Today is the 311thbirthday of the Founding Father and polymath, Ben Franklin. As a leading statesman and scientist of his day, Franklin made innumerable contributions—many of which made him a wealthy man. At his death, Franklin is estimated to have been worth about $67 million. Here are six quotes by Franklin on money, wealth, and virtue: On increasing wealth: The way to wealth is as plain as the way to market. It depends chiefly on two words—industry and frugality. On...

“A former Communist who found spiritual solace in his adopted Quakerism,” says Bruce Edward Walker in this week’s Acton Commentary, “Chambers reduced the dilemma facing modern humanity to a simple dichotomy: God or Man?” Consider: An avowed socialist candidate came close to clinching the presidential nomination in what was once considered the world’s greatest proponent of liberty; the same country is hobbled by an ever-encroaching, state-enforced regulatory apparatus; municipal bankruptcies and state budget crises proliferate, wrought in part by massively...

TodayAmericans observe a U.S. federal holiday marking the birthday of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It is observed on the third Monday of January each year, which is around the time of King’s birthday, January 15. Here are five facts you should know about MLK: 1. King’s literary and rhetorical masterpiece was his 1963 open letter “The Negro Is Your Brother,” better known as the “Letter From Birmingham Jail.” The letter, written while King was being held for a...

Note: This is the first in a weekly series of explanatory posts on the officials and agencies included in the President’s Cabinet. When Obamacare was signed into law in 2010, the Catholic nuns didn’t expect it would affect their religious liberty. Nor did they suspect that in a few years the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) would restrict their freedom of conscience. Yet it was that Cabinet-level government agency that issued a mandate requiring the women to disregard...

For the sixteenth consecutive year, North Korea is ranked as the most oppressive place in the world for Christians, according to the international non-profit ministry Open Doors. Every year Open Doors publishes the World Watch List to highlight the plight of persecuted Christians around the world. The list represents believers “who are arrested, harassed, tortured—even killed—for their faith.” The list measures the degree of freedom a Christian has to live out their faith in five spheres of life (private, munity,...

Image courtesy of Getty Images “Why can’t sane energy policies be developed and effectively implemented without a $30 billion bureaucracy to oversee it?” asks Acton Institute president and co-founder Rev. Robert Sirico in a recent article for The Hill. Sirico notes that under President-elect Donald Trump some overreaching government bureaucracies could be rolled back or even abolished. Most significantly, Sirico calls for an end of the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives: This well-intentioned subsidy obfuscates the nature of religious charities by...

On December 1st, Acton ed Cato Institute Senior Fellow in Constitutional Studies Ilya Shapiro to the Mark Murray Auditorium to speak on the role of the federal judiciary in the growth of government. The lecture, delivered as part of the 2015 Acton Lecture Series, emphasized the importance of judges’ both having the right constitutional theories as well as the willingness to enforce them. Shapiro argues that too much judicial “restraint” — like that of Chief Justice John Roberts in the...

“It is the evacuation of depth, stability, and substance of culture where we witness the death of character.” –James Davison Hunter Christians and conservatives have long despaired over the “loss of American values,” decrying the erosion of public virtue and the disintegration of morals. As researchers likeCharles Murray and Robert Putnam have duly confirmed, the fabric munity life and civil society is continuing to fray across America. In Yuval Levin’s latest book, The Fractured Republic, he finds the solution in...

Note: This is post #17 in a weekly video series on basic microeconomics. How does the price of oil affect the price of candy bars? When the price of oil increases, it is of course more expensive to transport goods, like candy bars. But there are other, more subtle ways these two markets are connected says economist Alex Tabarrok. (If you find the pace of the videos too slow, I’d mend watching them at 1.5 to 2 times the speed....

Thomas Jefferson wanted what he considered to be his three greatest achievements to be listed on his tombstone. The inscription, as he stipulated, reads “Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia.” Todaywe celebrate the 231th anniversary of one of those great creations: the passage, in 1786, of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom. Each year, the President declares January 16th...