From Agence France-Presse: Geneva — No Swiss fighter jets were scrambled Monday when an Ethiopian Airlines co-pilot hijacked his own plane and forced it to land in Geneva, because it happened outside business hours, the Swiss airforce said. You simply cannot make this stuff up. Granted, Switzerland has sort of made it “their thing” to avoid any territorial issue more dangerous than a Von Trapp family crossing, but this is embarrassing. Yes, the Swiss haven’t had much need for a...

What just happened in Ukraine? For the past three months, a protest movement has been expressing opposition to the government of Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych. Yesterday (Feb. 18), the protest reached a current peak when the country suffered its worst bloodshed since leaving the Soviet empire. More than 20 people were reported killed as riot police moved in to clear Kiev’s Independence Square, the crucible of the anti-government activism. What is the cause of the conflict? At its root, the...

. I imagine there are a lot of those. But Ms. Adams’ work focuses on attaining marriage rights for people like herself: those living in polyamorous living situations. To get a sense of this: Along with her primary partner Ed, she is currently romantically involved with several other men and women. An interview with Ms. Adams is currently featured in The Atlantic. She was asked, after stating that we humans have a “hard time with monogamy,” what the consequences of...

No child chooses to be a prostitute. No 11 year old girl spreads out her Barbies on her bed on a rainy Saturday afternoon to play “hooker and john.” No teenage girl doodles her way through geometry class, dreaming about hitting the streets to have sex with a dozen nameless men that night. “Child prostitute?” There is no such thing. Let’s banish the phrase, call it slavery and work to solve the issue. Because stories like Tami’s and Sandra’s are...

The much-maligned 1%. Websites are devoted to getting them to spread their wealth. They are called self-pitying, greedy…just all-around bad folk. Really? In today’s Wall Street Journal, James Piereson says the 1% are actually hard-working people like the rest of us. They have jobs. They earn their money. Maybe they earn more money that most of us, but they do earn it; they aren’t trust fund babies or spoiled heirs. Where does their e from? The top earners depend heavily...

Shortly after filing my blog yesterday, the New York Times’ David Firestone added another wrinkle. It seems liberal billionaires also contribute millions of dollars to voice their strongly held beliefs regarding climate change: Those who are worried about man-made climate change might be tempted to e the news that Tom Steyer, a Democratic billionaire, will spend $100 million this year to fight it. Mr. Steyer plans to put up half the money himself for attack ads against governors and lawmakers...

Calling all business and economics faculty at Christian colleges, universities, and seminaries across the United States and Canada! The deadline to apply for a Mini-Grant is March 15, only a few short weeks away. The Acton Institute’s Mini-Grant Program will award a total of $40,000 to business and economics instructors for purposes of course development and faculty scholarship in the field of free-market economics. If you are a professor or know of professors looking for financial assistance to bolster course...

Acton’s Director of Research, Samuel Gregg, recently wrote about the effects of raising the minimum wage at the National Review Online. The latest CBO report estimates that increasing the minimum wage to over $10/hour in 2016 will not greatly affect the poorest in society; it is estimated that this increase will only help 2% of those living in poverty. The benefit of the increase will go to people fortably above the poverty line.” Gregg discusses this phenomenon: Is that just?...

I have previously expressed my appreciation for the popular TV show, Undercover Boss, in which business leaders from large corporations spend several days working alongside lower-level employees. In an episode on Subway, Don Fertman,the restaurant chain’s Chief Development Officer, goes undercover at several locations across the United States.Most of the episode includes your typical Undercover Boss fare — a bumbling executive, dedicated workers, teer-jerker employee recognitions —but I was struck by a particular branch that Fertman visits along the way....

The “information theory of capitalism”, says Rev. Johannes L. Jacobse in this week’s Acton Commentary, upends conventional thinking about free markets and statist economic theories. Ever since the rise of information theory in the 1940s, it is ing increasingly clear that the universe is, in a sense, digital. Information, logic, data, whatever you want to call it, lies even deeper than the material operations that science has so ably discovered and quantified. This deeper informational dimension is dynamic and unpredictable....