“When loans are guaranteed by the state and detached from market forces and personal responsibility,” says Dylan Pahman in this week’s Acton Commentary, “those institutions being paid with that loan money experience inflated demand as everyone and anyone now can go and wants to go college. As a result, tuition prices have been inflated. The full text of his essay follows. Subscribe to the free, weekly Acton News & Commentary and other publications here. Federal Student Loans: A Problem of...

Anthony Weiner did not win the Democratic Party primary for New York City last night. Leading in the polls at one time, he ended up with 5 percent of the vote. His defiant and circus like campaign appropriately ended with more bizarre theatrics. In a scolding interview, Weiner was called out for his political power addiction recently by Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC. Though O’Donnell sees no need to call him out for his moral behavior and personally he doesn’t feel...

At least $8 million will be allocated to fund a new parking garage near David Wade Stadium at Mississippi State University. MSU, which is in Starkville, Miss. and far from the Gulf Coast, is 250 miles from Hurricane Katrina’s landfall. Jeff Amy of the Associated Press has more, Part of a hotel-convention plex planned around a former cotton mill, it’s blocks from Mississippi State’s football stadium. That’s not unlike the condominiums built for University of Alabama football fans in Tuscaloosa...

Wilhelm Röpke is one of the most important 20th century economists that almost no Americans know anything about. To really learn about the man whose influence was considered largely responsible for enabling Germany’s post-World War II economic “miracle,” you should read Samuel Gregg’s Wilhelm Ropke’s Political Economy. But if you don’t have the time (or $109.25) to spend, you can read Ralph Ancil’s introductory article at Front Porch Republic: Throughout his professional life Röpke was concerned about a socially and...

In his latest column, Tyler Cowen points out that whatever economic recovery we’ve experienced has “largely bypassed young people,” arguing that such a development is bound to have an impact for years e: For Americans aged 16 to 24 who aren’t enrolled in school, the employmentpicture is grim. Only36 percent are working full time, down 10 percentage points from 2007. Longer term, the overall labor-force participation rate for that age group has dropped 20 percentage points for men and 14...

Jordan J. Ballor has spent the past decade working for the Acton Institute. At Fieldnotes Magazine he share five lessons he’s learned from working at a think tank focused on the intersection of theology and economics: 1. Treat people like people. The Golden Rule, “do to others what you would have them do to you” (Matt. 7:12), may seem mon sense, but it is much more mon to see what it really should look like in practice. I experienced this...

Remember the “fiscal cliff”? It wasn’t a cliff. Over at Neighborhood Effects, James Broughel asks the question, “Has the Sequester Hurt the Economy?” So have the sequester cuts hurt the economy? One possible es from a new paper by Scott Sumner of Bentley University. Sumner argues that cuts to government spending don’t have serious deleterious macroeconomic effects when the Federal Reserve is targeting inflation. This is because the Fed ensures that prices stay stable under an inflation targeting regime, which...

Peter Beinart at the Daily Beast writes a fascinating article about the way the “left” is currently being reshaped. It seems that young adults in the Democratic Party are far more radical than what America saw in the Clinton White House. In fact, as the article notes, Bill de Blasio’s Democratic Party nomination to run for New York City mayor is a signal of this new direction. If those who love liberty are not paying attention to this shift, they...

On Saturday, Tony Abbott, a member of the Liberal-National Coalition, was elected prime minister of Australia despite being considered “too religious, too conservative and too blunt” to win a national election. Turns out, he’s an admirer of the work of Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg (Australian born). In 2001, Abbott addressed the role of government in alleviating poverty and reducing unemployment in an issue of Policy Magazine, in a special feature titled, “Against the Prodigal State.” He begins: The story...

I share Fr. Robert Barron’s concern about many of the attitudes on display in this Time magazine cover story on “the childfree life.” As Barron writes, much of the problem stems from the basic American attitude toward a life of “having it all.” Thus, Barron observes, “Whereas in one phase of the feminist movement, ‘having it all’ meant that a woman should be able to both pursue a career and raise a family, now it apparently means a relationship and...