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...

Eric Prince, founder and former CEO of Blackwater Inc., speaks at the Acton Institute On Tuesday night, the Acton Institute ed Erik Prince to the Mark Murray Auditorium in the Acton Building in Grand Rapids, Michgan. Prince, a west Michigan native, is the founder and former CEO of Blackwater, Inc., the private security firm that became the subject of a great deal of controversy during the Iraq War, and remains so to this day. Prince’s address shared the title of...

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?...

One of my dreams is to meet the person responsible for introducing the charge to young adults to “go out there and make a difference.” Youth and young adults are pressured and challenged to go “make a difference” but making a difference has never been clearly defined or quantified anywhere. For a few years now I have refused to tell my students to “go change the world” or “go make a difference.” Do those phrases really mean anything? In light...

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...

. 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...

We read the same Bible and follow the same Jesus. We go to the same churches and even agree on the same social issues. So why then do liberal and conservative evangelicals tend to disagree so often about economic issues? To explore that question I recently wrote a series of posts explaining “What Liberal Evangelicals Should Know About the Economic Views of Conservative Evangelicals.” The posts covered 12 principles that generally drive the thinking of conservative evangelicals when es to...

In a recent column forUSA Today,Kirsten Powers uses somelegislationin the Kansas state legislature as a foray for arguing that, for many Christians, the supposed fight for religious liberty is really just a fight for the “legal right to discriminate.” Pointing to recent efforts to protect aflorist, abaker, and aphotographerfrom being sued for their beliefs about marriage, Powers argues that these amount to the homosexual equivalent of Jim Crow laws. Powers, herself a Christian, reminds us that Jesus calls us “to...

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....