Economist Luigi Zingales provides a helpful explanation on the difference between being pro-market and pro-business: A pro-market strategy rejects subsidies not only because they’re a waste of taxpayers’ money but also because they prop up inefficient firms, delaying the entry of new and more petitors. For every “zombie” firm that survives because of government assistance, several innovative start-ups don’t get the chance to be born. Subsidies, then, hurt taxpayers twice. . . . And a pro-market approach panies financially accountable...

Earlier this week, Elise noted an essay by Rev. Schall, which asked, “Do Christians Love Poverty?” Michael Sean Winters at the National Catholic Reporter also responded to the piece, with ment, “Almost everything about this essay is obnoxious.” But I think Winters really misses the central insight of Schall’s piece, which really is an Augustinian point: A person who sorrows for someone who is miserable earns approval for the charity he shows, but if he is genuinely merciful he would...

[This post was co-authored with Chris Horst, director of development at HOPE International. He is a This is Our City fanboy and is grateful that Christianity Today has given him freedom to write about manufacturers, mattress sellers, and solar product designers, all working for mon good in Denver, where he lives with his family. Chris blogs atSmorgasblurb, and you can connect with him on Twitter at @chrishorst. His first book, Mission Drift, will hit shelves this spring. The views expressed...

We know the government is listening, watching, gathering information. We know that we’re being told it’s all for our own good; after all, who wants to miss a possible terrorist attack? Sleeper cells, the Boston bombers, the haunting memory of 9/11 say all of this is necessary for our safety, right? Not so fast, says Peggy Noonan. First, she reminds us that the NSA has – at least technically – only limited authority when es to spying on American citizens....

That’s the conclusion Wesley J. Smith, J.D., Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, e to. The surrogacy business in India is booming. While statistics are hard e by, according to one estimate, . That does not translate to much money for the surrogate mothers, however. Women are paid about $8,000 for their medical expenses and having a baby. However, since it is typically poor women, many of whom are illiterate, that are targeted for surrogacy, many sign contracts they do...

We need both of course. But do we Americans put too much emphasis on productivity? And is it hurting us? Jeff DeGraff, professor at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, thinks this might just be the case. It seems that industrialized country like the U.S. and Germany put great value on productivity, but not so much on creativity, and it may be costing us. The alarm that we are trading our creativity for productivity has been sounded for...

Delta Airlines has announced that it foresees a spike in health care costs for pany to the tune of $100 million a year. A Delta executive, Robert Kight, has said that fees associated with Obamacare will be costly, but won’t likely be more beneficial than what pany’s employees now have. One of the costly items pertains to an annual fee of $63 per “covered participant” next year. pany estimates this means a more than $10 million expense in 2014. The...

[Thanks to RealClearReligion for linking. — Editor] Anthony Chute, Christopher Morgan, and Robert Peterson have delivered a real gift toward building a unified future in their newly released Why We Belong: Evangelical Unity and Denominational Diversity. This edited volume brings together Anglican (Gerald Bray), Baptist (Timothy George), Lutheran (Douglas Sweeney), Methodist (Timothy Tennent), Pentecostal (Byron Klaus), and Presbyterian (Bryan Chapell) representatives to do two things: (1) the contributors give personal narratives of how they became a part of their respective...

If you haven’t yet bought a copy of Abraham Kuyper’s Wisdom and Wonder, you now have no excuse: You can get the Kindle edition from Amazon for free. As Jordan Ballor explained at the time of publication, this book consists of 10 chapters that the Dutch theologian and statesman Abraham Kuyper had written to be the conclusion of his three-volume study mon grace. But due to a publisher’s oversight, these sections were omitted from the first printing. So they appeared...

I ran across this video yesterday (courtesy of ESA), which I thought presented some interesting challenges and issues: The video was presented on Upworthy as an example of something “all white people could do to make the world a better place,” that is, use their white privilege to address injustices. A number of economists, including Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell, have written about the power of the market economy to e racism and discrimination, to put people into relationships on...