John Maynard Keynes, 20th century British economist, is best known for his book, “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” (1936), but it was his pointed analysis of the Treaty of Versailles, “Economic Consequences of the Peace,” which first launched him into the public eye. Keynes’s “Economic Consequences” incinerated main political players of the time who had a hand in drawing up the Versailles treaty, especially Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd Wilson and Georges Clemenceau. “Deep down, he believed, there was...

As the Democratic party in the United States gears up for the 2020 presidential campaign, and a host of candidates announce their entry into the fray, some have observed a (class?) struggle between what might be called the Old Left (the sort of democratic socialism associated with Bernie Sanders) and the New Left (the identity politics of a new generation of progressives). Is the identity politics of the New Left an extension of the old Marxistic dialectic of class struggle...

Note: This is post #114 in a weekly video series on basic economics. A monetarist is an economist who holds the strong belief that the economy’s performance is determined almost entirely by changes in the money supply. The most well-known monetarist is Milton Friedman, who wrote about his beliefs in the book “A Monetary History of The United States, 1867 – 1960.” In the book he argued that a lack of money supply was a cause of the Great Depression....

What just happened? Last month the U.S. Treasury Department reported that for the first time, the national debt has exceeded $22 trillion. What is the national debt? The national debt of the U.S. (also known as gross national debt) is the total amount of debt a federal government owes to creditors (public debt) and to itself (intragovernmental debt). What is public debt? Public debt is the portion of the national debt that the U.S. Treasury has borrowed from outside lenders...

Over the past week America has been fascinated and appalled by the latest college admissions cheating scandal. Much of the attention has been focused on the bribing of coaches to get kids into school with fake athletic credentials. But the even more absurd part of the scandal is that parents were paying between $15,000 and $75,000 per test to help their children get a better score on the SAT. The parents seem to believe that the SAT was a mere...

Although many are dissatisfied with the Vatican’s efforts to mediate Venezuela’s political crisis, says Acton Institute research director Samuel Gregg, Venezuela’s Catholic Church is the one institution that has retained its integrity throughout two decades of a leftist-populist tyranny. What might this mean for a post-dictatorship Venezuela? One of history’s less palatable lessons is that dictatorial regimes can stay in power a long time. We can talk endlessly about humanity’s insuppressible yearning for liberty, but if a government retains its...

To say that the history of Latin America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is marked by sadness and disappointment is hardly a novel insight. Whether it’s the persistence of cronyism throughout the region, the constant presence of Marxist ideology among intellectuals and in popular culture, the challenge of poverty, the crime and political violence, or the rampant populism that rears its head at regular intervals, many Latin Americans will tell you that theirs is the continent in which many...

The UK Parliament has taken two “meaningful votes” on Theresa May’s Brexit deal in less than six months. It has inflicted upon her the first and third largest defeats in modern history. At Acton’s Religion & Liberty Transatlanticwebsite, Rev. Richard Turnbull analyzes what the votes mean, for May and for the UK’s once-promising future as a nation leaving behind Brussels’ central planning for a future of free trade and innovation. Rev. Turnbull, who is the the director of theCentre for...

On this episode of Acton Line, Caroline Roberts speaks with Acton’s senior editor, Rev. Ben Johnson, about a new study released by a free market think tank in Denmark, claiming that Denmark isn’t actually socialist. Although Denmark is regularly cited as a country whose socialist policies have done good, this isn’t the whole story. Denmark isn’t technically socialist, and the current welfare state program has done harm despite what you may have heard. After that, Alan R. Crippen, II, Chief...

Pete Buttigieg (pronounced BOOT-edge-edge), mayor of South Bend, Indiana is running for president. His candidacy is a pared to democratic front-runners like former vice president Joe Biden or senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Nevertheless, he’s worth watching for the window he offers into his generation: millennials. Buttigieg is 37 years-old, and while twice-elected mayor of South Bend, his first splash into the political scene was with the winning essay he wrote in the year 2000 for the JFK Presidential Library and...