This is the fourth part in a series on how to read Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Read the Introduction and follow the entire series here. In the previous installment, we considered feudalism as a class system of mutual responsibilities centered on land. Land was the basis of wealth during the medieval period. But by the 12th century, land was slowly being replaced by trade as the main generator of wealth in Europe. That basic shift and the subsequent...

The Spanish government is currently run by the center-Right People’s Party, led by Mariano Rajoy. However, should Spain’s socialist parties return to power, they have announced their intention to remove Catholic education from the curriculum and replace it with a secular curriculum that teaches fidelity to the government. In place of voluntary religious education, the socialists of Spain would impose secular and progressive “Education for Citizenship and Human Rights” (EfC). In this way, socialism could use government funding to bring...

As children in the U.S. return to school, their European contemporaries have or soon will join them. However, they do so in a context that recognizes fewer of the traditional rights that society has accorded parents over the education of their children, especially whether they are taught to uphold or disdain their family’s moral and religious views. Grégor Puppinck, Ph.D., the director of theEuropean Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ), addressed the rights that parents rightfully exercise over their children’s...

Thomas L. Friedman said in The Lexus and the Olive Tree that no two countries with McDonald’s within their borders have ever been in a war since having a McDonald’s. Since it was proposed in 1999 this explanation of how globalization affects foreign policy and conflict has e known as theGolden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention. There are several examples that prove Friedman’s theory is wrong (e.g., India and Pakistan in 1998,Georgia and Russia, 2008). But in general, globalization does...

“Developed nations are increasingly haunted by doubts about the legitimacy of their economic structures,” says Victor V. Claar and Greg Forster in this week’s Acton Commentary. “This paralyzing anxiety crosses all lines of ethnicity, religion, class, party and ideology.” This is not a mere selfish concern about who gets how much of what. It is a moral anxiety, a concern about what kind of people we are ing. Is America still a country where it pays to “work hard and...

Over the last two decades, global poverty has plummeted and the world’s poorest people have steadily climbed out of the shadow of death. Yet many Christians cannot distinguish between dire poverty and e inequality, falsely believe both are worsening, and oppose the very policies that have lifted the world’s poor out of malnutrition. “Why do we underestimate success?” asks Philip Booth in a new essay forReligion & Liberty Transatlantic. “Why do we accept fake news about these issues?” Booth– a...

This week on Radio Free Acton, we ask Ismael Hernandez, founder and president of the Freedom and Virtue Institute to give his opinions on the new film “Detroit,” depicting the 1967 12th Street Riots. Hernandez states for listeners how “it is important to know that every time you see a portrayal of a historical event, you need to be able to separate fact from narrative…we have to be able to understand that we are being sold a narrative with the...

The social-media outrage machine is rather predictable these days. It doesn’t take much panies and celebrities to offend the cultural consensus, spurring online mobs to respond, in turn: not through peaceful discourse or by turning their attention elsewhere, but by fomenting rage, abuse, and assault on the subject(s) in question. The notion of public outcry isn’t new, of course, particularly as it relates to those in the public eye. But such vitriol seems to be more hastily applied, and increasingly...

“If a product is seen only as the opportunity for work, it is certain that the anxieties of protectionists are well founded.” –Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Sophisms Drawing inspiration from a 1847 essay by the inimitable Frédéric Bastiat, economist Donald Boudreauxtackles a popular argument from today’s trade protectionists: namely, “that protectionism is justified if enough consumers or voters are willing to pay higher prices in order to help workers.” The problem, of course, is that such a perspective debases the value...

Note: This is post #45 in a weekly video series on basic microeconomics. petitive markets, the market price—with the help of the Invisible Hand—balances production across firms so that total industry costs are minimized. In this video by Marginal Revolution University, economist Alex Tabarrok explains petitive markets also connect different industries. By balancing production, the Invisible Hand of the market ensures that the total value of production is maximized across different industries. (If you find the pace of the videos...