Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Religion & Liberty: The Moral Crisis of Crony Capitalism
Religion & Liberty: The Moral Crisis of Crony Capitalism
Jan 20, 2026 5:44 PM

Today’s new rich is the “government rich” according to Peter Schweizer. Massive centralization of money, resources, and regulation has allowed our public servants and many big businesses to thrive. The poor, new business start ups, the taxpayer, and the free market are punished. Washington and corporate elites profit from the rules and regulations they create for their own benefit and their cronies. As daily news reports currently reminds us, Washington is a cesspool of corruption and abuse of power.

It’s a moral crisis, and it’s the title for our interview with author and Hoover Institute Fellow Peter Schweizer. “I would say some of the biggest enemies of the free market today in America are big corporations,” declares Schweizer.

Jordan Ballor looks at two different versions of religious liberty that expresses freedom from religion that was modeled in the French Revolution and freedom for religion within America’s revolution in his feature, “Principle and Prudence.” The article was also published in Renewing Minds, a publication of Union University.

Stephen Schmalhofer offers a review of Sam Gregg’s ing Europe. There is also an excerpt of Faithful in All God’s House titled “Work and Play” by Gerard Berghoef and Lester DeKoster. Faithful in All God’s House is newly edited and reissued by Christian’s Library Press. The book was originally published as God’s Yardstick in 1982.

The “In The Liberal Tradition” figure is Clare Boothe Luce. Kris Mauren, Acton’s executive director, offers an important explanation on why R&L publishes the “In the Liberal Tradition.”

You can read more about the issue in my editor’s notes and be sure to check out all of the content here.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Praying for Rain in a Drought
A Reuters article highlights the fact that U.S. Agricultural Secretary Tom Vilsack is praying for rain to help relieve droughts in the Midwest. The drought is having a significant impact on farmers and their crops. The negative affect will of course inevitably lead to higher food prices as the supply is cut. Experts say it could be the most severe dry spell since 1950. The lack of rain and heat is really a simple reminder of our lack of control...
‘Does God Like Economics?’
That’s the question asked at the “Economics for Everybody” blog. The answer? A resounding yes: Work is important to God. It’s so important that He put Adam in the garden “to work it and keep it.” God took His creation and assigned it to Adam “to fill and subdue.” That sounds like work to me. So, what does this have to do with economics? The Bible shows us economics begins with work. God demonstrated this with His own creative action,...
Monks, Florists, and the Poor
It’s hard to think of anything more onerous than preventing enterprising people from entering the market. To do so is to interfere with their ability to serve others and engage in their vocation. It keeps people poor by preventing them from improving their lives. And one of the worst barriers of this kind is a type of law known as occupational licensing. And that’s exactly what a group of monks in Louisiana ran into in 2010 when the state government...
Is Capitalism the Most Biblical Economic Model?
Richard Land argues the case that free-market capitalism is the economic model that most closely fits in with Christian anthropology: When I lived in England as a Ph.D. student, I was visited during my first fortnight in the country by a fellow student seeking to sign me up for the Socialist Club. In some wonderment I asked him, “Why would you think I would want to join the Socialist Club?” He responded, “Well, I’ve been told you are a Christian...
The Truth about Roads, Bridges, and Businesses
Pundits and politicians have been having a field day with President Obama’s speech given in Roanoke, Virginia, last Friday. The quote providing the most fodder is the president’s assertion, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” (Here are a couple recent examples from Paul Ryan and Larry Kudlow.) This has been widely understood to mean that the president is saying that if you have a business, you didn’t build it…and certainly not on...
‘Journal of Markets & Morality’ Expands Access
Did you know that, with our new website ), you don’t have to be a subscriber to read content from the two most recent issues of the Journal of Markets & Morality? Now individual articles can be purchased for the meager price of 99 cents. Certainly, it would be more cost-effective to subscribe if you want to read all of our content, but perhaps you would just like to preview an article or two before purchasing the whole thing…. Perhaps,...
Acton Commentary: It Takes a Village to Raise a Business
President Obama’s speech last week in which he asserted to businesspeople, “You didn’t build that,” has been getting some pretty harsh and some pretty hilarious responses. In this week’s Acton Commentary, “It Takes a Village to Raise a Business,” I caution against responses that play into a simple individualist/collectivist dichotomy that underlays the president’s message: We all know at some level that we didn’t get where we are on our own, and that we have an ongoing responsibility and dependence...
Churches and Climate Change
I belong to the Christian Reformed Church, and our synod this year decided to formally adopt a report and statements related to creation care and specifically to climate change. I noted this at the time, and that one of the delegates admitted, “I’m a skeptic on much of this.” He continued to wonder, “But how will doing this hurt? What if we find out in 30 years that numbers (on climate change) don’t pan out? We will have lost nothing,...
ResearchLinks – 07.20.12
Review Essay: “Was Robert Bellarmine Ahead of His Time?” John M. Vella, Homiletic & Pastoral Re Despite his rehabilitation in the last quarter of the 19th century, Bellarmine’s intellectual legacy remains mixed. In one respect, at least, he was a product of his time because his vision of a res publica Christiana depended on a united Christendom that could never be restored. Yet, what is easy to see, in hindsight, was not so clear in the early 17th century. On...
How Does the U.S. Fare on Measures of the Rule of Law?
The free-market economist Milton Friedman used to argue that for a nation to prosper, all that was needed was to increase privatization and reduce the size of the state. But the collapse of the Soviet Union and munist states made him realize that “Privatization is meaningless if you don’t have the rule of law.” Today, the idea that the rule of law is a ponent of growth is all monplace. So why don’t more economists and policymakers connect the dots...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2026 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved