Americans are growing in their distrust of the U.S. government and its leaders, with polls typically showing approval of Congress somewhere around 11%. As Senator Ben Sasse put it in his first remarks to the U.S. Senate, “The people despise us all.” “No one in this body thinks the Senate is laser-focused on the most pressing issues facing the nation,” he said, “No one. Some of us lament this; some are angered by it; many are resigned to it; some...

Over the years, many of us here at Acton have been engaged in long-running(and mostly congenial) feud with distributists. Family squabbles can often be the most heated, and that is true of this rivalry between the Christianchampions of distributism and the Christian champions of free markets here at the Acton Institute. We fight among ourselves because we have an awful lot mon. For example, we share the afocus on encouraging subsidiarity, self-sufficiency, and entrepreneurship. We also share arespect for rule...

This week on Radio Free Acton, Magatte Wade joins us to discuss the challenges and rewards of being an entrepreneur in Africa. Too often, people in the West tend to think of Africa as a place to send aid rather than a place to engage in trade. Magatte is working to change that attitude while building her pany, Tiossan, as well asthe local economy in her native Senegal. Wadewill be joining us as a plenary speaker at Acton University in...

Last Summer I predicted that Harriet Tubman would be replacing Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill. I was almost right. She’ll be replacing Andrew Jackson. The U.S. Treasury announced last year that the $10 bill is the next paper currency scheduled for a major redesign — a process that takes years because of the anti-counterfeiting technology involved — and will feature a “notable woman.” The new ten will be unveiled in 2020, the 100th anniversary of the passage of the...

Boston Common Asset Management bills itself as “a leader in global sustainability initiatives.” Why would an investment portfolio pany label itself with the appellation “Common” when it carries such negative baggage? As it turns out, BCAM embraces mon” as something positive. From the BCAM website: Beginning in 1634, the Boston Common served as mon pasture for cattle grazing. As a public good, the Common was a space owned by no one but essential to all. We chose the name Boston...

The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, shareholder activists of the corporate God-fly variety, are gearing up for the May 25 ExxonMobil Corporation annual general meeting. The ICCR agenda isn’t about maximizing shareholder value, but seems far more intent on reducing it. For the record, your writer possesses no financial stake in ExxonMobil, but if he did it’s certain he’d be upset mightily at ICCR’s efforts to hobble the industry giant and send stock prices plummeting even further. The religious-left activists...

Recently we considered a simple tool and metric for measuring economic well-being: real GDP per capita. Yet such metrics feel can seem materialistic. What about the things that money can’t buy, we wonder, like health and happiness? As economist Alex Tabarrok explains, while real GDP is an imperfect measure, it tends to be correlated with many of the non-monetary improvements that contribute to human flourishing. ...

Kris Mauren, executive director of the Acton Institute, kicks off the second season of the Free Market Series, a television program for American and Canadian audiences produced by The World Show in partnership with the Montreal Economic Institute and broadcast on PBS affiliates. In Episode 1, Mauren takes apart the “fatally flawed poverty industry” and talks about Acton’s Poverty Inc. documentary. Interview notes: Many people imagine that free markets are synonymous with self-interest and greed, but for Kris Mauren, freedom...

“The temporal achievements of science, technology, inventions and the like also have a divine significance,” writesAbraham Kuyper in this week’s Acton Commentary, an excerpt fromCommon Grace: God’s Gifts for a Fallen World. With the destruction of this present form of the world, will the fruit mon grace be destroyed forever, or will that rich and multiform development for mon grace has equipped and will yet equip our human race also bear fruit for the kingdom of glory as that will...

A new Pew Research surveyfinds that the majority of American Catholics (73 percent)say they rely “a great deal” on their own conscience when facing difficult moral problems. Conscience was turned to more often than the three other sources — Catholic Church’s teachings (21 percent), the Bible (15 percent) or the pope (11 percent) bined. While it never really went away, conscience is making eback among Christians. Over the past few years, the term conscience has been increasingly referenced in debates...