In a recent interview in the Wall Street Journal, billionaire Stan Druckenmiller discusses his recent university tour sounding the alarm on intergenerational theft. The article paraphrases his case: [W]hile today’s 65-year-olds will receive on average net lifetime benefits of $327,400, children born now will suffer net lifetime losses of $420,600 as they struggle to pay the bills of aging Americans. It goes on: When the former money manager visited Stanford University, the audience included older folks as well as students....

For those of us on this side of the pond, France conjures up images of baguettes, beautiful women and lush countryside. For the French, the image conjured up might be taxes, taxes and more taxes. More than 70 per cent of the French feel taxes are “excessive”, and 80 per cent believe the president’s economic policy is “misguided” and “inefficient”. This goes far beyond the tax exiles such as Gérard Depardieu, members of the Peugeot family or Chanel’s owners. Worse,...

Christian’s Library Press has now releasedExodus, the second primer in its Opening the Scripturesseries.Written by Dutch Reformed pastor and preacher Cornelis Vonk, and translated by Theodore Plantinga and Nelson Kloosterman, the volume provides an introduction to the book of Exodus. Like others in the series, it is neither a mentary nor a sermon, but rather an accessible primer for the average churchgoer, walking readers through the “immense building” of Scripture while “tracing the unfolding” of God’s ultimate plan. Much of...

Earlier this month, Christian’s Library Press co-sponsored a discussion between Ken Myers, Matthew Lee Anderson, and British moral philosopher Oliver O’Donovan. Held a few blocks from the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., the conversation addressed questions and themes of political theology and was loosely centered around O’Donovan’s 1996 book The Desire of the Nations. Click here to listen to an audio of the conversation on the website of Mars Hill Audio Journal. ...

No, that’s not the name of a new James Bond movie. Rather, it’s a Public Discourse post by Anthony Esolen that discusses society’s ability (and disability) to get a handle on evil actions and morality. The cry, “You can’t legislate morality” is, of course, false. That is exactly what law does, as Esolen points out. All laws bear some relation, however distant, to a moral evaluation of good and bad. We cannot escape making moral distinctions. One man’s theft is...

Forget Max Weber and his Protestant work ethic, says Greg Forster. We don’t need social science to know that God cares about our work: Nothing shows the difficulty of understanding the relationship between work and faith more than our continued insistence on framing this issue as a debate over Max Weber’s long-discredited theory of the Protestant work ethic. Weber argued that Protestants value work because they think prosperity is proof that you’re saved; as anyone who knows anything about church...

While many Americans are struggling to navigate healthcare.gov and some are fighting against the Affordable Care Act’s threat to religious liberty, an estimated 100,000 people are exempt from the legislation as members of a health care sharing ministry (HCSM); these organizations offer the opportunity for individuals with similar beliefs to share their health care costs. HCSMs are not panies, but nonprofit religious organizations that receive no government funding. Andrea Miller, the medical director for Medi-Share, one HCSM in the U.S.,...

Japan is a nation going under, demographically speaking. It is estimated that Japan will lose 10 million people in population over the next ten years. Like many nations, Japan is not having babies fast enough to keep its population stable. One reason: what the Japanese are calling “sekkusu shinai shokogun, or ‘celibacy syndrome.'” Young people don’t want to date, be intimate, get married, have sex. There are pelling reasons for this. The first is the Japanese culture’s saturation in social...

In an essay for AEI’s The American, Henry Olsen does a deep dive on the white working class, a group that Republicans have won by significant margins in recent years. (HT) Yet upon reviewing evidence in a new book by Andrew Levison, The White Working Class Today: Who They Are, How They Think, and How Progressives Can Regain Their Support, Olsen concludes that “conservatives, not progressives, are the ones in need of an electoral strategy to capture this key segment...

“The plural of anecdote is not data”, claimed toxicologist Frank Kotsonis, in an attempt to correct sloppy thinking. While Kotsonis has provided a useful aphorism, it can obscure the equally interesting fact that the singular of data is anecdote. Consider, for example, the following two stories. The first is the shortest work of fiction ever written by Ernest Hemingway: For sale: baby shoes, never worn. This powerful story is a marvel of economy. In a mere six words and three...