Imagine that within the same hour, two large Boeing 747 passenger jets crashed killing everyone onboard. Now consider two planes crashing every hour for an entire 24-hour period. Finally, think of the accumulated deaths of two passenger jets crashing every hour for an entire year.* The death toll from all those crashes would be roughly equivalent to the number of people who die every year from pollution. A new study published in the British medical journal The Lancet finds that...

The number of federal regulations in the United States broke an all-time record last year. A total of 97,110 pages were added to the Federal Register in 2016. The Competitive Enterprise Institute calculates pliance costs and economic impacts of federal regulations at $1.89 trillion. This massive corpus of rules, guidances, and bureaucratic diktats spring from the pens (and keyboards) of unelected officials with little oversight from elected representatives and less from voters themselves. People of faith must scrutinize the outsourcing...

Christianity planted the seed that germinated into Western thought for two millennia. Yet the contributions of the faith, and its practitioners, remain unsung, underappreciated, and unheralded in an ever-secularizing west – a fact remedied in part by the bookGreat Christian Jurists in English History, edited by Hill and Helmholz. The book is reviewed in the latest essay for Religion & Liberty Transatlanticby Stephen F. Copp, Ph.D. Copp’s credentials – as an associate professor and former head of the department of...

For the past several years I’ve had a near obsession with trying to get Christians to recognize the devastating effects of unemployment. It’s not that believers don’t recognize unemployment as harmful, it’s that we often underestimate just how destructive not having a job is to the individual and munity. Jobs are the most important part of a morally functioning economy. As Rev. Sirico has said, “The Scripture provides an insight into our nature: We are all, man and woman, called...

In his most recent homily Pope Francis said that amassing wealth—both money and land—while children suffer and die is a morally unacceptable form of idolatry. There’s an “idolatry that kills,” said Francis, that makes “human sacrifices” by those who are hungry of money, land and wealth, who have “a lot” in front of “hungry children who have no medicine, no education, who are abandoned.” From a biblical perspective, Francis is correct. But there is more he needs to say about...

One hundred years ago on October 25, the Bolsheviks seized Russia’s Provisional Government under the guidance of Vladimir Lenin. As a result of Lenin’s Marxism, up to 100 million people were killed in the 20th century. Considering the corruption and devastation Communism wreaked upon Russia, it’s important to realize the foreshadowing signs of this ideology because many are flirting with Communism today. In an article written for The Catholic World Report, Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg explains just how damaging...

Note: This is post #54 in a weekly video series on basic microeconomics. How are wages determined? Why do most Americans earn so much by global standards? What exactly is meant by ‘human capital’? Do labor unions help workers, and if so, by how much? In this video by Marginal Revolution University, economist Alex Tabarrok answers all these questions and more. (If you find the pace of the videos too slow, I’d mend watching them at 1.5 to 2 times...

On this episode of Radio Free Acton, Caroline Roberts talks with Fr. Ben Johnson, senior editor at the Acton Institute, on the pitfalls of sin taxes. Then, on the Econ Quiz segment, Caroline speaks to Anne Rathbone Bradley, vice president of economic initiatives at the Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics and visiting professor at Georgetown University, about the impact of Amazon and whether or not it is a monopoly. On the Upstream segment, Caroline and Bruce Edward Walker talk...

Jerry Pournelle passed away in early September and is memorialized in this week’s “Upstream” segment of the Radio Free Acton podcast. An plished man in many fields in both the public and private sectors, he perhaps is best known as the author and co-author of a shelf-full of science-fiction novels. Among them is Oath of Fealty, a 1981 collaborative effort with Larry Niven, another sci-fi legend. The novel gained a reputation as a classic of libertarian fiction despite the fact...

When disasters strike – as they have repeatedly across the transatlantic sphere this season – government exercises its most essential function: saving lives. Do these heroic actions validate the ongoing intervention of the federal government into local affairs? This hurricane season has given federal officers too many opportunities to provide this service. Hurricanes Harvey, Irene, and Maria tore across the countryside in violent succession. Most recently, Hurricane Ophelia’s 100 mph winds killed three people in the Republic of Ireland and...