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Note: This is post #91 in a weekly video series on basic economics. Financial intermediaries serve as a bridge between borrowers and savers. When those bridges collapse the effects can be disastrous: businesses go bankrupt, workers get laid off, and people lose their homes. These negative effects show you how crucial intermediaries are to our lives. What exactly causes financial intermediaries to fail? In this video by Marginal Revolution University, economist Tyler Cowen looks at four reasons: insecure property rights,...

The arts of liberty: Education for image bearers

In the United States, there is a constant background critique of education. Complaints include the following: Teachers are too liberal. Professors are too abstract. Schools don’t do a good job of preparing students for work. Education costs too much, both for governments and the parents and students paying tuition. Yet despite all the dissatisfaction, we value education highly. When we are honest with ourselves, we recognize that an educated public brings with it all kinds of benefits. It is tremendously...

Radio Free Acton: Entrepreneurship in Guatemala; Upstream on the future of the arts

On this episode of Radio Free Acton, host Caroline Roberts speaks with Jonathan Porta, co-founder of merce platform UTZ Market in Guatemala, on his experiences in developing his business and on entrepreneurship in Guatemala. Then on the Upstream segment, Bruce Edward Walker talks to David Marcus, New York correspondent for The Federalist on the future of the arts. Check out these additional resources on this week’s podcast topics: Check out Utz Market Learn more about sustainable development and effective poverty...

Conquering famine: 3 reasons global hunger is on the decline

In confronting the problem of global hunger, Western activists, planners, and foreign aid “experts” are prone to look only toward various forms of economic redistribution. Even among nonprofits, churches, and missions organizations, we see an overly narrow focus on temporary needs and material donations with little attention to individual empowerment and institutional reforms. Meanwhile, global poverty and hunger are on the decline—a development driven not by top-level tweaks and materialistic trickery, but by a bottom-up revolution of freedom, innovation, and...

Lord Acton vs. the ‘New Socialists’ on Freedom

‘Lord Acton’ Public Domain Corey Robin, professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, wrote an interesting and troubling piece last week in the New York Times titled, “The New Socialists: Why the pitch from Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders resonates in 2018.” It is part chronicle of the recent rise of self-identified socialist politicians in the United States and part meditation on what people in 2018 mean when they talk about socialism....

What difference does reaching the middle class make?

Too often, advocating for economically sound policies is dismissed as extraneous to the life of a Christian. Faith leaders may see improving the lot of those living in this world as worthwhile but, fundamentally, outside the Christian’s mission. But if they understood the difference these policies make for “the least of these,” they may reconsider. It may be a cliche to say that those in the West take for granted the kind of daily pleasures and amenities denied much of...

John McCain, the Hanoi Hilton, and public virtue

“Sen. John McCain, who passed away on Saturday, is undeniably the most famous prisoner of war held captive and tortured by the North Vietnamese,” says Ray Nothstine in this week’s Acton Commentary. “McCain was one of 591 Americans returned by North Vietnam over several months during ‘Operation ing’ in 1973. But in our current politicized era, McCain’s fame somewhat overshadows the leadership and lessons of many other great Americans tortured by their Marxist captors.” McCain often praised fellow prisoners as...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

Lord Jonathan Sacks: The West’s Rabbi

In October 1798, the president of the United States wrote to officers of the Massachusetts militia, acknowledging a limitation of federal rule. “We have no government,” John Adams wrote, “armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, and revenge or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.” The nation that Adams had helped to found would require the parts of the body...

Oct 19, 2026

How Dispensationalism Got Left Behind

Whether we like it or not, Americans, in one way or another, have all been indelibly shaped by dispensationalism. Such is the subtext of Daniel Hummel’s provocative telling of the rise and fall of dispensationalism in America. In a little less than 350 pages, Hummel traces how a relatively insignificant Irishman from the Plymouth Brethren, John Nelson Darby, prompted the proliferation of dispensational theology, especially its eschatology, or theology of the end times, among our ecclesiastical, cultural, and political...

Oct 19, 2026

Adam Smith and the Poor

Adam Smith did not seem to think that riches were requisite to happiness: “the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for” (The Theory of Moral Sentiments). But he did not mend beggary. The beggar here is not any beggar, but Diogenes the Cynic, who asked of Alexander the Great only to step back so as not to cast a shadow upon Diogenes as he reclined alongside the highway....

Oct 19, 2026

Conversation Starters with … Anne Bradley

Anne Bradley is an Acton affiliate scholar, the vice president of academic affairs at The Fund for American Studies, and professor of economics at The Institute of World Politics. There’s much talk about mon good capitalism” these days, especially from the New Right. Is this long overdue, that a hyper-individualism be beaten back, or is it merely cover for increasing state control of the economy? Let me begin by saying that I hate “capitalism with adjectives” in general. This...

Oct 19, 2026

Up from the Liberal Founding

During the 20th century, scholars of the American founding generally believed that it was liberal. Specifically, they saw the founding as rooted in the political thought of 17th-century English philosopher John Locke. In addition, they saw Locke as a primarily secular thinker, one who sought to isolate the role of religion from political considerations except when necessary to prop up the various assumptions he made for natural rights. These included a divine creator responsible for a rational world for...

Oct 19, 2026

Creating an Economy of Inclusion

The poor have been the main subject of concern in the whole tradition of Catholic Social Teaching. The Catholic Church talks often about a “preferential option for the poor.” In recent years, many of the Church’s social teaching documents have been particularly focused on the needs of the poorest people in the world’s poorest countries. The first major analysis of this topic could be said to have been in the papal encyclical Populorum Progressio, published in 1967 by Pope...

Oct 19, 2026

Spurgeon and the Poverty-Fighting Church

Religion & Liberty: Volume 33, Number 4 Spurgeon and the Poverty-Fighting Church by Christopher Parr • October 30, 2023 Portrait of Charles Spurgeon by Alexander Melville (1885) Charles Spurgeon was a young, zealous 15-year-old boy when he came to faith in Christ. A letter to his mother at the time captures the enthusiasm of his newfound Christian faith: “Oh, how I wish that I could do something for Christ.” God granted that wish, as Spurgeon would e “the prince of...

Oct 19, 2026

Mistaken About Poverty

Perhaps it is because America is the land of liberty and opportunity that debates about poverty are especially intense in the United States. Americans and would-be Americans have long been told that if they work hard enough and persevere they can achieve their dreams. For many people, the mere existence of poverty—absolute or relative—raises doubts about that promise and the American experiment more generally. Is it true that America suffers more poverty than any other advanced democracy in the...

Oct 19, 2026

C.S. Lewis and the Apocalypse of Gender

From very nearly the beginning, Christianity has wrestled with the question of the body. Heretics from gnostics to docetists devalued physical reality and the body, while orthodox Christianity insisted that the physical world offers us true signs pointing to God. This quarrel persists today, and one form it takes is the general confusion among Christians and non-Christians alike about gender. Is gender an abstracted idea? Is it reducible to biological characteristics? Is it a set of behaviors determined by...

Oct 19, 2026

Jesus and Class Warfare

Plenty of Marxists have turned to the New Testament and the origins of Christianity. Memorable examples include the works of F.D. Maurice and Zhu Weizhi’s Jesus the Proletarian. After criticizing how so many translations of the New Testament soften Jesus’ teachings regarding material possessions, greed, and wealth, Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart has gone so far to ask, “Are Christians supposed to be Communists?” In the Huffington Post, Dan Arel has even claimed that “Jesus was clearly a Marxist,...

Oct 19, 2026