Category: Economics

some thoughts on “Anti-racism’s mission drift”

A few weeks ago, Jonathan Tran published a piece in The Christian Century called “Anti-racism’s mission drift.” It’s the best summary of where antiracism has gone off course in the last several years. It’s unfortunately paywalled, but here are the...

/ May 31, 2023

conservative Christian single payer health care: critiques & responses

First Things was gracious enough to publish my brief argument for single-payer health care from a conservative, Christian perspective. There was a lot that had to be cut due to space and a lot that I didn’t write simply because...

/ May 1, 2023
plastic waste litters an African beach

four theses on immigration

The following are some core points about immigration that I hope can cut through the rhetoric that both sides of the issue tend to elide. The solutions I have on offer are not easy, nor do I expect they can...

/ September 30, 2022

The Right Thing Has a Real Cost: Abortion Politics and Social Welfare

This essay was originally published in 2015 at Canon and Culture, a project of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission under the title “The Right Thing Has a Real Cost”. I was unable to find it on Wayback Machine. I...

/ May 16, 2022

the liberal order and its haters

I’ve had several conversations in the past year in person and online in which I referenced “the liberal order” or “liberalism” as me and some of my buddies understand it, only to find that I have engendered confusion with this...

/ April 6, 2022

“You have got to feed the biology of the soil.”

I have long been interested in the work of the Land Institute and their perennial crops, so I appreciated this story about how people are trying to use them: “Mainstream agriculture, they just don’t get it,” says Jerry Doan, standing...

/ January 14, 2019

whither conservatism?

While there’s a lot more that could be said and a lot of things that could be said differently (as I hope to in a forthcoming essay for Mere-O), I appreciated this assessment from Timothy Shenk at Dissent of where things are...

/ January 10, 2019

$2.1 trillion in dirty money annually

I felt like this interview itself was a little short and didn’t quite get to the point, but I am very interested in the degree to which the international finance industry might be reformed to help make corruption and crime...

/ January 2, 2019

employee stock ownership plans

I really appreciated Rachel Cohen’s discussion of what an employee stock ownership plan is and why there’s enthusiasm for them: Unlike conservatives, who have defended employee ownership on the grounds that it’s most certainly not socialism — indeed, it turns laborers into capitalists —...

/ December 31, 2018

makes you wanna holler

This report from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (an organization doing more than any other, I think, to highlight where and how people can be working for the localism we like to talk about) highlights how dollar stores deliver low-quality goods...

/ December 13, 2018