That last phrase should sound familiar to anyone who followed the debate over the “common good” raged across X this past week. It was offered up, nearly verbatim, as a definition of the common good itself. But a definition that cannot distinguish the common good from a lighthouse has mistaken a part for the whole and ignored more than two millennia of philosophical and theological reflection in the Christian West.

That conviction is at the heart of my essay published Sunday in The Dispatch‘s Dispatch Faith newsletter, “The New Right Is Wrong About the ‘Common Good.’”

The Catholic Church has engaged in a rich, sustained reflection on the common good for some 2,000 years. The Catechism, quoting the Second Vatican Council’s Gaudium et spes, defines it as “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily.” And it names three essential elements: respect for the fundamental and inalienable rights of the human person, the social well-being and development of the group, and the stability and security of a just order.

Note what comes first. Any honest grappling with the common good must include a serious commitment to the rights of the human person as a part of and not an obstacle to its realization. This is why the “zero-sum dispute” between the common good and individual liberty, so confidently framed by voices on the new right, dissolves under examination. As Lord Acton observed, the Catholic notion of liberty “denies that general interests can supersede individual rights.” When postliberals celebrate Franco’s regime or argue for the military occupation of American cities, they do not defend the common good. They discredit it.

After the essay published, I had a thought-provoking exchange on X with Ken Craycraft, professor of moral theology at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Cincinnati, who shared with me his own recent column in The Boston Pilot, “What is the ‘common good,’ anyway?”

Readers of both pieces will find a lot of convergence. Craycraft and I draw from the same wells: Gaudium et spes, the Catechism, and the four permanent principles of Catholic social doctrine: human dignity, the common good, subsidiarity, and solidarity. He rightly insists that the common good cannot be reduced to a calculation or spreadsheet, and his list of policies incompatible with human flourishing includes restrictions on freedom of religion, assembly, and travel.

Where we differ is in diagnosis and emphasis. Craycraft sees the recent debate as driven by classical liberals and libertarians who equate the common good with totalitarian collectivism. My concern runs in the other direction: not that the common good is invoked too often, but that it is invoked too thinly and even cynically.

Read the full essay at The Dispatch, and Kenneth Craycraft’s column at The Boston Pilot.

A century and a half later, in the year of America’s semiquincentennial, Brazil confronts a darker marvel: not that the voice can travel, but that it can be stopped.

This week on Acton Line I welcome back Marcel van Hattem, Brazilian congressman, journalist, and political scientist representing the state of Rio Grande do Sul, to discuss the state of free speech in his country and the perilous state of its institutions.

When Marcel first joined me on Acton Line last year, Brazil was in the midst of a constitutional crisis: a Supreme Court asserting ever-broader powers over the press, over social media platforms, and over the speech of ordinary citizens. Journalists deplatformed. Accounts banned. An entire social network switched off ahead of an election. That crisis has not passed. It has matured, and its fruits are now ripening across Brazilian public life.

Marcel knows this pressure firsthand. He has been investigated, threatened, and, in a scene seen around the world, had his microphone cut on the floor of the Chamber of Deputies. His witness raises questions that reach well beyond Brazil: What does the rule of law require when the guardians of the law become its greatest threat? How does a legislator fulfill his duties under authoritarian pressure? And what do free peoples everywhere owe one another when liberty is imperiled in one of the world’s largest democracies?

Censorship is never just policy, but claim about persons. That some may speak while others must be spoken for. A free society rests on the opposite conviction: that every person bears the dignity, and with it the duty, of bearing witness to the truth as they understand it.

This is why this year’s Brazilian elections matter so much. Marcel explains what change in the Senate would mean for the cause of liberty, why liberty-minded legislators cannot simply wait out the storm, and what ordinary Brazilians are doing to reclaim their constitutional inheritance.

Lord Acton reminds us that “liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.” It is required, he wrote, “for security in the pursuit of the highest objects of civil society, and of private life.” When the state presumes to decide which voices may be heard, it does not merely regulate politics; it forecloses the pursuit of those highest objects for everyone.

Dom Pedro II did not keep his throne; a coup deposed him in 1889, and Brazil’s constitutional history has been turbulent ever since. But his astonishment in Philadelphia still instructs. The human voice carrying farther than it ever had was the wonder of 1876. The wonder of 2026 is that men and women like Marcel van Hattem need to insist, at real personal cost, that their voices be allowed to carry at all.

That gap between the celebration and the commitment is, the subject of this week’s episode of Acton Line. My friend and mentor Bradley J. Birzer, the Russell Amos Kirk Chair in American Studies at Hillsdale College, and I talked about his new book, The Declaration of Independence: A Radical Experiment in Liberty. It arrives in this semiquincentennial year as a welcome invitation to read our founding document again in the company of the people who wrote it.

We are accustomed to reading the Declaration as a lawyer’s brief against George III or a philosopher’s argument for natural rights. Birzer does not deny it is both. But he insists it is something more: a moral document that embodies a people capable of virtue with a robust traditions of self-government.

They inherited these traditions above all from Cicero. They knew his writings intimately. His Roman republic haunted their imaginations as model and warning. Republics are fragile things. Rights alone do not sustain them. It takes citizens formed in prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude to keep a republic once you have one. In our conversation, Birzer traces how these classical virtues are not merely background to the Declaration but woven into its very structure and argument.

Birzer’s boldest claim is that what Christianity accomplished theologically in proclaiming human dignity, the Declaration accomplished, or would eventually accomplish, politically.

Our conversation also takes up the dramatic narrative at the heart of the book—the crowded months from 1774 through 1776, the debates in Congress, Jefferson’s drafting and the revisions that followed, and the controversy the Declaration attracted from the moment the ink dried. The document we now treat as self-evident was anything but self-evident to its first readers.

That, perhaps, is the most useful lesson of the semiquincentennial. Two hundred fifty years on, we are tempted to treat the Declaration as a finished monument, something to be admired and then returned to its case. The signers knew better. The Declaration they signed was not a conclusion but a beginning, a radical experiment that would demand of them, and of every generation after them, the republican virtues it presupposed. The fireworks belong to July 4. The work belongs to every day after.

Listen to my full conversation with Brad Birzer on Acton Line:

The Luddites asked the right question and answered it badly. Two centuries later, the question has returned with new urgency, and it is ours to answer better.

On this week’s episode of Acton Line, I sit down with my colleague Dan Churchwell, the Acton Institute’s director of programs and education, whose research sits at the intersection of media ecology, technological ethics, and the future of work. Our subject is faith and work in a technological age.

The fourth industrial revolution, with its fusion of physical, digital, and biological systems, is reshaping economic life with a speed and scope that earlier transformations did not possess. The stocking frame displaced the weaver over decades; today’s technologies promise, or threaten, to remake whole professions within a career, sometimes within a news cycle. The anxiety this produces deserves better than the two responses our culture reflexively offers: breathless assurance that the machines will solve everything, and apocalyptic warnings that they will destroy us. Both concede too much to the machine.

