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Pillar

Business & Economics

The fifth pillar, business and economics, is built upon concern for the common good and the ways in which the economic order contributes to—or detracts from—human flourishing. Public Discourse examines the ways in which the market is shaped by—and gives shape to—our understanding of the human person, the role of the family, the rule of law, and education and culture.

Does America Need a Sharansky?

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Soviet flag

Does America Need a Sharansky?

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Unfortunately, Morson looks only at a handful of symptoms that are vaguely comparable to the pathologies of late Soviet society and concludes that the same disease is at work. He does not address the deep causes of Soviet and Russian dysfunction, all of which are absent in the United States—authoritarianism, a command economy, censorship, oppression, terror, the Gulag. 
shopping

A Family-Focused Approach to Consumption

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Our consumption decisions should be focused on the needs of our family members. This requires attention to unglamorous factors such as budgets and nutritional requirements, instead of being up-to-date with the brands and campaigns that purport to solve the world’s problems by selling us products. 
social security

The Social Injustice of Social Security

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Unraveling a program that is deeply embedded in our politics and culture won’t be easy, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be attempted. The goal of relieving old-age financial hardship was a worthy one, but the policy measure enacted was a defective means to achieve it. The insolvency of Social Security may provide the emergency necessary to bring about change, if only we do not let the crisis go to waste.
beautiful homemaking

Valuing the Craft of Beautiful Homemaking

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Understanding homemaking as a craft that produces beautiful (if intangible) results should hopefully encourage young men and women who are thinking about caring for a home and/or children. For the young mother or father overwhelmed by all there is to do and feeling incompetent in the face of the multiple—often conflicting—demands of house and children, it may help to know that homemaking is a skill to be developed over time.
housing

It Takes a Swarm to Raise a Village

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For American families, housing has become too expensive. We can make it more affordable if we build enough housing. But in order to do that, we cannot stop at making it legal; we need to make it easy.
capitalism

The Right and Future of Capitalism: Part 2

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I don’t underestimate the difficulties in trying to shape the culture in which our markets operate. They are indeed formidable. But undertaking that type of work helps define, I suggest, what it means to be a conservative in the modern world.
capitalism

The Right and the Future of Capitalism: Part 1

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Conservative economics, unlike the fundamentalism that supplanted it, embraces reason. As conservatives, we begin with a confident assertion of what the market is for and then consider the public policies necessary for shaping markets toward that end.
homemaker

If We Value Homemaking, We Should Rethink Welfare Reform

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If you are willing to acknowledge that full-time caregiving may be a suitable, even preferable, use of one’s capacities, there can be little justification for policies that guard against it—in fact, you may want to construct policies that enable it.
remote work

The Conservative Case for Remote Work

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If conservative organizations want to promote an economy that centers around the family, one that rebuilds the small town and restores a healthy culture, they need to do more than promote the right family policies and tax credits.
Networking

The World, the Flesh, and the Young Professional: Reforming How We Approach Networking

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To the extent that networking preoccupies us with appearances, it distracts us from real professional excellence. This excellence is the basis for truly enriching professional relationships, and it can serve as an alternative to the spirit of unbridled acquisitiveness that usually drives how we network.
Classical school

The Place of Economics in a Classical Education

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Whatever approach is best for your students at your school, know that you are serving not just the mind but the whole person. To educate the whole person, we must not leave gaps where others may rush in to fill the void. Economics began with the late scholastics and ought to continue today as part of a full classical curriculum. 
Arthur Laffer and Brian Domitrovic

Taxes Have Consequences: An Interview with Arthur B. Laffer and Brian Domitrovic

By , , and
Whenever you redistribute income, you never actually redistribute income. You destroy total income completely. Every revolution on planet Earth has been fought in order to change the distribution of income. Not one of those revolutions has ever succeeded in redistributing income, but all of them have succeeded in destroying the entire quality and quantity of total income.
suburban neighborhood

Empowering People through a Renewed Sense of Place

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Crucially, Kaplan sees the fragility of American life not just in the low-income neighborhoods of inner-city Philadelphia, but in the isolation of otherwise well-off suburbs. His goal is to resurrect the idea of the neighborhood as a specific place with a distinctive sense of community. It’s a cultural narrative that runs counter to a mentality that prioritizes mobility over stability.
working moms

Flourishing in Work and Family Life: Considerations for Young Women 

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Six panelists share how they structure their lives in a way that allows them to pursue creative, intellectually inspiring work, while remaining open to life and faithful to the good work of the home.
Homeless

The War on Poverty at Fifty: How to Craft Policy to Help America’s Poor

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Government may be able to provide material assistance, but it has failed to address the deeper causes of poverty. Worse, it has discouraged the most important defenses against poverty in America—work and marriage.
Public Discourse

Public Discourse at 15: Resisting Evil without Losing Our Souls

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In the past fifteen years, we’ve published articles on the moral, cultural, religious, and political issues of our time, including the most controversial and sensitive; but we have done so in a manner of which we can be proud, respecting the intellect and personhood of our readers, interlocutors, and intellectual contestants.
Person holding two pennies

In a Fallen World, Scarcity Is a Gift

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In our fallen condition in which we are detached from relationship with God, our mortality is a gift. Scarcity grants meaning to our decisions, provides a merciful conduit for us to know the love of God and one another, and pushes us toward relationships broken by the Fall.
Homelessness

“Housing First” Policy Is Not Helping the Homeless

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It takes excruciating self-loathing for a person to defecate on public sidewalks, shoot up with poisonous drugs, engage in rampant criminality. The mental illness and dissipation is sometimes so profound that many of these poor people die on the streets. Providing housing vouchers alone simply doesn’t cut it.
Unidentified young demostrator with megaphone and notebook protesting against austerity cuts

Graduate Student Unions and Catholic Social Thought

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Since the first social encyclical, Rerum novarum (1891), the Church consistently has taught that forming unions is a natural human right, an expression of the right of association and a right that governments may not deny.
An aerial view from the drone of a neighborhood with its swimming pools inside a forest in the outskirts of Madrid city seeing the urban planning of the area with its home and streets aligned

Housing Affordability: Putting People First

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The deterioration of housing affordability suggests that we must reorient current policies on land use  and focus on more fundamental objectives: people’s need for housing
Delivery and installation of a modular frame house. Frame construction of small houses. Modular housing construction. Your house. An inexpensive house.

Better Housing Would Make Families Happier

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Modern life in the United States is atomizing, lonely, and hard on family bonds. Improving the housing stock would help alleviate these challenges.
Three girls riding down the street on scooters and a bike

Yes in My Backyard—and in My Frontyard

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Being pro-family must also mean being pro-housing reform. If we want more neighborhood children playing in our front yards, we should be pushing their elected officials to make it easier for developers to build, baby, build.
Illustration, a dirty supermarket aisle, with empty and abandoned shelves. Ai generated.

Scarcity Is about More Than the Market

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Before modern economists claimed a monopoly on the topic of scarcity, philosophers, artists, and theologians spent centuries arguing over the nature and limits of our desires.

Why We Don’t Trust the Rich

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If we are worried about wealth inequality because we don’t think the wealthy are using their wealth to help others, then it seems worth asking, who are the wealthy people? Can I, the writer of this essay, and you, the reader of this essay, afford to give $20 more than we are giving to something which will genuinely benefit those less fortunate?
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