Although theCuban people continue tosuffer and struggle under the weight munist rule, many have been encouraged by even the slightest of Raul Castro’s incremental changes toward private businesses. Out of a total population of roughly 11 million, the number of self-employed Cubans rose from 150,000 to 500,000 between 2010 and 2015. The state still controls the press, the internet, and most of the “formal” economy, but a small portion of the Cuban population is finally gaining the freedom to innovate...

Last week, President-elect Donald Trump along with Vice President-elect Mike Pence, who is the current governor of Indiana, struck a deal with United Technologies, the pany of Carrier, in order to save over 1,000 jobs from being sent from Indiana to Mexico. This deal will supposedly give Carrier over $7 million in tax break incentives and it has everyone across the political spectrum reacting in different ways. People on the far-left such as the self-described democratic-socialist senator from Vermont, Bernie...

Just as Acton concluded its ‘Reclaiming the West: Freedom and Responsibility‘conference series in London on Dec. 1, Italy was getting ready to decide its own fate among troubled Western democracies. On Dec. 4, the storied homeland to some of the greatest intellectual, political, religious and artistic genius over the last 2,500 years voted to implement or reject deep political reform via the ruling Partito Democratico’s proposed constitutional referendum. No doubt it was a fundamental decision about freedom and responsibility. But...

In ing weeks, a film speculated by many to be Martin Scorsese’s most personal and poignant project to date will release throughout the United States. “While Silence depicts a Japan deeply resistant to Christian influence,” says Ken Marotte in this week’s Acton Commentary, “the story actually begins approximately 100 years earlier, when Christianity was not only tolerated, but encouraged.” The Christian faith reached Japan’s shores in 1549, when Francis Xavier, co-founder of the Jesuit order and one of the church’s...

Sandro Magister, Vatican correspondent for L’Espresso, notes in his Italian blog a recent TV program that “fact checks” the pope’s economics. Here’s a translation of the blog post: In his speeches Pope Francis often puts forth original theories of dubious foundations but that, for him, are of unshakable certainty and explain everything. Take, for example, this from an interview a few days ago with the Belgian Catholic weekly “Tertio”: “There is an economic theory that I have not verified, but...

In September 1969 the Chemical Bank branch in Rockville Center, New York opened the first automatic teller machines. The first ATM was only able to give out cash, but by 1971 the machine could handle multiple functions, including providing customers’ account balances. The machine could do the job that was once reserved for human tellers. Over the next three decades, the number of ATMs increased exponentially. Today there are about 400,000 ATMs across America. You can probably imagine what happened...

This year marks the 125th anniversary of two key documents in the development of modern Christian social thought: the papal encyclicalRerum Novarumby Pope Leo XIII and the speech “The Social Question and the Christian Religion” by Abraham Kuyper. To mark this anniversary and mend these works to readers today, Acton Institute has recently releasedMakers of Modern Christian Social Thought: Leo XIII and Abraham Kuyper on the Social Question. This volume consists of the texts of these two key sources, along...

Free trade and trade agreements are not the same thing.In fact, they are often times in direct contradiction with each other.Acton Director of Research Samuel Gregg recently wrote an article about this at The Stream.Gregg explains how all trade agreements are ‘managed trade,’ not free trade.He explains how free traders should approach the issue of economic nationalism and the best ways to work toward freer trade.Concerning the issue of trade agreements and managed trade, Gregg says this: There’s no-one-size-fits-all form...

Note: This is post #13 in a weekly video series on basic microeconomics. What is a subsidy? A subsidy is really just a negative or reverse tax, explains Alex Tabarrok. Instead of collecting money in the form of a tax, the government gives money to consumer or producers. In this video by Marginal Revolution University, Tabarrok looks at the subsidy wedge and who benefits the most from different subsidies. (If you find the pace of the videos too slow, I’d...

If you’ve been stuck at the mall listening to a song about ten Lords a-Leaping and eight Maids a-Milking you can blame the Jesuits. Rumor has it they invented the Twelve Days of Christmas song as a catechism in code for persecuted Catholics in 16th-century England. The claim is that each of the items has a coded meaning (Old and New Testaments are the two turtle doves; three hens are the Wise Men; the Evangelists are the four calling birds;...