The deeper danger is not economic but spiritual. Historians have observed that faith in technological progress has long functioned as a kind of American civil religion, the one creed a nation of many creeds could share. When that faith hardens into certainty, we begin to confuse the vast possibilities of our tools with divine power itself, and to measure human beings by the machine’s own standard: output, efficiency, productivity.

This is the accounting that broke the Luddites. If a man is worth what his labor fetches, then a machine that outproduces him has judged him and found him wanting. A civilization that worships its tools will, sooner or later, sacrifice its people on that altar.

The Christian tradition keeps a different ledger. Our worth is not earned at a workstation but given in creation: we bear the image of God, and no innovation in productivity can amend that endowment. Work, rightly understood, is not mere output but vocation, a participation in God’s ongoing creative and providential care for the world, whether exercised at a loom, a keyboard, or a kitchen sink.

This conviction does not resolve every practical difficulty, and Dan and I do not pretend otherwise. What does vocation mean when the task you trained for can be automated? How should Christians think about stewarding technologies whose consequences outrun their creators’ intentions? These questions demand discernment rather than slogans, but discernment requires a fixed point, and the doctrine of human dignity provides one: the person is never a cost to be optimized away.

The Luddites had no grammar of worth beyond the wage, and so when the wage was threatened, everything was. Their hammers were a kind of grief. The tradition Dan and I both work within offers what they lacked: an account of the human person whose value precedes and survives every economic revolution, including this one.

The frames, in the end, were rebuilt. The question the frame-breakers asked still waits, in every generation, for a better answer.

You can listen to my conversation with Dan Churchwell on this week’s episode of Acton Line, available wherever you get your podcasts, or watch it here:

That would be a pleasant enough story about any neighborhood. About Fishtown, it is something more. Because Fishtown was not supposed to have a future. It had been assigned a different role in the American story: the cautionary tale.

In 2012, Charles Murray published Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, and the old riverside Philadelphia neighborhood of Fishtown, working class since before the Revolution, became a national byword. Murray used it as his emblem of everything unraveling in blue-collar America: marriage rates cut in half, men drifting out of the labor force, pews emptying, crime climbing. “Fishtown” ceased to be a place and became a data set, shorthand for decline itself.

Statistics have their uses. They can reveal what anecdote conceals. But a statistic is a snapshot, and neighborhoods do not hold still for the camera. While Fishtown was serving as the nation’s favorite symbol of working-class collapse, actual Fishtowners went on living, working, building, and, as it turns out, reviving.

On this week’s episode of Acton Line, I talk with my colleague Noah Gould, who traveled to Fishtown and reported what he found for The Wall Street Journal. The short version: the poster child of decline is booming.

Noah is no romantic about this. Gentrification carries real costs, and the longtime residents he spoke with feel them: rising rents, familiar faces departing, and the strangeness of watching your corner bar become a cocktail lounge. He does not gloss over any of it. But the story Fishtowners themselves tell is not primarily one of displacement. It is, in their own telling, a feel-good story: a community hammered by decades of economic shifts that is enjoying a genuine comeback.

It is easy, from a distance, to sort every changing neighborhood into one of two prefabricated narratives: decline or displacement, ruin or ruination-by-renewal. Noah went and listened.

What strikes me most about Fishtown’s turnaround: no one decreed it. There was no federal renewal program with the neighborhood’s name on it, no master plan drawn up in a distant office. What happened instead was the patient, unglamorous work of civil society. Entrepreneurs taking risks on an old factory floor, newcomers and longtime residents negotiating a common life, with institutions rebuilt block by block and storefront by storefront.

This is the kind of renewal that declinist narratives, left and right, have trouble seeing. We are awash in obituaries for working-class America, and the grief behind them is often sincere. Real things were lost in Fishtown, and Murray was not wrong to count them. But the ledger of communities is never closed. Where renewal comes, it tends to look less like policy and more like neighborliness. It rarely makes the news. Noah’s reporting is a welcome exception.

Fishtown entered the national imagination as a statistic. It deserves to be known again as a neighborhood. A particular place where particular people are doing the ancient human work of making a home together, in buildings their great-grandparents would recognize even if the menus would baffle them.

The factories are still there. They are just full of life again.

Watch my full conversation with Noah Gould on YouTube:

That refusal sits at the center of the argument my colleague Thomas Dias makes on the newest Acton Line. The conversation was inspired by his writing in Public Discourse. There Thomas set two New Yorkers side by side, Dorothy Day and Zohran Mamdani. He examined the tensions between their approaches to the serving their city’s poor.

Day arrived in New York in 1916 and, apart from her travels, never really left; she died at Maryhouse in Manhattan in 1980. With Peter Maurin she founded the Catholic Worker movement in 1933. A newspaper, but above all houses of hospitality that fed the hungry and sheltered the homeless. More than 180 of them still operate today.

She had come to this work the long way around. As a young woman she moved through the city’s radical movements of socialism, communism, and syndicalism. Then the Christian anarchism of Tolstoy and finally converting to Catholicism in 1927. What changed was not her concern for the poor but her account of their poverty. Her whole experience, she wrote, had been that “our failure has been not to love enough.” Her remedy was correspondingly personal: the poor were to be met, fed, and known face to face, by hands that could not hand the task to anyone else.

Zohran Mamdani, now the mayor of the same city, shares Day’s concern but almost none of her method. His platform locates the remedy for poverty in political power: rent freezes for the rent-stabilized, hundreds of thousands of new affordable units, government-run grocery stores, and universal childcare. The strategy is to win power, staff it with allies, and legislate. It is a theory of change that runs through the machinery of the state rather than through the encounter of persons.

Thomas is careful not to caricature this. Mamdani is no cynic, and the provision of material goods is a real good. The question is whether it is a sufficient one.

Here Thomas reaches for Hilaire Belloc, whose 1912 warning about the Servile State identified the danger precisely: a society that secures the body’s provision by making men permanently dependent on the power that provides it. Such an arrangement can fill a stomach. What it cannot do is the very thing Day thought indispensable: to meet a person as a person, and in doing so restore the dignity that provision alone leaves untouched.

The fault line, then, is not fiscal but anthropological. For Day, loving the poor was an act that could not be assigned to a bureau, because a love that is delegated is no longer quite love. The modern state, by contrast, converts charity into a transfer: efficient, scalable, and impersonal. Its great temptation is to let the institution will what only we can will, and to mistake the smooth functioning of the transfer for the work of encounter.

Which returns us to the woman on the bench. The road she walked of voluntary poverty, repeated arrests, and a lifetime of meeting the poor where they were was a hard one. It is also humanizing. It refuses the shortcut of handing our obligations to someone, or something, else. Day’s radical call to love still rings.

Two New Yorkers, two answers—listen to the full conversation on Acton Line:

I had the pleasure of taking up precisely this question last week with John Daly and Thomas Howes on the Reagan Caucus Action podcast. Our conversation ranged widely across two centuries, several encyclicals, and the varied threats to the liberty we too often take for granted. The supposed contradiction between political liberalism dissolves under honest examination and careful distinctions.

