When President Lyndon B. Johnson unveiled the plans for his Great Society initiative at the University of Michigan in 1964, he promised to usher the United States into “a new age.” Through government programs jump-started by the Great Society, the country would amass wealth and power for all, wholly eradicating poverty and even enabling “all nations to live in enduring peace.” Johnson promised a materialist utopia. In her new book “Great Society: A New History,” author Amity Shlaes examines the...

Did you know that there are over 1,300 endangered species in the United States? Polar bears, northern spotted owls, red wolves, Florida panthers and even monarch butterflies are all on the endangered species list. We’ve been given a mandate to take care of the earth and all living creatures on it. How can we make sure that vulnerable animals are protected from extinction? This week, Jonathan Wood joins Acton Line to show how market-based approaches are the best way to...

(AtlasNetwork.org Photo / Rodrigo Abd) Despite the once promising election of President Mauricio Macri, Argentina’s first non-Perónist leader in 13 years, the country has largely returned to its embrace of leftist economic policies, including recently imposed capital controls and interventionist price fixing. The results have not been positive. Yet amid the constant meddling by legislators and government officials, everyday Argentinians are forging new paths of economic opportunity. While the top-down planners continue to tinker, the bottom-up searchers continue to innovate...

This week’s Acton Commentary focuses on a Supreme Court case that could strike down an eighteenth-century statute, borne of anti-Catholic animus, that now locks poor children in underperforming schools. A clear understanding of economics and solid Supreme Court precedent could sweep this relic of anti-Catholic discrimination, known as the Blaine amendment, into the past. After tracing America’s deep and pervasive history of anti-Catholic bigotry, the Commentary moves on to the present case, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue: In 2015,...

The United States has experienced years of record-breaking stock markets and unmatched levels of employment. Yet Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez presents her country as a dystopia in equal parts Dickensian and Hobbesian, where the wealthy few ground the poor masses into the dust. Meanwhile, an existential environmental catastrophe leaves decent people wondering, “Is it OK to still have children?” Most recently, she took her prosperity-as-affliction message to television, asserting that the wealthy somehow caused 40 million Americans to “live in destitute [sic].”...

Are churches tax exempt as a matter of privilege or right? What does tax exception munities and churches? Christianity Todayhas been hosting an interesting debate on these issues. Paul Matzko, Assistant Editor for Tech and Innovation at the CATO Institute, argued in the cover story of this month’s issue that tax es at a high a cost to munities in which they are located: This feeling that churches don’t contribute to mon good is not mon in America. There are...

Inequality is one of those topics that is sure to spark quick and intense debate, wherever and whenever it is raised. In any such discussion, however, facts matter. That’s one reason why my attention was recently drawn to an article published in early December at Real Clear Markets, titled “Inequality Is Decidedly Not the Problem In the U.S.” The author, Aaron Brown, writes: There is a simple theory of inequality in which rich people have nearly all the wealth and...

Alejandro Chafuen, Acton’s Managing Director, International, writes this morning in Forbes about the relationship between economic freedom and corruption. Transparency International released its 2019 Corruption Perceptions Index last week, and Chafuen correlates these results with countries’ rankings in the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom. As a general rule, greater economic freedom and lower corruption seem to go hand in hand. Although I was born and raised in a country where corruption, especially petty corruption, had e part of many...

Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg recently tweeted that his political program grows out of a Jewish religious teaching giving him the “responsibility” to use the government to “‘repair the world’ in the tradition of Tikkun Olam.” While progressive Jews often use the phrase in this manner, rabbis warn equating politics with the faith distorts Judaism. Bloomberg tied his surging primary campaign to the Jewish doctrine in an online video released Sunday: My parents taught me that Judaism is about more...

E.B. White, the author of Charlotte’s Web and co-author of The Elements of Style, once wrote a story that aptly demonstrates the folly of central planning. White, a Maine farmer who wrote for The New Yorker and Harper’s, saw the story turned into an animated short, which he narrated 36 years after its publication. In “The Family that Dwelt Apart” – published in The New Yorker on July 31, 1937 – White tells the story of the Pruitt family, which...