Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
The Acton Institute encourages 275 million people to embrace liberty
The Acton Institute encourages 275 million people to embrace liberty
Apr 26, 2025 1:05 AM

From the Enlightenment to the works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida, the power of French ideas has radically altered the rest of the world. The Acton Institute has engaged France’s long history as a global thought leader in two new French-language articles, which discuss contemporary French influence on U.S. and Spanish leaders.

The first translation discusses what politicians in general, and one senator in particular, could learn from French efforts to pare back their notoriously inefficient welfare state: “Elizabeth Warren pourrait s’inspirer d’Emmanuel Macron”(originally published as “What Elizabeth Warren could learn from Emmanuel Macron”), translated into French by Benoît H. Perrin.

French President Emmanuel Macron, despite his profligate spending and ambition to further concentrate power in the European Union, has one silver lining: his desire to reinvigorate the economy. He moved the nation’s Overton Window when he proposed raising the retirement age from 62—the second-lowest in Europe, behind Luxembourg—to 64 and setting out a plan to streamline dozens of separate pensions.

At the same time, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, then a leading contender for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, “had a plan” to vastly expand the size, scope, cost, and tax footprint of the U.S. Social Security system. My article contrasted the two:

Emmanuel Macron a proposé que les travailleurs cotisent plus longtemps au système avant de prendre leur retraite. Le système «à points », qui serait plus proche du modèle américain de Social Security, pourrait encourager les Français à entrer plus jeunes sur le marché du travail. À noter que le taux de chômage de la jeunesse en France est supérieur de dix points à celui de l’Allemagne.

Le programme de Warren, à l’inverse, propose d’augmenter les cotisations de Social Security de 200 dollars par mois, de supprimer le plafond d’imposition pour les contribuables les plus riches et, pour la première fois, de taxer les revenus d’investissement pour contribuer au financement des retraites. Cette mesure ferait passer le programme de Social Security d’un fonctionnement proche de celui d’un fonds de pension, adossé sur les cotisations des travailleurs, à un système d’État-providence plus explicite visant à redistribuer les richesses. …

Les chrétiens doivent aller au-delà des promesses de campagne. Ils prendre le rôle douloureux et paralysant que l’État-providence a joué dans l’histoire de l’Occident. À ce moment-là, lorsque nous réfléchirons à notre avenir, nous pourrons exercer «la mère de toutes les vertus » : la prudence. Sinon, les États-Unis risquent de croiser le chemin de la France, en marche vers la stagnation économique.

In this instance, French political influence could help the United States avoid the inevitable stagnation of the social assistance state.

However, the most consequential French political movement of the last year has been the “yellow vest” protesters, the gilets jaunes. Their highway-clogging demonstrations, originally spontaneous explosions of outrage at France’s skyrocketing fossil fuels tax, in time allowed labor unions and Marxists to graft their message of class envy onto populist, anti-tax sentiment. This later stage of the movement inspired farmers in neighboring Spain to stop traffic weeks before the coronavirus left us all sheltering in place. Ángel Manuel García Carmona analyzes the influence of this French movement in the article “Paysans espagnols : les nouveaux gilets jaunes ?” (originally published on Religion & Liberty Transatlanticas “Spanish farmers: the new ‘gilet jaunes’?”), translated by Dominique Perrin.

Farmers, he notes, protested the fact that they receive far less than the full retail price of their produce. Carmona notes that they represent one of many indispensable links in the supply chain:

Les manifestants semblent oublier qu’ils font partie d’une chaîne de distribution prend la production, la transformation, le stockage, l’emballage, l’expédition et la distribution au détail. Les chiffres du ministère de l’Agriculture montrent que près de 46 % du coût final peut être attribué aux producteurs, alors la distribution au détail ne pèse que 1,5 % de ce coût. C’est le cas par exemple pour les principaux supermarchés en Espagne, tels que Mercadona, DIA et Carrefour.

French ideas continue to influence Europe and the rest of the world. Prudent Christians must assure that their impact makes the world better. The Acton Institute has made these translations into the language of the world’s 275-million Francophones in that spirit.

Legrand – COMEO / . Editorial use only.)

