Alejandro Chafuen, Acton’s Managing Director, International, attended last month’s inaugural National Conservatism conference in Washington, DC, sponsored by the Edmund Burke Foundation. Today in Forbes he offers a few reflections on the event. The conference tackled more than just economics, of course, but in this article Chafuen focuses on the economic realm. It would be hard for me to e a nationalist. I have learned, however, to respect love for one’s nation as a valid motivation in social and political...

What do we mean when we talk about “liberty?” While it may appear that we all use the word in the same way, closer examination reveals that Americans have a wide range of meanings for the term. For instance, when those of us at Acton refer to liberty we tend to have in mind the definition we use in our “core principles”: Liberty, in a positive sense, is achieved by fulfilling one’s nature as a person by freely choosing to...

The other evening I was at a pool with my family. It was beautiful and warm, and we decided to order some pizza and have dinner at one of the tables overlooking the pool. As we sat and talked and enjoyed blue sky and full trees of late summer, I realized that I could hear the background sounds of children laughing and talking and of water splashing. It was noticeably different and pleasant. Then it struck me that the music...

Economic globalization has brought many economic benefits to the planet, but it’s also true that the benefits have been uneven. One continent which has lagged behind much of the rest of the world is Latin America. As a recent Wall Street Journal article entitled “Latin America Hangs On to Its Economic Gloom” pointed out: This year, once again, Latin America is shaping up as an economic disappointment. Brazil’s economy likely shrank slightly in the year’s first half, and Mexico’s didn’t...

Boris Johnson‘s decision to prorogue Parliament has opened up two paths for the UK to make a clean break from the European Union.This holds the potential to undermine globalism and the welfare state while diffusing prosperity to the developing world, according to a new essay by Rev. Richard Turnbull in the Acton Institute’s Religion & Liberty Transatlanticwebsite. Rev. Turnbull – the director of the Centre for Enterprise, Markets, and Ethics in Oxford – clearly explains the real impact of these...

When I was twelve my family lived on a small, dry piece of land in rural Texas. Since we lived far outside of any city limits, we couldn’t rely on services like water (we had a well), sewage (we had a septic tank), or sanitation (we had a 12-year-old boy and a 50-gallon burn barrel). Before my weekend free-time could begin, I’d have a list of chores to get done, including burning the week’s trash and burying the ashes in...

It is mon theme in fairy tales and other stories that the loser of the struggle will tell the victor that their victory e with a cost. We see a similar theme in the Bible with the prophets–perhaps most famously when Israel finally gets the king they wanted so they could be like the other nations. Samuel warns them—you have gotten your desires, but they e at a cost. Robert Nisbet uses a similar image in the introduction to Tradition...

One of the constant refrains in economic development—and now environment issues—is the topic of population control. Evidence notwithstanding, the claim that population causes poverty and that the planet is facing a population explosion is taught as settled science—even in the face of serious population decline in some countries. We hear this over and over from the UN and popular media, in schools, and from people like Jeffrey Sachs to professional doomsday peddler Paul Erlich. Even the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for...

“In the field of social phenomena, only economics and linguistics seem to have succeeded in building up a coherent body of theory.” –Friedrich Hayek In 1887, L. L. Zamenhof proposed a universal language as a means for ushering in a new era of international peace and prosperity. The language, now known as Esperanto, was carefully constructed to be easily absorbed and understood across cultures and countries, but it failed to take hold. Zamenhof was focused on solving a knowledge problem...

On Monday, the United States will celebrate Labor Day – and a new studyshows that, while U.S. workers have much to celebrate, Canadians are not quite as fortunate. A new study about the Canadian economy dovetails with a report earlier this week that poor Americans are better off economically than average citizens of other advanced, but less economically free, OECD nations. The Fraser Institute, Canada’s premier think tank on economic matters, analyzed the labor market of each of the 50...