The Acton Institute, where I serve as a research fellow and where I host the Acton Line podcast, exists to make exactly that case. We are not a partisan policy shop, and I tried to be clear with John and Thomas about the distinction. Our aim is not to win the next election but to promote a free and virtuous society in which liberty is sustained, rather than corroded, by religious principle. The two are not adversaries. Strip virtue out of freedom and you are left with mere license; strip freedom out of virtue and you are left with coercion in the costume of piety.

This insight is central to a whole tradition of nineteenth-century thinkers, Lord Acton chief among them, who labored to reconcile the Catholic faith with constitutional government, freedom of conscience and of speech, and the free economy. These men were not liberals in the impoverished modern sense, that rationalistic and atomistic creed which holds tradition and institutions in contempt. Theirs was the older, organic liberalism that understands freedom as the necessary condition for human beings to pursue the good together. Acton found the seed of that liberty not in the Enlightenment but in the Gospel itself: in Christ’s instruction to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s, words that, as Acton observed, set bounds upon the state that it had never before been made to acknowledge.

The twentieth century furnished its own vindication. We spoke about Pope St. John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus, his great encyclical marking the hundredth anniversary of Rerum Novarum, in which the pope, who took the trouble to consult some of the finest economists of his day, affirmed a free economy set within a strong juridical framework, an economy ordered to the whole of human freedom rather than against it. It was not an unqualified blessing of capitalism. It was something better and more durable: a humanistic account of why markets, rightly bounded, can serve human dignity rather than diminish it.

If all of this sounds comfortably historical, the latter half of our conversation was anything but. I gave John and Thomas my candid assessment of the obstacles to freedom in 2026, and they are not few. Abroad, liberty faces open hostility from authoritarian regimes that regard it as a species of weakness. At home, the threat is subtler and, to my mind, sadder—a growing impatience with the liberal settlement among Christians themselves. Among some Protestants it takes the shape of Christian nationalism; among some Roman Catholics, of integralism. Both are tempted to cut through the Gordian knot of a pluralistic society with the sword of political power. Both misread the very tradition they mean to defend.

We closed on the question of war and the papacy, drawing on a piece I recently wrote for The Dispatch. There has been a great deal of confusion about the pope’s role in moments of conflict. The Holy Father is not a geopolitical referee, called to adjudicate this or that campaign. He is an advocate for peace, and his office obliges him to remind a forgetful world of an old and sober truth: a war that would eradicate a civilization can never, under any doctrine worthy of the name, be called just.

Which brings us back to where we began. “Catholic liberal” is not an oxymoron. Properly understood, it is closer to a redundancy, a name for the conviction that the God who made us free intended us to remain so. I’m grateful to the Reagan Caucus Action for the chance to make that case, and I’d commend the full conversation to you.

Watch the full episode here:

On the latest episode of Acton Line, I spoke with James M. Patterson, associate professor in the Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee and president of the Ciceronian Society, about Why Postliberalism Failed, the book he has written with Thomas Howes and published with the Acton Institute. It is a polemic that wins its argument less by assertion than by evidence.

Postliberalism offers a seductive narrative, especially to disaffected young Catholics. The story goes that liberalism is not merely flawed but founding-level corrupt, that the American order is a machine for manufacturing atomized consumers, and that the remedy is a confessional state strong enough to order society toward the good. Tear out the rotten liberal root, the argument runs, and a flourishing Christian civilization will grow in its place. The trouble, as Patterson and Howes demonstrate, is that we already know how it ends. We know because it has been tried.

The signal achievement of Why Postliberalism Failed is to replace speculation with the historical record. The authors trace postliberalism’s intellectual lineage to two unlovely sources: an extreme papalism that subordinates all political authority to the Church, and a reactionary European tradition that explained the rise of liberal modernity as a conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons against throne and altar. These streams converged into an ideology that animated regime after regime in the interwar years.

Franco’s Spain, Vichy France, Tiso’s Slovakia, Pavelić’s Croatia—everywhere the postliberal vision was actually implemented, it produced the same harvest: economic stagnation, the persecution of dissenters, and the moral compromise of the Church it claimed to serve. In several cases it shaded into collaboration with genocide. This is not the fever dream of liberalism’s defenders; it is the documented career of postliberalism wherever it touched real power. Contemporary postliberals, in far too many cases, have not merely echoed these older thinkers but praised the regimes themselves, drinking, as Patterson and Howes put it, from the same poisoned wells.

There is a grim irony here that Acton would have savored. A program advertised as the salvation of the faith has, in practice, reliably delivered emptier pews and fuller graves.

What rescues the book from mere demolition is that it has something to defend. The American Catholic experience never required the dismantling of the constitutional order to live faithfully within it. Archbishop John Hughes, James Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop John Ireland, Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day, and John Courtney Murray were not chaplains to a regime but builders of a civil society. They raised parishes, schools, hospitals, and charities that served millions, and they did so under a constitution that protected the free exercise of conscience rather than commandeering it. Their lives are the standing refutation of the postliberal premise: a faithful Church does not need a captive state.

This in not merely an American prejudice. The Second Vatican Council, in Dignitatis Humanae, already settled the matter the postliberals would reopen, recognizing religious liberty as a demand of human dignity rather than a concession to error. This project is not a bold recovery of tradition. It is a quarrel the Church has already had and resolved.

Acton’s maxim is usually deployed against secular ambition, but he meant it more broadly, and the broader meaning is the one postliberalism has forgotten. Power corrupts, and it does not become safe simply because the hand that wields it is consecrated. The confessional state does not sanctify politics; it secularizes the altar. The likeliest fruit of fusing throne and altar is not a renewed Christendom but a discredited Church. This lesson taught plainly across the twentieth century for those with ears to hear.

Patterson and Howes have written that lesson down with rigor and verve. It is, as I told James, a book whose timeliness is matched only by its unwelcomeness in certain quarters. A sure sign that a book is worth reading.

On the newest episode of Acton Line, I sat down with two colleagues who have spent the better part of a decade quibbling with that tidiness: John Pinheiro, the Acton Institute’s Director of Research, and Dylan Pahman, Research Fellow and founder of the St. Nicholas Cabasilas Institute. Their new book, The Christian Roots of American Liberty: A Reader (Acton Institute, 2026), refuses the binary entirely and does so not by mere argument but careful presentation of evidence.

A Sourcebook, Not a Polemic

What distinguishes the volume is its method. Pinheiro and Pahman are not interested in asserting that American liberty is Christian; they are interested in showing it, document by document. Ideas and texts ancient, medieval, and early modern, formed the principles the founders would later take for granted. The editors mostly step aside and let the witnesses speak.

It is a quieter approach and a more durable one. Polemics persuade in the moment; sources outlast the controversies that occasioned them.

The Principles and Their Prehistory

The book is organized around the load-bearing commitments of the American settlement: natural rights and the rule of law, religious liberty, private property, limited government, and representation and consent. None of these was conjured whole cloth in Philadelphia. Each arrived with a prehistory, older than 1776, older even than Locke, stretching back through the schoolmen and the Church Fathers.

