In an interview with Reason TV,Whole Foods co-founderJohn Mackey answers a rangeof questions about why so many intellectuals areopposed to the freemarket, whetherthroughouthistory and to this today. “Is it a misunderstanding of what business does?” asks Nick Gillespie. “Is it envy? Is it a lack of capacity to understand that what entrepreneurs do or what innovators do?” Here’s a sample: Intellectuals have always merce. That is something that tradesmen did; people that were in a lower class. And so you...

Highly mended reading es from Matt Ridley in the Wall Street Journal. His essay, “The Green Scare Problem,” rebuts environmentalist Cassandras from Rachel Carson to the present day, exposing the rampant hyperbole ecological warriors employ to sell their global warming and anti-genetically modified organism policies to an unsuspecting public. Ridley goes even further to show how these policies harm the world’s poorest. Ridley begins by quoting President Obama, who reduces the opposition of his climate-change agenda as nothing more than...

Last week, I was pleased to attend the ERLC’s 2015 National Conference on Gospel and Politics, of whichthe Acton Institute was a proud co-sponsor. The speaker line-up was strikingly rich and diverse, ranging from pastors to writers to politicos to professors, but among them all, Russell Moore’s morning address was the clear stand-out. Moore beganby asking, “How do we as Christians engage in issues that sometimes are political without ing co-opted by politics and losing the gospel and the mission...

Last year when Seattle announced it was raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour, I made four predictions about how the policy would affect the city over the next three years. One of the predictions was that, Unemployment will increase for low-wage workers— It’s true that economists disagree about the effects of the minimum wage on employment and the living standards of minimum wage earners. But almost all of the disagreement is about relatively small increases—less than 20 percent....

Cardinal Joseph Bernardin (1928-1996)At The Catholic World Report, Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg examines the use of the expression “a consistent ethic of life” — a phrase which has been used by Roman Catholic bishops as far back as a 1971 speech delivered by then-Archbishop Humberto Medeiros of Boston. More recently, Chicago Archbishop Blaise Cupich used the phrase in a Chicago Tribune article about the scandal of Planned Parenthood selling body-parts from aborted children. Elaborating, Cupich said “we should be...

Fr. Michael Crosby You can’t really take fossil fuel divestment seriously unless you ignore a lot of inconvenient truths. These would include such things as Al Gore’s carbon footprint or the fuel bill for the dozens of private jets flown to any UN climate summit. On a more mundane level, we might point to benefits of abundant and affordable resources of coal, natural gas and crude oil that power modern industrialized economies and will continue to dominate as future energy...

A year ago this month, Islamic State (also known as IS, ISIS, or ISIL) began a systematic program of capturing women and girls for the purposes of rape, forced marriage, and sexual slavery. Yesterday, the New York Times brought renewed attention to the war crimes in an article examining how IS enshrines a theology of rape. Here are five facts you should know about how IS views and justifies the practice of sexual slavery: 1.IS considers rape of sex slaves...

While being homeless is not a crime, cities across America are increasingly making activities associated with a lack of shelter against the law. A survey of 187 cities found that 34 percent impose city-wide bans on camping in public and 18 percent impose city-wide bans on sleeping in public. In 2009, a group of homeless plaintiffs challenged the city of Boise, Idaho over its ordinance banning sleeping and camping in public places. This week the Department of Justice issued a...

Acton’s Director of Research Samuel Gregg made an appearance over the weekend on the Real Clear Radio Hour with Bill Frezza to discuss the relationship between economic and religious liberty, and the role that a Christian worldview plays in building thetype of world that prefigures the Christian idea of the next life. The interview runs for 25 minutes, and you can listen to it via the audio player below. ...

S. L. Frank Today at The Imaginative Conservative, I offer a brief look into the social though of the Russian philosopher S. L. Frank: In his 1930 book, The Spiritual Foundations of Society, Frank offers a refreshing vision of a conservatism that cannot survive apart from creativity. The book is a remarkable tour de force of intelligent, nuanced, and in some ways even prescient Christian social thought. One can find references—some explicit, some in Frank’s own words—to personalism, natural law,...