While I was reading The 1776 Report, it disappeared. The missioned to “enable a rising generation to understand the history and principles of the founding of the United States,” which found itself memory-holed by one of the initial executive orders President Joe Biden signed during his first day in office, expertly explains the American philosophy of liberty and applies it to the most threatening modern-day crises. For that reason, I’m giving an overview of its most significant points and posting...

Ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt took office on March 4, 1933, a president’s first 100 days have served as a benchmark for his presidency. Newly inaugurated President Joe Biden has already made history by signing an unprecedented number of executive orders on his first day and pledging a flurry of legislation which will greatly expand the size, scope, and cost of government while reversing protections for people of faith and the unborn. Biden’s staff designed some of his initiatives to...

The newest issue of the Journal of Markets & Morality, vol. 23, no. 2 (2020), has been released. This issue’s memorates the centennial of Abraham Kuyper’s death in 1920. The issue is guest edited by Jessica Joustra, the assistant professor of religion and theology at Redeemer University in Toronto, and Robert Joustra, the associate professor of politics and international studies at Redeemer. In their editorial in this issue, they provocatively cast Kuyper in a mischievous bative light: Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920),...

The Acton Institute is not only one of the world’s most influential thought leaders, according to a new report, but our annual Acton University ranks as the best conference presented by any think tank in the world that consistently supports a free economy. The University of Pennsylvania released its “2020 Global Go To Think Tank Index Report” on Thursday. Once again, Acton ranked well in the categories with which it has e most closely identified. This year, the report feted...

Few people have the courage to resist a totalitarian system from within; fewer still have the intellectual and moral grounding to plant the seeds of its metamorphosis into a free and virtuous society. The world lost one such person on the last day of 2020. “A wretched year came to a sorrowful end when Father Maciej Zięba, O.P., died in his native Wrocław, Poland, on December 31,” wrote George Weigel in First Things. The 66-year-old Dominican, who suffered from cancer,...

Online shopping has soared in the wake of COVID-19, boosting merce giants like Amazon and Walmart, and creating record growth for UPS and FedEx. While some question the moral legitimacy of these gains, others celebrate the market’s ability to respond plex demands, innovating products and adapting supply chains to meet countless human needs. Yet we should also remember that such businesses are not mere machines to be retooled, adjusted, and manipulated for materialistic purposes. Fundamentally, businesses are organisms and ecosystems...

Between the riots of last spring and the recent storming of the U.S. Capitol, the forces of polarization appear stronger than ever, manifesting across American society with increasing energy and destruction. Despite all our talk of “unity,” the division only seems to fester, perpetuated by the spread of misinformation and partisan efforts to justify all sorts of reckless disregard. The various movements have their distinctions, to be sure. Each represents a unique set of grievances among a subset of the...

A psychotherapy practice’s year-long experiment with paying every employee an equal salary has disproved the central economic thesis of socialism. Calvin Benton co-founded Spill, a British firm that offers psychological counseling via online technology like Zoom. He met another of pany’s founders a decade earlier while taking an economics class together. It’s not known whether the failure of pensation model came in spite of, or because of, their economics instructors. As Benton and his four co-workers got Spill off the...

We are routinely told that rising inequality is a profoundly pernicious problem – a clear and obvious sign that the rich and well-connected continue to benefit at the expense of the poor. Whether argued by economists like Thomas Piketty and Joseph Stiglitz or politicians like Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, the implication is clear: The government needs to play a more active and interventionist role in the distribution of wealth. But what if the reality is a bit plex, and...

Today with one stroke of the pen, President Joe Biden vitiated three unalienable rights. Biden signed a presidential memorandum order forcing U.S. taxpayers, including those with religious objections, to fund abortion-on-demand and abortion advocacy around the world. In 1984, President Ronald Reagan enacted the Mexico City Policy, which excluded foreign non-governmental agencies that “perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning” from receiving U.S. Agency for International Development funds. President Donald Trump’s Protecting Life in Global Health...