In the musical Camelot which first appeared on stage in 1960, Mordred — the antagonist, evil traitor and eventual deliverer of a mortal wound to King Arthur — appropriately lauds the antithesis of what good men are to pursue with his signature song titled “The Seven Deadly Virtues” the first line of which ends “those nasty little traps.” The lyrics are clever. “Humility,” Mordred tells us, “means to be hurt. It’s not the earth the meek inherit but the dirt.”...

God is rational, and the universe is governed by unchanging natural laws instituted by Him. The Bible tells us in the Book of Genesis that “God created the heavens and the earth.” God is not arbitrary; the Bible also tells us that He is just and that He keeps promises to His people. The prophet Jeremiah tells us that God has established “ordinances of heaven and earth.” Since e from a perfect lawgiver, we know that these laws do not...

The Radio Free Acton crew is back in the studio! On today’s broadcast, Dr. Donald P. Condit and Dr. Kevin Schmiesing join our host Marc VanderMaas for a discussion of the ins and outs of the US health care system. Dr. Condit gives us some background on how the current system came into being, the problems associated with it, and the pitfalls of the current healthcare reform proposals in Washington. Next week RFA will be back for part 2, bringing...

Dr. David Murray of Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary investigates the concept of “biblical fundraising,” reasons to continue to give in the midst of difficult economic times, in the latest edition of his vcast, “puritanPod.” Dr. Murray uses 2 Corinthians 9 as the basis for his brief but valuable message. Check out the video here. ...

Everybody realizes that the current healthcare system in the United States has problems. Unfortunately, much of the discussion about what to do rests on a false premise. The argument goes something like this: Our current free market system is not working: health care costs are astronomically high, and close to 50 million people aren’t insured. Maybe it’s time to let the government try its hand. But we don’t have a free market health system; we have a highly managed, bureaucratic...

One of the main arguments for nationalized health care is a moral argument: Health care is a right and a moral and just society should ensure that its people are taken care of–and the state has the responsibility to do this. Bracketing for the time being whether health care is actually a right or not–it is clearly a good, but all goods are not necessarily rights–whether the state should be the provider of it is another question. But there is...

Spurred on by listening to and reading Samuel Gregg, I’ve been making my way through Wilhelm Ropke’s A Humane Economy which is really a special book. The following passage (on p. 69) really caught my attention with regard to our current situation: Democracy is, in the long patible with freedom only on condition that all, or at least most, voters are agreed that certain supreme norms and principles of public life and economic order must remain outside the sphere of...

The argument from federalism: One of the great benefits of federalism is that the states can act as the laboratories of democracy. If a new public policy is tried in the states and works (as happened with welfare reform in Michigan and Wisconsin), then a similar program has a good chance of succeeding at the national level. The welfare reform went national and proved to be one of the most successful public policy initiatives of the last half century. On...

[update below] British physician Theodore Dalrymple weighs in on government healthcare and “the right to health care” in a new Wall Street Journal piece. A few choice passages: Where does the right to health e from? Did it exist in, say, 250 B.C., or in A.D. 1750? If it did, how was it that our ancestors, who were no less intelligent than we, pletely to notice it? … When the supposed right to health care is widely recognized, as in...

The Public Discourse recently published my article, Rethinking Economics in the Post-Crisis World. Text follows: In the wake of the financial crisis, we need an economics with greater humility about its predictive power and an increased understanding of plicated human beings who, when the discipline is rightly understood, lie at its center. Apart from bankers and politicians, few groups have received as much blame for the 2008 financial crisis as economists. “Economists are the forgotten guilty men” was how Anatole...