One of the constant refrains in economic development—and now environment issues—is the topic of population control. Evidence notwithstanding, the claim that population causes poverty and that the planet is facing a population explosion is taught as settled science—even in the face of serious population decline in some countries. We hear this over and over from the UN and popular media, in schools, and from people like Jeffrey Sachs to professional doomsday peddler Paul Erlich. Even the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for...

Boris Johnson‘s decision to prorogue Parliament has opened up two paths for the UK to make a clean break from the European Union.This holds the potential to undermine globalism and the welfare state while diffusing prosperity to the developing world, according to a new essay by Rev. Richard Turnbull in the Acton Institute’s Religion & Liberty Transatlanticwebsite. Rev. Turnbull – the director of the Centre for Enterprise, Markets, and Ethics in Oxford – clearly explains the real impact of these...

I have been thinking a lot about all of the invisible things around us, important foundational things that we take for granted. Because they don’t immediately manifest themselves to our attention we can forget about them if we are not careful. There are different layers of “invisible” things or institutions or concepts that make life go on and that undergird our economic, political, and social life. One of the characteristics of these invisible things is that we don’t necessarily need...

Jordan Ballor recently brought to my attention this remarkable passage from Michael Novak’s The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, “Our moral and cultural traditions have not kept pace with our economic possibilities. We try to match new demands with a spiritual life not designed for them.” What we think of as ‘democratic capitalism,’ and the economic and political theories which under-gird it, arose out of a tradition of moral and theological reflection on the institutions, ethics, and law of early modern...

When I was twelve my family lived on a small, dry piece of land in rural Texas. Since we lived far outside of any city limits, we couldn’t rely on services like water (we had a well), sewage (we had a septic tank), or sanitation (we had a 12-year-old boy and a 50-gallon burn barrel). Before my weekend free-time could begin, I’d have a list of chores to get done, including burning the week’s trash and burying the ashes in...

Economic globalization has brought many economic benefits to the planet, but it’s also true that the benefits have been uneven. One continent which has lagged behind much of the rest of the world is Latin America. As a recent Wall Street Journal article entitled “Latin America Hangs On to Its Economic Gloom” pointed out: This year, once again, Latin America is shaping up as an economic disappointment. Brazil’s economy likely shrank slightly in the year’s first half, and Mexico’s didn’t...

Alejandro Chafuen, Acton’s Managing Director, International, attended last month’s inaugural National Conservatism conference in Washington, DC, sponsored by the Edmund Burke Foundation. Today in Forbes he offers a few reflections on the event. The conference tackled more than just economics, of course, but in this article Chafuen focuses on the economic realm. It would be hard for me to e a nationalist. I have learned, however, to respect love for one’s nation as a valid motivation in social and political...

“In the field of social phenomena, only economics and linguistics seem to have succeeded in building up a coherent body of theory.” –Friedrich Hayek In 1887, L. L. Zamenhof proposed a universal language as a means for ushering in a new era of international peace and prosperity. The language, now known as Esperanto, was carefully constructed to be easily absorbed and understood across cultures and countries, but it failed to take hold. Zamenhof was focused on solving a knowledge problem...

On Monday, the United States will celebrate Labor Day – and a new studyshows that, while U.S. workers have much to celebrate, Canadians are not quite as fortunate. A new study about the Canadian economy dovetails with a report earlier this week that poor Americans are better off economically than average citizens of other advanced, but less economically free, OECD nations. The Fraser Institute, Canada’s premier think tank on economic matters, analyzed the labor market of each of the 50...

During the mid-1990s I spent a tour of duty as a Marine recruiter in southwestern Washington State. One of my primary tasks was to give talks at local high schools, but because many of the guidance counselors were not exactly pro-military, I was expected to give generic “motivational” speeches. I soon discovered my idea of what constituted a motivational speech was not widely shared. “Your parents and teachers have not been straight-forward with you,” I told the students in my...