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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.

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Supporting crony capitalism weakens the appeal of social conservatism; it is difficult to hold the moral high ground on abortion and marriage while defending exploiters of the poor and oppressed.
We all have a moral obligation to use our surplus wealth to help those in need, but we should do so in a way that is effective, fair, and in accordance with our own vocations.
Private, not public, law enables healthy dependencies by carving out space for communities of people to deliberate together about what to do with the resources available to them.
Entitlement reform cannot succeed by eliminating dependence. Instead we should aim to promote healthy dependencies.
Natural law does not demand capitalism, but we can deduce from natural law that some institutions that are key to market economies are normally just, while practices key to socialist arrangements are usually unjust.
Aristotelian-Thomistic moral philosophy doesn’t imply that every economy should be capitalist.
Conservatives need to stop shying away from principled, as opposed to merely utilitarian, defenses of economic freedom and its associated institutions.
There is no right to lose oneself in a game of chance for the state’s benefit, and more than that there is no good in it. Video keno contracts liberty and virtue while accelerating the state’s colonization of civil society.
While there is something noble in economists’ assumption that social life is based on mutually beneficial exchange, rather than coercion and plunder, this fails to account for what philosophy, theology, and literature reveal to us about the true substance of marriage.
Good public policy can meet the needs of all Americans without redefining marriage.
Family, church, and school are the three basic people-forming institutions, and it is no wonder that they produce the best results—including economic and political ones—when they cooperate.
Economic liberty is necessary for achieving the real, non-economic goods of individuals and associations in civil society. Not the collectivist “we” of government, but the many “we’s” of civil society are the true ground of a just, and good, society.
Applying new governance methods to medicine will undermine physician autonomy and make doctors more liable to malpractice claims. The second in a two-part series.
Obamacare purports to improve medical quality through dynamic processes that involve government-supported private actors, quality benchmarks, and participation by practitioners and patients. The first in a two-part series.
Constitutional law has often been used to shape economies, but there are limits to the law’s ability to influence economic culture, especially when societal priorities no longer accord with constitutional principles.
Is inequality the cause of our worst social ills?
A recent address encouraging Democrats for Life to re-elect President Obama is marked by flawed reasoning and misleading statistics.
Work is at the core of our humanity, and our ownership of what we produce precedes laws demanding that we give it back to “community” in the abstract.
The Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the Affordable Care Act is constitutionally correct. This doesn’t prevent us from seeing the individual mandate as a tax on freedom—an exercise of Congress’s constitutional power to tax so as to destroy personal and institutional freedom with respect to health insurance.
Close attention to particular decisions by European institutions and governments before and during the present economic crisis suggests that many have significantly infringed the rule of law.
Melinda Gates and the Family Planning Summit will waste 4.6 billion dollars on contraception for women in third world countries instead of addressing the educational and healthcare-related challenges pregnant mothers face.
Though the Supreme Court has long been hostile to tax exemptions for religious reasons, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the Establishment Clause should give religious organizations reasons to hope that they won’t be penalized by the Obamacare “tax.”
The Supreme Court should be an apolitical institution dedicated to enforcing the minimal and clear requirements of the Constitution.
Two Catholic universities’ decisions to drop student health-care plans show Obamacare’s long-term goal: Force Americans to choose government-subsidized plans over no insurance at all.

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