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Welcome to Cuba: Where doctors earn less than taxi drivers

In Cuba, taxi drivers earn far more than doctors, raking in more money in one day than a doctor will make in an entire month. The reason? Unlike most of the Cuban economy, taxi licenses are privately held and wages are not set by the state. Johnny Harris explains: Although Cuba offers fewopportunities for private enterprise — outside of itssprawling black market, that is — the number of self-employed workers has slowly grown in recent years. Seven years after Raul...

Green America’s War on Restaurants

The network of leftist shareholder activism plex and wide-ranging. In the name of progressive causes, they panies to forfeit profitability, reduce investment returns, raise costs to customers and threaten both actual and potential jobs. It’s heartbreaking that religious shareholder groups not only willingly but passionately lend their support to secular causes promoted by US SIF: The Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment and Ceres. As I have noted previously, both organizations count religious shareholder groups among their respective membership rosters...

Pope Francis and Free Economy in the Evangelii Gaudium

1. Introduction Francis’ Apostolic ExhortationEvangelii Gaudium[1](EG) is not a text on economy: it is a fine and substantial magisterial reflection about the topic of evangelization in our days, a most extensive subject whose analysis exceeds the humble purposes of this article, and must await a later occasion. However, Francis’ diagnosis of current circumstances holds some judgments on economic issues that have once again caused admiration and adhesion among free market critics, as well as concern or outright rejection among free...

The FAQs: China’s ‘One-Child’ Policy

What was China’s “one-child” policy? In an attempt to limit population growth, China implemented a policy in the late 1970s that forbid families from having more than one child (there were, however, no penalties for multiple births, such as twins or triplets). Over the years, though, numerous exceptions have been allowed and by 2007 the policy only restricted 35.9 percent of the population to having one child. What is the new policy? Starting next March, a change to current family...

Review: That’s a Great Question

A couple of months ago Arkansas’ Secretary of State rejected the request from the Universal Society of Hinduism to erect a statue on state capitol grounds. A good friend from college, himself a Hindu, sent me an email asking me what I thought about it. What could I say? It seemed patiently unfair: Arkansas had approved a monument for the Ten Commandments on state grounds, but rejected the Hindu organization’s privately funded statue. miserated with my friend, saying only that...

Yes, New York Times, for Christians Scripture Is Indeed the Rule of Law

“If any of you has a dispute with another, do you dare to take it before the ungodly for judgment instead of before the Lord’s people?” The Apostle Paul asked the church in Corinth. “Or do you not know that the Lord’s people will judge the world?” Paul continues, And if you are to judge the world, are you petent to judge trivial cases? Do you not know that we will judge angels? How much more the things of this...

Radio Free Acton: Jay Nordlinger On The Children of Monsters

Jay Nordlinger speaks at the Acton Lecture Series This week on Radio Free Acton, National Review Senior Editor Jay Nordlinger joins the podcast to talk about his latest book,Children of Monsters: An Inquiry Into the Sons and Daughters of Dictators, a book I enjoyed enough to create the “Radio Free Acton 5 Star Award of Excellence” in order to have an award to bestow upon it. Nordlinger joined us here at Acton on October 29 to deliver an Acton Lecture...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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...

Mar 23, 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...

Mar 23, 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...

Mar 23, 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...

Mar 23, 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...

Mar 23, 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....

Mar 23, 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...

Mar 23, 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...

Mar 23, 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,...

Mar 23, 2026

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...

Mar 23, 2026