Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Acton Line podcast: The moral hazard of student debt; Unraveling Islam
Acton Line podcast: The moral hazard of student debt; Unraveling Islam
Mar 16, 2025 8:14 PM

On this episode of Acton Line, Caroline Roberts speaks with Andrew Kloster, deputy director of the Center for the Study of the Administrative State at George Mason University, about the student debt crisis. Kloster claims that the student debt crisis is the greatest moral hazard of our Nation and explains how he sees the crisis panning out in the future. On the second segment, Acton’s director of research, Samuel Gregg, sits down with Mustafa Akyol, senior research fellow at the Cato Institute, to address the topics of Islam and Freedom. Reformist trends in Islam reinterpret religious law by referring to the moral teachings at its core resulting in an intellectual battle going on in the Muslim world, where some believers condemn freedom as a Western invention while others praise it as Allah’s blessing. Is patible with ideas of individual freedom?

Check out additional resources for this podcast:

Read “Student Loans: Perhaps our Nation’s greatest moral hazard problem,” by Andrew Kloster

Student debt and moral hazard: To forgive or not to forgive?

Warren’s Free College Time Machine

Here’s why millions of millennials are not homeowners

Warren’s College-Loan Plan Is a Subsidy for the Comfortable Class

“Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty”

“The Creeping Liberalism in American Islam”

Video: Mustafa Akyol on the prospects for liberty in the Islamic world

New to the Acton Line podcast? Subscribe here! We also mend starting with these episodes:

Mourning the Notre-Dame cathedral inferno; Rev. Robert Sirico on education

F.A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom; The media vs. ‘Unplanned’

Rev. Robert A. Sirico on the reality of socialism; Interview with a Venezuelan dissident

Do you have feedback for the Acton Line podcast team? We want to hear from you! Email us at [email protected]. Lastly, if you like what you heard on today’s episode, please leave a review and rating on iTunes.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Acton Commentary: After the Berlin Wall — the Enduring Power of Socialism
The Economist marked the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall by observing that there was “so much gained, so much to lose.” As the world celebrates the collapse munism, who would have imagined that in less than one generation we would witness a resurgence of socialism throughout Latin America and even hear the word socialist being used to describe policies of the United States? We relegated socialism to the “dustbin of history,” but socialism never actually died...
Acton Commentary: Government Health Care — Back to the Plantation
Black leaders constantly remind Americans of our racism. Should not these same leaders protest the expansion of government control contained in the health-care reform bill currently working its way through Congress? Here’s why. Notwithstanding their rhetoric of freedom and empowerment, many prominent black leaders appear content to send blacks back to the government plantation—where a small number of Washington elites make decisions for blacks who aren’t in the room. Why do minority leaders not favor alternatives that demonstrate faith in...
Messianic Marxism
From “The Origin of Russian Communism” by Russian philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev (published by Geoffrey Bles, 1937): Marxism is not only a doctrine of historical and economic materialism, concerned with plete dependence of man on economics, it is also a doctrine of deliverance, of the messianic vocation of the proletariat, of the future perfect society in which man will not be dependent on economics, of the power and victory of man over the irrational forces of nature and society. There is...
Reflecting on Berlin
I was in the 8th grade in November of 1989, and I don’t think that the fall of the Berlin Wall had any immediate impact on my thinking at the time. I don’t remember if I watched the coverage on TV, or if there were any big discussions of the event in school during the following days. I was a history buff back then, to be sure – I still am – but I don’t think that I was engaged...
Studying Stewardship in Scripture
This weekend’s Grand Rapids Press featured a story about the release of the NIV Stewardship Study Bible. Ann Byle writes, Three Grand Rapids-based organizations and numerous local residents joined forces recently to create a study Bible that focuses on stewardship. The Acton Institute, the Stewardship Council and Zondervan brought the NIV Stewardship Study Bible into print after more than five years of work that began with Brett Elder, the council’s executive director. Elder traveled the world speaking on generosity. He...
Communism as Religion
From the opening page of Lester DeKoster’s Communism and Christian Faith (1962): For the mysterious dynamic of history resides in man’s choice of gods. In the service of his god — or gods (they may be legion) — a man expends his mits his sacrifices, devotes his life. And history is made. Understand Communism, then, as a religion; or miss the secret of its power! Grasp the nature of this new faith, and discern in contrast to it the God...
The Financial Crisis: What We (Still) Haven’t Learned
It’s over a year now since the 2008 financial crisis spread havoc throughout the global economy. Dozens of books and articles have appeared to explain what went wrong. They identify culprits ranging from Wall Street financiers overleveraging assets, to ACORN lobbying policy-makers to lower mortgage standards, to politicians closely connected to government-sponsored enterprises such as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae failing to exercise oversight of those agencies. As time passes, armies of doctoral students will explore every nook and cranny...
Economic Liberalism and its Discontents
How do we restore confidence in free markets? Formulate a robust explanation of their moral value. Read Economic Liberalism and its Discontents on Public Discourse. In his recent book The Creation and Destruction of Value, Princeton University’s Harold James observes that the 2008 financial crisis resulted in more than the devastation of economic value. It also facilitated a collapse of values in the sense of people’s faith in particular ideas, institutions, and practices. Among these, few would question that economic...
Veterans Day Review: As You Were
Washington Post reporter and author Christian Davenport has told a deeply raw and emotional story in his new book As You Were: To War and Back with the Black Hawk Battalion of the Virginia National Guard. This book does not focus on battlefield heroics but rather it captures the essence and value of the citizen- soldier. Most importantly this account unveils through narrative, the pride, the pain, and the harrowing trials of the life of America’s guardsmen and reservists. Davenport...
Secularism and Poverty
A colleague recently mentioned that a wag had observed the church had failed to solve poverty, so why not let the federal government have a try? I think it is interesting that anyone, such as the wag in question, could think that the federal government can effectively solve the problem of poverty. I don’t think it can because it resolutely refuses to confront the sources. Really, truly, don’t we know the cause of a great deal of the poverty in...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved