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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.

A Family-Focused Approach to Consumption

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Public Discourse

Obamacare: Text and Intention

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Confronted with its legislative weaknesses, defenders of Obamacare are appealing to the law’s intent instead of its text. This is a dangerous approach that the founders clearly rejected.
Public Discourse

The Blessings of Liberty and the Index of Culture and Opportunity

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Opportunity is not merely the absence of artificially imposed impediments. It is also the capacity to pursue happiness, individually and in community. Adapted from the 2014 Index of Culture and Opportunity.
Public Discourse

Religious Liberty and Economic Freedom: Intellectual and Practical Paradoxes

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The role of economic liberty in contributing to human flourishing and the common good remains deeply underappreciated, even by those who are dedicated to religious liberty.
Public Discourse

Just Inflation

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A low but predictable inflation rate is sound, just policy.
Public Discourse

Just Money

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If a society regards governmental manipulation of money as the antidote to economic challenges, a type of poison will work its way through the body politic, undermining justice and the common good.
Public Discourse

Covetous Envy: The Forgotten Deadly Sin

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Modern rhetoric of income inequality is driven by covetous envy that betrays America’s tradition of applauding those who succeed. Caritas, humility, gratitude, and goodwill toward others are a healthy society’s answer to the ancient curses of envy and pride.
Public Discourse

The Culture of Dishonesty: Abortion, Divorce, and Obamacare

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Americans’ acceptance of President Obama’s lies reveals how dangerously comfortable we have become with dishonesty. It will take a profound renovation of our culture to restore truthfulness to its proper place and establish political freedom on a more secure foundation.
Public Discourse

A Moral Basis for Markets: A Response to James Stoner

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All truly voluntary exchange should be allowed without state interference. But many exchanges that are not fully voluntary should be allowed, too. It is immoral to restrict the ability of market processes to create a space where right action is rewarded and immoral actions are punished.
Public Discourse

Is There a Moral Basis for the Free Market?

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The morality of the market, important as it is in a free society, is not the only kind of morality that matters in common life.
Public Discourse

We Need a Real Women’s Agenda, Not Government-Funded Abortion

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By passing HR 7, the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, Congress could settle the matter of federal funding for abortion once and for all, and start addressing the real needs of American women. Adapted from testimony delivered before the House Judiciary Committee on January 9, 2014.
Public Discourse

Theology, Anthropology, and Economics

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Every economic system is based upon an implicit vision of the human person. Maciej Zieba’s new book provides an introduction to Catholic social thought that examines the anthropologies of Catholicism, liberal democracy, and the free-market economy.
Public Discourse

Why Max Weber Was Wrong

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The association of Protestantism with capitalism, famously articulated by Max Weber and now widely accepted by many, is theologically dubious, empirically disprovable, and largely incidental. An edited excerpt from Gregg's new book, Tea Party Catholic.
Public Discourse

A Modest Balanced Budget Proposal

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Constitutional amendments requiring Congress to pass a balanced budget are unrealistic and doomed to fail. It would be more effective to combat deficit spending by requiring the president to submit a balanced budget.
Public Discourse

Memo from Paul Ryan to Georgetown Faculty: Ever Heard of a Tea Party Catholic?

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In most cases, Catholic social teaching provides the correct principles for resolving complex social and economic questions, not specific policy requirements. Nathan Shlueter reviews Sam Gregg’s new book in the voice of Paul Ryan.
Public Discourse

An Orwellian Warning for Conservatives

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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.
Public Discourse

Charity with a Conscience

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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.
Public Discourse

Principled Entitlement Reform: Private Ordering Needs Room to Grow

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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.
Public Discourse

A Moral Foundation for Entitlement Reform

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Entitlement reform cannot succeed by eliminating dependence. Instead we should aim to promote healthy dependencies.
Public Discourse

Natural Law and the Economy: A Reply to Miller

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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.
Public Discourse

Morality and Economic Freedom: A Response to Gregg

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Aristotelian-Thomistic moral philosophy doesn’t imply that every economy should be capitalist.
Public Discourse

Conservatives and the Non-Triumph of Capitalism

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Conservatives need to stop shying away from principled, as opposed to merely utilitarian, defenses of economic freedom and its associated institutions.
Public Discourse

Video Keno: Pennsylvania’s Leviathan?

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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.
Public Discourse

On Economists and Marriage

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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.
Public Discourse

We Don’t Need to Redefine Marriage to Fix Policy Problems

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Good public policy can meet the needs of all Americans without redefining marriage.

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