There is no shortage of readers that gather the early-modern voices we already know. What Pahman and Pinheiro add is patristic and medieval depth. Irenaeus of Lyons on freedom and judgment sits a few pages from the familiar founders; the conviction that taxes ought not be levied without consent turns out to have a long Christian pedigree. The roots, it emerges, run deeper than our usual histories trouble to dig.

Render Unto Caesar

Lord Acton, as ever, saw the heart of it. He held that when Christ said render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s, those words—spoken days before His death—gave to the civil power “a sacredness it had never enjoyed, and bounds it had never acknowledged.” The limit on Caesar was a was written into nature and made the charge of the Church before it was a political doctrine. Liberty, in other words, has a longer genealogy than its modern champions are inclined to admit, and a more theological one than its modern critics find comfortable.

That genealogy is precisely what Pinheiro and Pahman have set out to recover. To name the Christian roots of American liberty is not to baptize the state, as the integralists would have it, nor to surrender the founding to secular self-congratulation. It is to understand what we have actually inherited—and therefore what is ours to conserve, or to squander.

A Book for the Semiquincentennial

The timing is not accidental. As the republic approaches its 250th anniversary, Americans of every persuasion will be asked what, exactly, they are celebrating. The Christian Roots of American Liberty is an argument, made in the words of others, that the answer reaches back much further than the fireworks suggest and that the foundation is older, and stranger, and more enduring than either party to our current quarrel tends to allow.

Which returns us to where we began. The question is not whether America was founded as a Christian nation. The better question, the one this book equips us to as, is how deep the roots of our liberty actually go, and whether we still know how to tend them.

Listen to the full conversation with John Pinheiro and Dylan Pahman on Acton Line here:

Modern charity, organized at scale and routed through institutions, often loses that intuition. The poor become the recipients of programs rather than the subjects of relationships. The giver, freed from the friction of encounter, can dispense generosity without ever beholding the person to whom it is given. Something is delivered. Something else is withheld.

This week on Acton Line, I sit down with Ismael Hernandez, founder and president of the Freedom & Virtue Institute and author of Not Tragically Colored: Freedom, Personhood, and the Renewal of Black America and Rethinking Charity: Restoring Dignity to Poverty Relief, to talk about what we forget when we forget the person at the heart of charity.

The Anthropological First Question

Hernandez’s argument begins where every serious account of charity must begin: with the human person. Before we ask how to help, he insists, we must ask whom we are helping. The poor are not an undifferentiated mass, nor are they a problem to be managed by appropriately credentialed administrators. They are persons bearing the imago Dei. Each had a name, a history, a vocation, and capacities yet to be discovered.

If poverty is not a disease to be cured by top-down planning but a condition experienced by persons whose dignity precedes their need, then the entire architecture of much contemporary charity, designed to deliver goods to passive recipients, is misconfigured. It addresses the symptom and ignores the soul. When we view those in need as victims or as mere objects of our good intentions, we strip them of agency in the very act of meaning to help them.

From Transaction to Encounter

The reorientation Hernandez proposes is not a matter of redesigning programs but of reimagining the moment of contact. The transactional question “How may I help you?” assumes a fixed asymmetry between helper and helped. It can be asked, and answered, without either party really seeing the other.

The question Hernandez prefers is different. “We are so glad you’re here. We need you.” It is a small reformulation that changes everything. It treats the person in need not as a recipient but as a participant. A person whose presence is wanted, whose contribution is sought, whose agency is presumed.

This is the spirit animating the Freedom & Virtue Institute’s Effective Compassion Training and Self-Reliance Clubs. It is patient relational work, unglamorous and uncountable by the metrics that please donors of a more managerial cast, but it is the work that actually restores the things poverty corrodes: confidence, capacity, connection.

Respect Before Pity

Hernandez’s own story gives the argument its edge. A former Marxist-Leninist from Puerto Rico, he came into Christian ministry in the inner cities of southwest Florida and discovered how often “compassion” hollowed itself out into condescension. Generosity unaccompanied by recognition is not virtue but its counterfeit. It flatters the giver and diminishes the receiver. It mistakes the relief of guilt for the love of neighbor.

“Stop feeling sorry for the poor,” Hernandez puts it bluntly. “What about respecting the poor a little bit?”

That inversion, respect before pity, reorders the moral universe of charitable work. It refuses the comfortable hierarchy of benefactor and beneficiary and demands the harder, more humanizing labor of treating the person across from you as someone whose dignity is not yours to bestow.

It is a conviction with deep roots in the Christian tradition, and one that resonates with Pope Leo XIV’s recent call in Dilexi Te to bring the poor “from the margins to the center” of our economic, social, and spiritual life. Almsgiving without recognition leaves the margins exactly where they are.

Watch the full conversation with Ismael Hernandez here:

On the latest episode of Acton Line, I sat down with Dave Hebert, Director of Economics & Economic Freedom and a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, and an affiliate scholar at the Acton Institute, to walk through both fronts of the war that has been the dominant economic story of the spring.

What is seen

The visible costs are easy enough to enumerate. Gas above $4 a gallon. Jet fuel sharply up. Summer travel pricier. Headline inflation rising to levels we hadn’t seen in nearly two years. Bastiat’s “what is seen” is, as ever, the most visible part of the story.

But why does a regional conflict thousands of miles away show up at a gas station in central Pennsylvania within days? Dave walks us through the mechanics: how a global commodity market prices in disruption almost instantly, how the Strait of Hormuz functions as the single most consequential chokepoint in the world economy, and why releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve does not move the needle nearly as much as the press releases suggest.

What is not seen

“What is not seen” matters just as much. Consumer spending pulled back. Supply chains rerouted at tremendous cost. Inflation expectations were unsettled. These consequences compound and shape decisions made by households, firms, and policymakers for years.

Among the costs not seen, and entirely self-inflicted, are those imposed by our own laws. Dave makes the case against one of them in particular: the Jones Act, the century-old protectionist statute requiring that goods shipped between American ports travel on American-built, American-crewed, American-flagged vessels. It is the reason that it is nearly impossible to move natural gas by ship from Texas to New England—even as New Englanders pay some of the highest energy prices in the country. The 90-day waivers periodically granted in moments of acute need paper over the policy without ever addressing it. A century on, the Jones Act remains a monument to how durable a bad idea can be when it is also profitable to a small and well-organized constituency.

The Fed’s walking contradiction

The Federal Reserve’s predicament is more a structural one. Dave describes the Fed as a “walking contradiction”: charged by Congress with both price stability and full employment, and now asked to deliver both in conditions where the two pull in opposite directions. Rising prices argue for tighter money. A softening labor market argues for the reverse. The Fed cannot have it both ways, and the more it tries, the more it confirms what classical economists have long suspected about the dual mandate itself.

This is not, in Dave’s telling, a failure of intelligence or character on the part of any particular chairman. It is a failure built into the institutional design. To ask one body to manage two variables with one instrument is to invite the kind of muddled, half-measured policy we have come to expect. Prudence, here, would begin with humility about what monetary policy can actually accomplish.

A small experiment in pedagogy

We close on a different note. Dave is in the middle of a fascinating experiment on his Substack, Economics Reality Check: turning four thousand of his old economics lecture slides into accessible articles, using Claude as a writing partner. The discussion that follows touches on the ethics of using AI as a tool rather than a shortcut and what we owe our readers and students when we adopt new instruments. It is also a small but instructive case study in what an economist’s habits of mind can offer to a question more often driven by moral panic.

Listen to the full episode here:

In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.

So Pope Leo XIV told the College of Cardinals in his first official address as pope. Many of us reading the words at the time wondered how, and how soon, the new pope would make good on them. The answer, it turns out, was: soon, and at length. His first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, has now arrived.

The choice of regnal name continues to serve as a hermeneutical key to the papacy of Leo XIV. Leo XIII looked out at the smokestacks of the late nineteenth century and gave the Church a moral analysis of the building blocks of economic analysis — land, labor, capital — to meet the first industrial revolution without surrendering to either social Darwinism or state socialism. Rerum Novarum did not solve the new things of that age, but it did equip the faithful to think with the Church about them. Our Augustinian mathematician-pope, facing not the smokestack but the server farm, now offers Magnifica Humanitas in much the same spirit.

This week on Acton Line, I sat down with my colleagues Dylan Pahman and Caleb Whitmer for a roundtable discussion on what the Holy Father is saying, and not saying, about Catholic social teaching and artificial intelligence.

A few of the threads we pulled on:

Catholicism’s developing social teaching. The encyclical lays great stress on the need for development in the Church’s social teaching with the Pope stating, “I would also like to stress how, within this tradition, the unchanging core of revealed truths regarding the human person and society is constantly intertwined with a renewed capacity for listening to historical situations and for responding to contemporary issues.” We get into historical presidents for such development and it’s necessity in the coming age of AI.

Babel vs. Jerusalem. Leo XIV reaches past the modern frame for a far older one. Are we using our new tools to build a Tower of Babel, an engineered top-down uniformity imposed by the technologically dominant, or a New Jerusalem of free cooperation, mutual aid, and shared responsibility for the common good? The biblical typology is the encyclical’s diagnostic key, but what about Pentacost?

The shift in addressee. Catholic social teaching since Rerum Novarum has, on the whole, addressed the State. Magnifica Humanitas turns much of its attention to transnational technology corporations whose decisions now shape labor markets, public discourse, and the texture of ordinary life more decisively than many governments. That shift opens fresh debates on subsidiarity, intellectual property, and the universal destination of goods.

Algorithms and just war. Among the encyclical’s most urgent passages is its warning on automated weapons. Can the venerable just-war tradition of proportionality, discrimination, legitimate authority, and last resort survive the migration of life-and-death decisions to autonomous systems? Leo XIV’s answer is unambiguous: a human person, not a program, must bear the moral weight of taking a human life.

Work, markets, and the metrics of flourishing. Magnifica Humanitas is no baptism of techno-utopianism, but neither is it a romantic rejection of the modern economy. There is a pointed jab at the “invisible hand”, and a sharper one of how GDP treated as the measure of a society’s health. Whether technological innovation, profit motives, and human dignity can be harmonized, and on what terms, is a question we kick around at some length.

Lord Acton once described the work of a faithful Catholic magazine as a fight on two fronts: against those who, for the sake of religion, fear science, and against those who, for the sake of science, despise religion. Magnifica Humanitas is, among many other things, an attempt to refuse both temptations at once. Whether it succeeds is for readers to weigh. That the attempt is worth our serious attention is not in doubt.

Listen to the full roundtable on Acton Line:

▶️ YouTube:

The choice of name was telling. It was Pope Leo XIII who, in 1891, addressed himself to the “new things” (rerum novarum) of the modern industrial economy, employing the Church’s perennial moral wisdom to engage the still-young categories of “land,” “labor,” and “capital.” With his choice of name and the words of his first address, Pope Leo XIV has placed artificial intelligence within a long arc of Catholic engagement with technological and economic change. A new encyclical is on the horizon.

It seemed a fitting moment, then, for the Acton Institute to take up these questions itself. I recently had the privilege of moderating a three-part video series, On The New Things, in which I sat down with three colleagues to consider what AI is doing, and might yet do, to our economic, historical, and anthropological self-understanding.

AI & Economics — with Dr. Stephen Barrows

The economist’s first instinct, when confronted with a new technology, is to ask what it does to prices, productivity, and the structure of work. Stephen Barrows and I take up exactly these questions. We discuss the short-term dislocations AI is likely to inflict on particular kinds of labor and the long-term potential for AI-driven productivity gains to underwrite robust global economic growth, lower the cost of living, and expand human possibility.

The honest answer is that both stories are likely to be true. The technological revolutions of the past have generally vindicated neither the Luddite nor the utopian, however well each is represented in our cultural imagination. They have, instead, demanded patience, prudence, and serious thought about what work is for in the first place.

Watch: On The New Things | AI & Economics with Dr. Stephen Barrows

AI & History — with Dr. John Pinheiro

If economics asks what is happening, history asks what has happened before. John Pinheiro joins me to situate our present moment within the longer story of modern technological change. We return to the original Industrial Revolution—its real human costs, its real human benefits, and the Church’s response in Rerum Novarum—to consider what it might mean to navigate AI without succumbing either to a reflexive Luddism or to a credulous utopianism.

The history is more interesting, and more useful, than either of those received postures. It is also more demanding. To take the past seriously is to recognize that we have been here before, in our own way, and that the resources of the tradition are not exhausted.

Watch: On The New Things | AI & History with Dr. John Pinheiro

AI & Humanity — with Michael Matheson Miller

Beneath every question of regulation, capability, and labor market dynamics lies a deeper one: what is the human person? Michael Matheson Miller and I take up the anthropological questions directly. Is artificial intelligence in fact intelligent? What is it that we are doing when we converse with a large language model, or trust an algorithm to mediate our relationships, our judgments, our attention? What becomes of human freedom, vocation, and the interior life when we are increasingly accompanied by systems designed to anticipate, predict, and shape us?

These are not entirely new questions. They were Philip K. Dick’s questions, and in their deepest form they were St. Augustine’s. But they are newly urgent.

Watch: On The New Things | AI & Humanity with Michael Matheson Miller

Whether your concerns about AI center on the labor market, the proliferation of deepfakes, or the slow erosion of authentic human encounter, this series offers a framework rooted in human dignity and the long tradition of Catholic social teaching to help orient us toward the questions that matter most.

As Pope Leo XIV has reminded us, we are not the first generation to face new things, and we will not be the last. The task is to bring to bear the resources of faith and reason on the moment in which we find ourselves—and to do so without fear.

