This article appeared originally in Forbes. Read the entire article here. Last week, while visiting the political and business capitals of Brazil, I was able to study the plan for deregulating the Brazilian economy and speak with some of the plan’s architects. The MP da Liberdade Economica (MPLE) the economic freedom provisional measure, has the same standing as any law; it has been signed by President Jair Bolsonaro. In 60 days regulations to implement it will expand its effects. It...

On Monday, May 13, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a lower court ruling that politicians can legally forbid churches from expanding their ministries in order to maximize the government’s tax revenues. Justices declined to hear the case Tree of Life Christian Schools v. City of Upper Arlington. What happened in the Tree of Life Christian Schools case? Briefly, the Tree of Life Christian Schools serves 583 students, 44 percent of whom are ethnic minorities. A robust 99 percent of...

Note: This is post #122 in a weekly video series on basic economics. Imagine that you’re the Fed and monetary policy is your domain, says Alex Tabarrok. The economy has been doing fine: inflation isn’t too high, GDP is growing at a reasonable rate. But then something happens. Consumer confidence drops. The economy shrinks. What do you do? In this video by Marginal Revolution University, Tabarrok discusses the details of this scenario and how the Fed might respond. He looks...

Once again, the national news reports that the government has legally prevented a Christian ministry from expanding its services for fear it will lose tax revenue. This opposition proves that politicians overvalue the role of government and undervalue the immense benefits that churches provide munity. Religious institutions generate trillions of dollars for the U.S. economy every year, according to a recent study. When a nonprofit petitions a zoning board, politicians see only the lost property taxes they can no longer...

In the academic world there are several well-known “twoness theses”, says Acton research fellow Andrew McGinnis, arguments by scholars that there are in one historical person two identifiable and contradictory lines of thought that warrant depicting the individual as divided. It seems that anyone who writes and publishes enough material will be susceptible to a twoness thesis. In some ways it is a mark that you have made it as an author. It means you have published, lectured, or preached...

The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the middle class remains stagnant. That’s the story often told by those plain about inequality in America. But is it true? Has economic progress in America been shared widely or captured by only the rich? As economist Russ Roberts explains, the standard story of stagnating wages takes snapshots of one set of people in the past pares them to an entirely different set of people in the present. But when you...

The Mongol ruler Genghis Khan once asked his generals, “What is the greatest happiness in life?” When they answered that it was going hunting on a spring day while riding a beautiful horse, Genghis said they were wrong. The greatest pleasure, he said, is to be founding in vanquishing ones enemies and robbing them of their wealth. In other words, to the man who has more living descendants than almost any person in history, happiness was found in looting. The...

Today is the feast day of St. Bernardine of Siena, a fifteenth-century Franciscan known as the “apostle of Italy” for his preaching and efforts to revive the faith in his time. So many flocked to hear him preach, in fact, that he had to give his sermons outside. Bernardine is also known, though, for his writings and particularly for his systematization of Scholastic economics, which built on the earlier work of St. Anselm, St. Thomas Aquinas, and others and helped...

Matthew Sanders and Fr. Ezra Sullivan, O.P. facilitate moral discussion with entrepreneurs and academics. Matthew Harvey Sanders, a former seminarian turned successful technology munications entrepreneur, has sought to fuse deep theological and moral convictions with his natural talent and contagious pioneering spirit. His brain child: Humanity 2.0, a self-described “human progress accelerator” showcased last May 9 at a forum held inside Vatican walls. According to Sanders’s web site, Humanity 2.0 is built on Thomas Aquinas’s precepts for human salvation, namely,...

Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook and co-chairman of the Economic Security Project, has recently written an impassioned plea in the New York Times calling for the government to break up Facebook. The piece is well worth reading for the light it sheds on the early days of the social media giant, as well as for the questions it raises regarding privacy and social media use in general, but brings more heat than light in its analysis of Facebook as...