Fr C. John McCloskey, a Church historian and research fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute in Washington, recently reviewed Samuel Gregg’s ing Europe: Economic Decline, Culture, and How America Can Avoid a European Future. He says: Samuel Gregg, director of research at the Acton Institute in Grand Rapids, Mich., has written a very timely book, given the concerning state of our economy and, more importantly, our ever-declining moral life. … ing Europe opens with an account of the human...

New research suggests that school vouchers have a greater impact on whether black students attend college than small class sizes or effective teachers: Matthew M. Chingos of the Brookings Institution and Paul E. Peterson, director of Harvard’s program on education policy and governance, tracked college enrollment information for students who participated in the School Choice Scholarship program, which began in 1997. They were able to get college enrollment information on 2,637 of the 2,666 students in the original cohort. The...

A new report by Greg Forster of the Friedman Foundation finds that of all the “gold standard” research on children who utilize school vouchers, 11 of 12 studies conclude all or some of those students achieve better educational es. No study found choice participants were worse off than those remaining in traditional public schools: The evidence points clearly in one direction. Opponents frequently claim school choice does not benefit participants, hurts public schools, costs taxpayers, facilitates segregation, and even undermines...

Joe has done us all a real service in putting together his three part (1, 2, 3) primer on Bitcoin (full PDF here). I am curious, though, what the justification is for referring to Bitcoin as a modity” currency. Consider this from Izabella Kaminska at the FT Alphaville blog: For those who insist that the term “fiat” refers exclusively to government-issued fiat currency, it’s perhaps better to interpret our use in the evolutionary sense. Meaning that Bitcoin (and other virtual...

The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life has been studying the steady rise of hostility towards religious expression and religious liberty worldwide. In fact, they found that restrictions on religion rose in every major area of the world, including the United States, since the study began in 2009. Citing what the Pew Forum calls “social hostilities” (as opposed to government hostilities), the study found that Pakistan, India and Iraq were the most hostile countries to religious freedom. The Social...

New York City’s hipster and elitist class seem to believe that they should have some role in determining what business owners do with their property. Like hipsters and elitists around the country, New York’s cohort are banding together to panies that do not present the utopian vision for the neighbors where these elites dwell (most of whom are renters, by the way). There is much buzz in New York City right now because more and more national chains are setting...

Nobody can know everything about everything, but in the age of the internet, fact-checking isn’t too tough. It’s one thing for a high-school student to attempt to slide by on “facts” in a research paper for sophomore social studies, but another when professional journalists make errors about easily investigated pieces of knowledge. Lately, the media has been getting blasted for getting the facts wrong about religion. Carl M. Cannon: The upshot during Holy Week this year was a spate of...

J.C. Penney recently gave up on last year’s strategy to abandon sales and coupons in favor of “everyday low pricing.” As an article in the New York Times points out, “simplifying pricing, it turns out, is not that simple”: “It may be a decent deal to buy that item for $5,” said Ms. Fobes, who runs Penny Pinchin’ Mom, a blog about couponing strategies. “But for someone like me, who’s always looking for a sale or a coupon — seeing...

Over at the National Catholic Reporter, Michael Sean Winters makes ments about my book ing Europe based on a review he had read by Fr. C.J. McCloskey. Here are the most pertinent of his observations: I know that American exceptionalism lives on both the left and the right, but when did the right e so Europhobic? And why? National Catholic Register has a review of a new book by the Acton Institute’s Samuel Gregg entitled ing Europe: Economic Decline, Culture,...

[Note: This is the third entry in a three part series. You can read the introductory posthereand part two here.] The Disadvantages of Bitcoin For people who are not obsessed with anonymity and are not waiting for the U.S. to return to the gold standard, the reasons for avoiding entering the Bitcoin market are numerous: 1. Convertibility – Whereas other currencies are convertible into other financial instruments (dollars to checks to certificates of deposit, etc.) and through numerous third-party services...