Yet most Americans tell pollsters they are living through an affordability crisis. They are not wrong. The same quarter-century that has made televisions vanish into wallpaper has made hospital bills, college tuition, and the median home price into objects of dread. Economist Mark Perry’s now-famous “Chart of the Century” plots the divergence: prices of things produced in genuinely competitive markets fall, often dramatically; the prices of things tangled in heavy regulation and labor-intensive service delivery rise, often catastrophically. The market giveth, and the regulator taketh away.

On the latest Acton Line, I sat down with the economist Anne Bradley to discuss what to make of it all and, more pointedly, to ask whether the word “affordability,” which now dominates our political conversation, is the right word for the work ahead.

Bradley is unsentimental about the chart. The things that have grown cheaper—produced by industries open to competition, free trade, and technological substitution—are also, not coincidentally, the things in which America has been most willing to let markets work. The things that have grown more expensive like healthcare, housing, and higher education are the things in which we have been least willing. We license the providers, restrict the supply, subsidize the demand, and then act surprised when the bill arrives.

Bradley presses past the standard economist’s lament toward a question I had not heard asked quite this way: What, exactly, are we after when we say we want things to be “affordable”?

Affordability, on closer examination, is a thin and rather sad word. To make a thing affordable is to make it just barely within reach. It is a politics of zero-sum tweaks: a subsidy here, a price control there, and a tax credit to soften the edge letting people just get by. The affordability frame accepts the basic cost structure of the world as given and tries to manage its sharpest blows. It is a politics of triage.

Abundance is something else entirely.

The older and richer word in the American tradition is not affordability but abundance, and that the difference between them is not merely rhetorical. Abundance does not ask how a family might just barely scrape together rent. It asks how a society might so multiply its productive capacities that rent becomes a smaller and smaller fraction of what a working life can buy. Affordability is content with a household that survives. Abundance imagines a household that flourishes.

It is here that the conversation took its most striking turn. Bradley does not defend abundance on narrowly material grounds. She insists, rather, that abundance has a moral dimension. The point of cheaper food, cheaper clothing, cheaper communication, cheaper medicine, is not the cheapness as such but what cheapness frees us to do.

When the basic conditions of life are secured efficiently, when feeding and clothing and sheltering a family no longer consume every waking hour and every available dollar, the surplus that opens up is not merely a surplus of consumption. It is a surplus of time, of attention, of moral agency. It is the surplus from which we invest in our marriages, raise our children, befriend our neighbors, attend our churches, and give to those who have less than we do. The fruits of abundance are not the new television and the new car. The fruits of abundance are the hours and the dollars that need not be spent on mere survival.

There is a strong echo here of Fr. James V. Schall’s reflections in On Christians and Prosperity. “The great numbers of the poor,” Schall writes, “are best helped to be what they initially strive to be, namely, not poor, when everyone prospers as a result of his own initiative and work.” The development that lifts the poor is not primarily the development of charity, indispensable as charity is. It is “the development of the means of production and distribution that made it possible for the poor to enter into more productive relationship with those who had already figured out how not to be poor.”

Affordability, in its modern political register, often forgets this distinction. It treats the household budget as a fixed pie to be redivided. Abundance remembers that the pie can grow, and that the growing of it is a profoundly humane vocation.

I came away from the conversation with Bradley more convinced than I had been that words matter, and that the recent shift in our political vocabulary from the open-horizon language of abundance to the budgetary language of affordability is a change for the worse. The first is a vision; the second is an accounting exercise. The first asks what human flourishing might look like in a society that has unshackled its capacity to produce. The second asks how to make the next month’s bills.

There is a place for the accounting exercise. Families have to eat this month, not in some glorious abundant future, but a political imagination that begins and ends with affordability has given up on the aspiration that produced the cheap televisions in the first place. It has accepted the cost curve of the most regulated sectors of American life as a permanent feature of the landscape.

Bradley invites us to refuse that resignation. The “Chart of the Century” is not a chart of fate. It is a chart of choices, sector by sector, decade by decade. Where we chose competition and openness, prices fell and the world grew larger. Where we chose protection and complexity, prices rose and the world grew smaller. The conversation worth having, she suggests, is not how to subsidize our way through the second half of that chart, but how to apply to it the lessons we already learned from the first.

It is a conversation about more than economics. It is, finally, a conversation about what we believe a free people are for.

Watch the full conversation with Anne Bradley on YouTube:

That moment has passed. Not collapsed, exactly, and not been refuted into oblivion. It has quietly receded the way intellectual fashions do once their internal contradictions begin to outweigh their rhetorical force. On the latest Acton Line, I sit down with Thomas D. Howes, co-author with James M. Patterson of the forthcoming Acton Institute book Why Postliberalism Failed, to talk through how the movement rose, what it actually claimed, and why its diagnosis, however penetrating in places, led so consistently into a an anachronistic cul-de-sac.

The postliberals were right that something is wrong. That much is worth conceding at the outset. Atomization is real. The hollowing out of mediating institutions is real. A managerial liberalism increasingly contemptuous of the human goods it was once thought to safeguard is real. These are not invented grievances. But diagnosing a sickness is not the same as prescribing a cure, and here the movement faltered.

Howes traces the genealogy with care. The intellectual furniture of contemporary integralism was assembled less in the Middle Ages than in the nineteenth century, by Catholic reactionaries pushing back against the French Revolution and its aftermath. They looked to a medieval order they imagined more than they remembered: a Christendom in which the temporal and spiritual swords were neatly coordinated, the prince a faithful son of the Church, and dissent a manageable exception rather than a constitutive feature of public life. That this picture mostly never obtained. Medieval politics was a chaos of competing jurisdictions. Kings excommunicated as often as popes coronated. That messiness was paradoxically its greatest legacy! Nostalgia rarely consults the archives.

Every modern attempt to embody this vision ended badly. Confessional states have a history, and the history is not edifying. They tend to produce, roughly in this order: sectarian persecution, civil war, secularization, and finally a population so wary of religion in public life that it cannot be coaxed back without enormous patience and labor. Acton, who saw the dynamic with characteristic clarity, observed that “whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the State, be it the advantage of a class, the safety or the power of the country, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the support of any speculative idea, the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute.” Make the state’s supreme end the Catholic faith, and you do not thereby protect the faith. You enlist it in the project of absolutism, and absolutism eventually devours its instruments.

There is also, as Howes emphasizes, an economic dimension to the postliberal project that often goes underexamined by its sympathizers on the right. The movement’s critique of markets, of “neoliberalism,” of the autonomy of civil society from state direction, very often converges with progressive critiques of the same. The instrument of choice is the administrative state. The faith that bureaucrats wielding the right metaphysics will produce better outcomes than free associations of free persons is a strange one to find among self-styled traditionalists, but find it one does. It is, in the end, the old technocratic temptation in cassock and surplice.

