yuval Levin, Resident Scholar and Director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at AEI, who was also her student. Levin’s recent essay in the National Review, “The Historian as Moralist,” is the best introduction I have ever read to Himmelfarb’s intellectual project, her major works, and her lasting influence. My...

China’s social credit system seeks to tie each individual’s credit rating and privileges to his support for the Communist regime. Venezuela’s socialist dictator, Nicolás Maduro, has moved to import “perhaps the creepiest tool of repression” to his own country, writes Doug Bandow in this week’s Acton Commentary. Bandow, a senior rellow at the Cato Institute and former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, writes that the metastasizing Big Brother program proves that government surveillance is an integral feature of socialism:...

When discussing globalization, advocates of the free economy usually start by stressing the large number of people who have risen out of extreme poverty in the last three decades. This period of poverty reduction showed a parallel growth in globalization. But it has not been even. Those who try to prove that we are living in the best of times usually use monetary statistics – they count the number and percentage of people who earn less than $1.90 per day....

Last November, my colleague Dan Hugger ments by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) about his desire for mon good capitalism” informed by Roman Catholic social teaching. Generally speaking, this is an aspiration that many at the Acton Institute share, but the specifics of what that would look like are where the real differences lie. At the least, this demonstrates how people of good will, of the same (or similar) religious and ethical tradition, can still have divergent opinions about policy. Shared...

Capitalism is routinely castigated as an enemy of the arts, with much of the criticism pointed toward monsters of profit and efficiency. Others fret over more systemic features, worried mercialization and consumerism will inevitably detach artists from healthy creative contexts. Among progressives, such arguments are quickly paired with vague denunciations of “corporate greed” and advocacy for “corrective” or “protective” policies, from cultural subsidies to wage controls to “artist lofts” and beyond. The irony, of course, is that such solutions have...

The former UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson oncesaid that “the NHS is the closest thing the English people have to a religion” – but as a new story shows, it is a religion that forces people to break the Ten Commandments. Certain British citizens must lie to the government or face a punishing fine for telling the truth. One person to suffer this fate is a domestic abuse survivor and single parent who did not want to deceive...

Legal historian Wim Decock of the KU Leuven recently published a study of the economic thought of the Flemish Jesuit Leonardus Lessius (1554–1623). Last week the National Catholic Register posted an interview with Decock about his book and Lessius’s contribution to economics. Lessius was one of a host of significant early modern authors who addressed the economic realities of the burgeoning European market economies. These early modern authors, despite recovery efforts by Decock and other scholars, continue to be overlooked...

Protectionist policies are, on the surface, attractive. Through state means, they promise to protect industries and workers as well as boost a country’s industrial production. But like most top-down solutions, there’s a catch; the government has a knowledge deficiency. “No one knows what technological innovation or entrepreneurial insight will upend the present economic landscape in America—or any other country,” explains Samuel Gregg in an article in Law & Liberty. “Nor can such developments be anticipated by economic nationalist policies.” Evidence...

On a recent episode of the excellent podcast Conversations with Tyler the economist Tyler Cowen reflected on the direction his and co-author Alex Tabarrok’s blog Marginal Revolution has taken over the last ten years: [I]n 2009 I was still experimenting in some fresh way with blogging as a new medium and what it meant. In some ways the blog was better then for that reason. Whereas now, Marginal Revolution, it’s a bit like, well, the Economist magazine plus a dose...