All Latin-Americans at some point ask themselves: Why is no Latin American country as well-developed as the United States? The answer is probably not related to our weather or a lesser disposition to work, as many have tried to claim. The answer is probably simpler: A socialist culture and a strong attachment to the left. Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Argentina are all countries that suffered or are suffering devastating economic, political, and social crises. They are all examples of countries...

Even among freedom minded individuals, classical liberalism gives way to conservative resistance on the issue of money. The view prominent on the right and the left is that money is the exclusive right of the state, rather than private initiative. Thus, the dominant view is that the monetary policy should be the sole responsibility of central banks. They have a monopoly on the volume of money in circulation, credit and interest rates. In 1978, Friedrich August von Hayek presented the...

Westminster Abbey held a service on memorating the 70thanniversary of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS). At the service Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, said that the “NHS is the most powerful and visible expression of our Christian heritage, because it sprang out of a concern that the poor should be able to be treated as well as the rich.” Holding a service for the NHS raises two questions: Why does the Anglican Church no longer believe itself to...

The day after she bested a 10-term congressman by 16 points in a Democratic Party primary, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made an unlikely literary debut: She published an article in a Jesuit magazine burnishing her Catholic bona fides. The story, titled, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on her Catholic faith and the urgency of a criminal justice reform,” appeared in America last Wednesday. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member’s blog offers a personal reflection about an incarcerated relative, cites U.S. incarceration statistics as proof...

Series Note: Jobs are one of the most important aspects of a morally functioning economy. They help us serve the needs of our neighbors and lead to human flourishing both for the individual and munities. Conversely, not having a job can adversely affect spiritual and psychological well-being of individuals and families. Because unemployment is a spiritual problem, Christians in America need to understand and be aware of the monthly data on employment. Each month highlight the latest numbers we need...

In a Turing Test, puter tries to pass for human in a natural language conversation. During the test a human judge engages in the conversation but doesn’t know if it’s with a human or a machine emulating human responses. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. Several years ago, economist Bryan Caplan suggested a similar test for understanding ideologies, an “ideological Turing test”: If someone can correctly...

Imagine: You are in the grocery store, searching for the perfect bag of coffee- not too expensive, but still rich in flavor and good quality. As you are turning away with the coffee you have just chosen, there on the shelf is a bag of coffee with the Fair Trade logo. After an intense internal debate, you return the first bag of coffee to its shelf and take the Fair Trade coffee with a sense of contentment. The coffee farmers...

Given the breakneck pace of improvements in automation and artificial intelligence, fears about job loss and human obsolescence continue to consume the cultural imagination. The question looms: What is the future of human work in a technological age? Innovators such as Elon Musk and Bill Gates have done their share to affirm the predominant pessimism, painting a grim picture of a future defined by robot overlords and diminishing human contributions. “At least when there’s an evil dictator, that human is...

Gene Fant, president of North Greenville University, recently attended Acton University as a presidential fellow. He, like many of us, has a bunch of summer reading lined up, and this includes the short treatise from the sixteenth century, Advice to a Desolate France, by Sebastian Castellio. Fant had this to say about Castellio’s argument: Castellio was a 16th-century scholar who was writing in a time of literal cultural wars, the battles and shameful dehumanizations of the French Wars of Religion...

On this Fourth of July, the U.S. ambassador to the UK has written an op-ed encouraging the government to embrace the spirit of the Declaration of Independence. Robert Wood Johnson’s op-ed points to the special relationship that grew up following our Revolution to strengthen Theresa May’s flagging resolve as Brexit talks lumber forward. “Change calls for courage, conviction and confidence,” writes Ambassador Robert Wood Johnson in the Daily Mail. “And there is no finer example of that spirit in action...