The alternative is not a glib endorsement of liberalism in its present American form. Acton’s liberty was never mere license, and the classical liberal tradition has resources for self-criticism that its postliberal critics seldom acknowledge. Wilhelm Röpke and F. A. Hayek both distinguished a true liberalism—organic, social, deferential to traditions and institutions—from a false one that is rationalistic, atomistic, and contemptuous of inherited goods. John Paul II in Centesimus Annus distinguished an economy ordered to the human person from one that reduces persons to economic functions. The serious work is not to throw the liberal tradition over but to recover its deepest insights, rooted in the dignity of the human person, the principle of subsidiarity, and the recognition that the good must be freely chosen to be the good at all.

Constitutional democracy and religious liberty are not, as some postliberals would have it, the Trojan horses by which secular modernity smuggled in its dissolutions. They are, rightly understood, the very conditions for the kind of public life in which faith can speak honestly, contend openly, and persuade without coercion. That is a patrimony worth defending and one that postliberalism, in its haste to bury liberalism, never paused long enough to inherit.

Listen to the full conversation with Thomas Howes on Acton Line:

Preorder Why Postliberalism Failed by James Patterson and Thomas Howes from the Acton Institute here.

Nearly a century later, a different kind of flood washed through Minneapolis. No levees broke. No homes were lost to the current. The water, in this case, was money. A torrent of federal dollars released in the name of feeding hungry children during the COVID-19 pandemic. By the time the waters receded, something on the order of a quarter of a billion dollars had been diverted into the pockets of a sprawling conspiracy of restaurateurs, nonprofit operators, and middlemen who invented the hungry children, invented the meals, and very nearly invented their way into permanent immunity from scrutiny.

On the latest episode of Acton Line, my colleague Caleb Whitmer sits down to walk through what he has been calling, with a wry precision the subject deserves, the story of “fraud and flood.”

The temptation, when reading about a fraud of this magnitude, is to reach for the language of villainy. Here are the bad actors; here is the prosecutor; here, in the satisfying final act, is the verdict. Whitmer resists that temptation, and so does the conversation. The story he tells is less courtroom drama than civic anatomy. How, he keeps asking, did a federal program designed in compassion become a vehicle for plunder? What does it say about the architecture of American welfare administration that the fraud was so easy, so brazen, and so invisible to the people charged with watching it?

The answer is uncomfortable, and it has nothing to do with the unique wickedness of any individual. Floods of money, like floods of water, find every crack. Loosen the oversight in the name of urgency and during the pandemic, urgency was the universal solvent.

There is a long Catholic tradition, running through St. Thomas and reaching back to Aristotle, that distinguishes between pity and mercy. Pity is the sentiment that recoils at suffering; mercy is the virtue that orders one’s response to it. Pity, undisciplined, can do tremendous harm. It writes the check without asking who is cashing it. Mercy, by contrast, has eyes. It asks the unfashionable questions: Who is this for? Is the help reaching them? Are we, in our hurry to do good, building the next scandal?

Whitmer’s analysis, and his conversation on Acton Line, is in this tradition. He is not interested in scoring points against the welfare state, nor in defending it from its critics. He is interested in the harder thing, in what a serious Christian engagement with public administration looks like when the cameras are off and the spreadsheets are open. His analysis is the kind of work the Acton Institute exists to support: patient, granular, morally serious, and refusing the lazy shortcuts of either populist outrage or technocratic complacency.

The 1927 flood, Barry argued, marked a turning point in American political life. It exposed the limits of local response, accelerated the growth of federal authority, and set in motion a chain of consequences that ran through the New Deal and beyond. What the Minneapolis fraud affair will turn out to mark is harder to say. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps a renewed seriousness about the design of public programs. Perhaps, more darkly, a further erosion of the trust on which any welfare state, modest or expansive, finally depends.

Listen to the full conversation on Acton Line: “Caleb Whitmer: Fraud and Flood — Cataclysmic Money in Minneapolis.” The video is here.

Where it has taken root (with fascinating exceptions) the soil has been Christian.

This is an unfashionable claim in 2026, and what makes it unfashionable is instructive. Two camps with little else in common share a strong interest in severing American liberty from its Christian inheritance. Secular progressives wish to do so in order to liberate the American project from what they regard as parochial constraint. postliberal Catholics and Christian nationalists wish to do so in order to expose the American project as a Lockean Trojan horse smuggling Enlightenment subjectivism into Christendom. The conclusions diverge wildly. The premise is the same: that the American founding can be cleanly cut from the long Christian reflection on conscience, law, and the limits of political authority that preceded it.

It cannot. And on the latest episode of Acton Line, my colleagues Dylan Pahman and John C. Pinheiro patiently explain why.

Their project, documenting the Christian roots of American liberty, is not an exercise in apologetics. It is an exercise in historical recovery. The two distinguish themselves admirably from the loudest voices in this debate by refusing the temptation either to claim too much or to concede too much. They do not argue that America was a baptized polity, nor do they argue that it was a secular accident with religious frosting applied after the fact. They argue, with documents in hand, that the moral and intellectual habits that made ordered liberty thinkable in 1776 were habits cultivated over centuries of Christian engagement with classical sources, canon law, scholastic philosophy, Reformation doctrines of conscience, and the long argument over what the things that are Caesar’s and the things that are God’s.

Acton put the matter unforgettably. “When Christ said: ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s,’ those words, spoken on his last visit to the Temple, three days before his death, gave to the civil power, under the protection of conscience, a sacredness it had never enjoyed, and bounds it had never acknowledged.” That is not a sectarian observation. It is a historical one. The bounding of political authority by something higher than itself is the precondition of any liberty worth the name, and the bounding of political authority by something higher than itself was, in the West, the work of the Church.

Pahman, an Orthodox theologian, and Pinheiro, a Catholic historian, bring complementary gifts to this work. Pinheiro’s earlier writing on Pope Leo XIII showed how the careful distinction between true and false liberalism allowed the Church to defend human freedom without surrendering to rationalism, atomism, or contempt for tradition. The same disposition animates this conversation. There is a liberalism that is, in Wilhelm Röpke’s phrase, “specifically Catholic” in its social philosophy: organic, deferential to mediating institutions, and alert to the dignity of persons. There is also a liberalism that is none of those things. To collapse the distinction is to lose both the criticism worth making and the inheritance worth defending.

Pahman, for his part, has done sustained work on what Christian social thought actually requires of a free economy and a free polity. His instincts run away from abstraction and toward concrete description. The Christian roots of American liberty are not a slogan for him but a continuing tradition recorded in texts, councils, magistrates, dissenters, charters, and arguments that can be named and footnoted. The recovery he and Pinheiro are undertaking is therefore not vulnerable to the standard objection that this is all sentimental civic religion. It is documentary work.

This kind of project matters now, beyond the partisans of either side of our current debates.

A republic that does not know what produced it cannot defend what it has. The American settlement is, as Acton suspected of all settlements, imperfect. But it is also the most durable working approximation of ordered liberty that has yet been achieved at scale, and it was not produced by a generation of pure rationalists or a generation of pure theocrats. It was produced by men and women who had inherited a long argument and were prepared to continue it. That argument predates John Locke by a millennium. It includes Augustine on the two cities, Aquinas on natural law, the late Scholastics at Salamanca on the just price and the rights of conscience, the English common law tradition with its theological underwriting, and the Reformation insistence that the conscience cannot finally be coerced. Cut any of these strands and the rope frays.

