As Donald Trump stood alongside Emmanuel Macron at a parade on Friday, memorated more thanBastille Day. The presidents of the U.S. and France burst into applause as a marching band paid tribute to the 86victims of last July 14th’sNice terrorist attack. The ever-growing string of terrorist “incidents” gained momentum with the murders at a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012. But the situation, which one Israeli official dubbed the “European intifada,” broke into public consciousness following the 2015Charlie Hebdoattack. A...

Students of the free market say that economics is merely human action. Economists also understand that policies have unintended consequences – such as reducing the number of children born in a nation. The Adam Smith Institute, based in London, has released a new report describing one such consequence due, in part, to central planning and overregulation. The British housing crisis has inadvertently discouraged women from having 157,000 children, its report finds. Young couples in the UK increasingly struggle to afford...

Many might not even recognize the name “Russell Kirk,” and those who do often do not know the true impact of his contributions. Kirk quickly rose to prominence in American political discourse during the 1950s, but fell from the public eye following Barry Goldwater’s defeat in the 1964 presidential election, whom Kirk had firmly supported. But at this year’s Acton University, Bradley Birzer, a professor of history at Hillsdale College, and the Russell Amos Kirk Chair in American Studies, outlined...

“How many people know how to ride a bicycle? How many people can explain how a bicycle works?” asked Michael Miller, research fellow at the Acton Institute, during his lecture on “Moral Imagination” at Acton University. Knowing how to ride a bicycle, yet not being able to explain its exact mechanics, is just one example Miller gives to explain “inarticulate rationality.” This concept, developed by the 20th century polymath Michael Polanyi, recognizes that there are things people ought to do,...

On Tuesday, Newsweek published an article relating how the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) allocated $65 million to develop brain implants “to link human brains puters.” Neuro-technology has been a priority of the U.S. Military since the launch of the Neural Engineering System Design (NESD) program in January 2016. Their goal is to “[develop] an implantable system able to provide munication between the brain and the digital world.” In other words, the U.S. Military wants to make better...

Campus Reform, a project of the Leadership Institute,recently interviewed students in Washington, D.C. to get their opinions on socialism. Not surprisingly, most of them were all for it. And also not surprisingly, most of them could not explain what they mean by socialism. While it’s tempting to mock these students for supporting an economic system they can’t define, I’m not sure those of us on the right side of the political spectrum can do any better. I remember hearing that...

In his Acton University lecture titled “Creation and the Image of God,” Scott Hahn began with the assertion that we often ask the wrong questions about the creation story in Genesis. Instead of focusing on scientific questions of exactly when God created and how, we should be asking what God created and why. These are questions of theological anthropology, i.e. the understanding of God that is necessary for the understanding of man. Hahn uses biblical theology in order to answer...

Paul Bonicelli, director of programs and education at the Acton Institute, published an article onFrench President Emmanuel Macron controversial response to the question:“Why isn’t there a Marshall Plan for Africa?” at the recent G20 summit. Though Macron rightly rejected parison between the needs of Africa and post-war Europe, he failed by making a cultural argument about the amount of children born to African women. ments: Much of Africa has never enjoyed home-grown democratic institutions launched from a culture that can...

Our society has grown increasingly transactional in its ways of thinking, whether about family, business, education, or politics. Everything we spend, steward, or invest — our money, time, and relationships — must somehow secure an immediate personal return or reward, lest it be cast aside as “wasteful.” As an overarching philosophy of life, such an approach fails not due only due to its narrow individualism, but also to its cramped obsession with scarcity, standing in stark contrast with the lavish...

Note: This is post #41 in a weekly video series on basic microeconomics. We tend to assume profit—the bottom line—is the main motivation for a firm’s actions, says economist Alex Tabbarok. For most firms most of the time, this is a good assumption, especially in petitive market. This video by Marginal Revolution University explores how pany maximizes profit in petitive environment where there are many buyers and sellers. (If you find the pace of the videos too slow, I’d mend...