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What Churchill knew about tariffs could fill a bucket

Winston Churchill, like Benjamin Franklin and Mark Twain, has been the putative source of many a pseudonymous or misattributed quotation. However, one of his best-known aphorisms about taxes is authentic – but misunderstood. Churchill did, in fact, say, “To think you can make a man richer by putting on a tax is like a man thinking that he can stand in a bucket and lift himself up by the handle.” The quotation has had a long and storied history in...

Turning points in Catholic social teaching

In a recent Acton Line podcast I began by asking Father Robert Sirico the very large question, what is Catholic social teaching and why is it important today? He answered that the Church has always had a social teaching but that when we usually discuss Catholic social teaching today we begin with Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum. George Weigel’s latest book, The Irony of Modern Catholic Historysheds much historical and theological light on just why that is. Francesca Murphy,...

Acton Commentary: How socialism causes atheism

Most socialists have been atheists, but does accepting socialist economic principles make believers more likely to e atheists? This week’s Acton Commentary, which is the cover story of the newest issue of Religion & Liberty, explores survey data and anecdotal evidence that a socialist worldview can lead believers to lose their faith. A growing body of research reveals that as the welfare state grows, the church shrinks. Adam Kay of Duke University discovered that church and state have a “hydraulic...

Acton Line podcast: Breaking down Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society with Amity Shlaes

On May 22nd, 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson launched his program for a “Great Society” in a speech at the University of Michigan. “The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all,” Johnson began. “It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are mitted in our time. But that is just the beginning.” 84 bills later, Johnson’s war on poverty was in full effect, expanding to sectors in education, medicine, housing, and many more. Did the...

Christmas consumerism: Spending for the glory of God?

The Christmas shopping season is well underway—and with it, a peculiar blend of hyper-generosity and hyper-consumerism. Indeed, while many celebrate the social and spiritual glories of gift-giving and merriment, others are quick to warn about the steady creep of materialism and self-indulgence. Over at Made to Flourish, Matt Rusten explores these tensions, asking, “Does worshipping the Christ of Christmas necessarily conflict with the proliferation of shopping and festivities during the holiday season?” plaints are many, as Rusten aptly summarizes: “The...

A war on freelancers is a war on women

This year, California’s progressives decided to wage war on the nightmare of being your own boss. A new state law aimed at limiting the gig economy has already cost hundreds of people their jobs – and had a seriously harmful impact on women’s earnings and long-term happiness. Assembly Bill 5 curbs the ability panies like Uber and Lyft to classify their workers as independent contractors. The law, which codifies the California Supreme Court’s Dynamex decision into law, panies in the...

Slavery, Shmi Skywalker, and Star Wars

As the final installment of the final trilogy of the Star Wars saga opens today, it’s worth thinking about where this blockbuster franchise and cultural phenomenon started. And by that I mean where the story of Anakin Skywalker started in Episode I: The Phantom Menace. I got to revisit some of this as the earlier movies have been playing on repeat on cable TV leading up to today’s opening. The part I noticed as I flipped through the channels was...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

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...

Jul 9, 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...

Jul 9, 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...

Jul 9, 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...

Jul 9, 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...

Jul 9, 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,...

Jul 9, 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...

Jul 9, 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...

Jul 9, 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...

Jul 9, 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....

Jul 9, 2026