This is also why the project is unlikely to satisfy either of the camps I mentioned at the outset. The secular progressive will find too much Christianity in it. The integralist will find too much liberty in it. So much the better. The honest reader, of whatever conviction, will find what Pahman and Pinheiro are after: a serious attempt to describe the actual genealogy of American liberty rather than a tendentious attempt to claim it or denounce it.

There is a final reason to listen to this episode of Acton Line. The work of recovery is itself a kind of apprenticeship in the virtues that produced what is being recovered. To sit with sources, to make distinctions, to refuse easy synthesis, to hold authority and free inquiry together rather than playing one against the other—these are habits of mind, and they were cultivated, before they were ours, in cloisters and cathedral schools and dissenting congregations. We do not have to share the faith of those who cultivated them to recognize the debt, but we should not pretend the debt does not exist.

Acton’s unwritten history of liberty would, I suspect, have made just this point. Pahman and Pinheiro are doing some of the work he left undone.

Listen to the full conversation on Acton Line:

🎥 YouTube 🎧 Acton.org show notes and audio

Most of our talk about civilization is about how it will END, and how soon, and why, and who’s to blame. These days, everything the public frets about gets elevated to where it has to be seen as an “existential threat” to civilization.

I think I know where that started, because I was seven in 1945 when the Japanese city of Hiroshima was destroyed by a single bomb.

Hiroshima and then the Cold War introduced a new idea to humanity—that we had the power to destroy the world.

My youth was poisoned at times by that dread.

…

A massive nuclear war now would be horrible. World War Two taught us how horrible it can be. It taught us that civilization would be traumatized… and then it would rise from the ashes.

Nuclear war now would not make civilization cease to exist.

Neither will mass extinction or climate change or artificial intelligence, serious as they are. In the coming decades, there will certainly be various kinds of calamities, and we will keep on surviving them and learning from them.

Our planet has been through a lot, yet Earth abides.

Humanity has been through a lot, yet we abide.

…

Civilization as a human practice has carried on steadily, progressively, in a variety of forms, ever since the first cities.

Civilizations come and go. Civilization continues.

Stewart Brand, “Unending World” (2024).

On the latest episode of Acton Line, Jeffrey Polet joins the program to consider the philosophy of Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It is a conversation worth the attention of anyone who has ever wondered whether the word “leadership,” so heavily freighted by the self-help industry, might still be made to carry something more substantial.

McChrystal’s recent writing on character is not the usual leadership-aisle fare at the airport bookstore. It is a genuine meditation on the formation of the soul that draws from classical sources older and deeper than any service manual. That alone sets it apart from most of what passes for reflection on the subject, which tends to reduce the question of how to lead to a handful of techniques, a checklist of traits, or a personal brand to be curated.

Polet, a careful reader of the Western tradition, situates McChrystal within a lineage that stretches back through Aristotle and Aquinas. Character, on this account, is not a private possession or a matter of self-styling but a habit of the heart, forged slowly in the company of others. It is the sort of thing one acquires by imitation, repetition, and the patient correction of those who have walked the road before. It cannot be downloaded, streamed, or otherwise fast-tracked.

One of the most striking themes of the conversation is the necessity but insufficiency of rules. Institutions that try to replace judgment with procedure eventually hollow themselves out. Rules are indispensable and no army, no firm, no parish can operate without them, but they cannot do the work that only prudence can do. Ultimately virtue cannot be outsourced to a compliance department.

Polet points to where McChrystal grapples with this tension, and he explores the uneven results of the general’s thinking through these issues. McChrystal is not a philosopher, and Polet is too honest a reader to pretend otherwise. Yet the attempt is admirable, and it highlights the unique perspective a soldier can bring to these questions. Those who have commanded in extremis know something about the limits of procedure that those of us who have only written about such matters can know only secondhand. The classroom and the command tent are different schools, and the tradition is richer for admitting both.

It is no small thing for a man of McChrystal’s career to sit with the older questions. That he does so, even unevenly, is itself a witness worth considering.

A thoughtful conversation, well worth an hour. Listen to the full episode of Acton Line with Jeff Polet wherever you get your podcasts, or watch on YouTube:

Prices feel out of reach, mortgage rates have fluctuated wildly, and supply in major metro areas is severely constrained. When faced with a crisis of this magnitude, people look for a villain. Lately, that villain has been “institutional investors”, the large, faceless Wall Street firms allegedly buying up all the single-family homes and pricing ordinary Americans out of the market.

But is that narrative actually true?

On the latest episode of the Acton Line podcast, I sat down with Jason Sorens, Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) and principal investigator on the New Hampshire Zoning Atlas, to find out.

We looked at the hard economic data driving the housing market, evaluated the bipartisan policies currently on the table, and discussed what it will actually take to build a future of housing abundance.

Here are a few key takeaways from our conversation:

The Institutional Investor Myth

It’s easy to point the finger at big corporations, but the data tells a different story. Jason points out that large institutional investors (those owning more than 100 homes) actually own less than 1% of the single-family housing stock nationally.

Furthermore, they aren’t just sitting on empty houses; they are heavily involved in the “build-to-rent” market. By adding to the supply of single-family rentals, they are socio-economically integrating neighborhoods and driving down the cost of rent. While they might marginally increase the purchase price of homes, their overall impact on the market provides vital liquidity and housing access for families who might not qualify for a traditional mortgage.

Navigating the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act

We also dove into the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. Like most sweeping legislation, it’s a mixed bag.

On the plus side, the bill attempts to leverage federal transportation dollars, moving them away from heavily-regulated, NIMBY-heavy cities and toward municipalities that actually permit and build new housing. It also includes sensible deregulations for manufactured housing.

However, the bill also attempts to ban large institutional investors from owning single-family homes for more than seven years. As Jason notes, this would effectively kill the build-to-rent market, pulling crucial supply out of the ecosystem and making the overarching problem even worse.

The Real Culprit: Local Zoning

If Wall Street isn’t to blame, who is?

THE CALL IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE.

The primary barriers to affordable housing are local zoning regulations, permitting delays, and restrictive building codes that make it illegal or prohibitively expensive to build dense, affordable housing where people actually want to live. Jason’s work on the National Zoning Atlas is crucial here, providing everyday citizens with the data they need to show up at local township meetings and advocate for pro-growth, pro-abundance reforms.

Practical Advice for Navigating the Market

We closed our conversation with something every citizen has to grapple with: how to be a savvy consumer when you just need a place to live. Jason offered incredibly practical advice, from utilizing cost-of-living data to geographic flexibility, to renting in a new market for a few years before rushing into a purchase.

Housing will always cost money, but by aligning our policies with economic realities rather than political scapegoating, we can get back to a market that serves ordinary families.

Watch the full episode here: Jason Sorens Builds a Case for Reforming American Housing Policy