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
Lord Acton and the Power of the Historian
Looking through my back stacks of periodicals the other day I ran across a review in Books & Culture by David Bebbington, “Macaulay in the Dock,” of a recent biography of Thomas Babington Macaulay. The essay takes its point of departure in Lord Acton’s characterization of Macaulay as “one of the greatest of all writers and masters, although I think him utterly base, contemptible and odious.” As Bebbington writes, “Acton, a towering intellectual of the later 19th century, was at...
Is Work a Curse?
Is work a curse, a result of mankind’s fall from grace? Not according to the Book of Genesis. As Hugh Whelchel, Executive Director of the Institute for Faith, Work & Economics, explains, what Adam was called to do in the garden is what we are still called to do in our work today: Humanity was created by God to cultivate and keep God’s creation, which included developing it and protecting it. You see, we were created to be stewards of...
Italy’s Tax Man Takes Aim at the Vatican
Kishore Jayabalan, the Acton Institute’s Rome office director, was interviewed by the Zenit news agency in an article titled, “Is Taxing the Church a Real Solution for Italy?” In the article, Jayabalan discusses the history of the Italian state and its imposition of property taxes on the Roman Catholic Church’s land holdings, residences and non-profit businesses. Sometimes in the past, particularly under Napoleonic rule and before the Lateran Pacts, the institution of property tax was often a subject of state...
How to Love Liberty More Than a Libertarian Economist
I have a deep and abiding love for liberty—which is why I find myself so often in disagreement with libertarians. Libertarians love liberty too, of course, but they tend to love liberty a bit differently. I love liberty in an earthy, elemental way. I love liberty because I need it—like I need air and food—for human flourishing. In contrast, the libertarians I’ve encountered tend to love liberty primarily as an abstraction. Indeed, the most ideologically consistent libertarians I know seem...
Constitutional Cases and the Four Cardinal Virtues
Should virtue be a consideration in judicial decisionmaking? Indiana Law Professor R. George Wright makes an intriguing argument for why the four cardinal virtues could be useful in interpreting constitutional cases: Judges typically decide constitutional cases by referring to one or more legal precedents, rules, tests, principles, doctrines, or policies. This Article mends supplementing this standard approach with fully legitimate and appropriate attention to what many cultures have long recognized as the four basic cardinal virtues of practical wisdom or...
Let’s Change Hearts and Minds (and Laws, Too)
Few clichés are so widespread within the evangelical subculture, says Matthew Lee Anderson, as the notion that our witness must be one of “changing hearts and minds.” In careful hands, the idea is at best ambiguous. At worst it reinforces the sort of interior-oriented individualism that allows for and perpetuates a blissful naivete about how institutions and structures shape our dispositions and thoughts. In less than careful hands, the phrase drives a wedge between law and culture by attempting to...
How to Steal a Bike in New York City
Edmund Burke didn’t really say it, but it still rings true: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. In a test of this maxim, filmmaker Casey Neistat tries to steal his own bike in several locations around New York City and finds that most people do nothing about it—even when it’s done right in front of a police station. I recently spent a couple of days conducting a bike theft experiment, which...
Reagan, Whittaker Chambers, and the Threat to Freedom
Over at the Liberty Law Blog, there is an excellent post titled “Ronald Reagan, Whittaker Chambers, and the Dialogue of Liberty” by Alan Snyder. Snyder delves into the influence Chambers had on Reagan and how their worldviews differed as well. Many conservatives and scholars felt Chambers’ prediction that the West was on the losing side of history in the battle against Marxism collapsed after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union. For many, the ideas of Chambers...
Obamacare’s Religious Rubes
The White House has a plan to mobilize prayer vigils in front of the Supreme Court in defense of Obamacare. It was reported that the administration met with leaders at non-profit organizations and religious officials who support the new health care law. The court takes up the constitutional test of the health care mandate in a couple of weeks. The mandate has now been challenged in 26 states. Cue the same stale big government religious prophets who confuse statism and...
Integral Human Development
The Journal of Markets & Morality is planning a theme issue for the Spring of 2013: “Integral Human Development,” i.e. the synthesis of human freedom and responsibility necessary for the material and spiritual enrichment of human life. According to Pope Benedict XVI, Integral human development presupposes the responsible freedom of the individual and of peoples: no structure can guarantee this development over and above human responsibility. (Caritas in Veritate 17) There is a delicate balance between the material and the...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved