Delta Airlines has announced that it foresees a spike in health care costs for pany to the tune of $100 million a year. A Delta executive, Robert Kight, has said that fees associated with Obamacare will be costly, but won’t likely be more beneficial than what pany’s employees now have. One of the costly items pertains to an annual fee of $63 per “covered participant” next year. pany estimates this means a more than $10 million expense in 2014. The...

ing Europe, the latest book from Acton’s Director of Research Samuel Gregg, has been reviewed by Books & Culture: A Christian Review. Theodore Roosevelt Malloch, a research professor at Yale University’s Center for Faith & Culture, begins his review with a series of question, including, “Will entrepreneurship vanish in America, as it has, more or less, in Europe? And what will be the moral and political costs of what Gregg describes as ‘reduced freedoms’?” Malloch notes how Gregg walks the...

When a business advertises a particular product in a particular way but secretly delivers something different, it’s considered fraud. When a government agency advertises a particular product in a particular way but secretly delivers something different, it’s considered . . . what, a necessary evil? Huffington Post’s Jason Cherkis spent two days at the Kentucky State Fair with workers from Kynect, the state’s health marketplace. A middle-aged man in a red golf shirt shuffles up to a small folding table...

A recent story from Catholic News Service highlights an interesting encounter between markets and monasticism, a subject that I mented on before, this time centered around the Monastery of St. Benedict in Norcia: The monks in Norcia initially were known for their liturgical ministry, particularly sharing their chanted prayers in Latin online – – with people around the world. But following the Rule of St. Benedict means both prayer and manual labor, with a strong emphasis on the monks earning...

As the civil war in Syrian continues to escalate, Christians are increasingly ing the target of violent attacks. Catholic and Orthodox groups in Syria say the anti-government rebels mitted “awful acts” against Christians, including beheadings, rapes and murders of pregnant women. Today, the conflict has morphed into a full-fledged civil war in which more than 100,000 people have perished. The most capable units on the rebel side — those spearheading the fight against the secular government — posed of Islamist...

The New Mexico Supreme Court, in a ruling regarding a Christian photographer who declined to photograph mitment ceremony of a same-sex couple, stated that this violated the state’s Human Rights Act. In 2006, Elane Huguenin, a professional photographer, was asked to photograph the ceremony of a lesbian couple. Huguenin declined, citing her religious beliefs, and subsequently had plaint filed against her with the New Mexico Human Rights Commission. She was found guilty of discrimination and fined. Justice Richard Bosson, in...

NRO’s Mark Steyn minces no words when es to his distaste for Obamacare: “a hierarchy of privileges,” he calls it, along with “crappy” and “inefficient.” First, Steyn points out that it’s doubtful anyone has read the prehensive” health care act: it’s a thousand pages long. As he says, the problem with something so prehensive” is that “when everything’s in it, nothing’s in it.” But worst of all, it means whatever the government wants it to mean: The Affordable Care Act...

A piece of news analysis over the weekend by Amy Harmon, a national correspondent for the New York Times, captures well the dynamics of the current debates about the merits of genetically-modified organisms (GMO’s). Harmon writes specifically about the case of Golden Rice, which has some attributes that should inoculate it mon concerns about GMO’s. Golden Rice is not monopolized by a corporate entity, and has been developed specifically to address urgent health concerns in the developing world: Not owned...

Pro-market advocates often talk about how markets are self-correcting. But why do businesses in free markets fix their own mistakes? Because if they don’t, customers and other stakeholders will punish them: Lululemon, which produces yoga and other athletic apparel, provoked outrage from its devoted customer base when it released a flawed product earlier this year: see-through yoga pants. Founded in 1998, pany had built trust and loyalty among its yoga-loving clientele for delivering quality products: In just 15 years, Lululemon...

Why do people live in poverty? Sometimes the problem is structural, and the cause can be attributed to a corrupt government or economic injustice. Sometimes the problem is individual, and the cause can be attributed to poor work ethic or a dependency on drugs. Sometimes, perhaps even most of the time, the problem is bination of structural and individual reasons. Just as there is no one cause of poverty there can be no one solution to poverty. Forgetting this obvious...