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In defense of intellectual property
While sharing intellectual objects may not involve loss of possession or prevent your personal use, the loss of income incident to such sharing is a true and significant loss and not to be dismissed.Is consumerism harmful?
Victims of consumerism are caught up in the pursuit of false or superficial gratifications at the expense of experiencing their personhood in an authentic way.Does Fair Trade Help the Poor?
Fair trade coffee is touted as a way to help the poor provide the necessities of life for their families. It is billed as a win-win for anybody with heart -- for only a slight premium on our coffee we get to help poor farmers while sitting in the comfort of a café. Many Christian organizations connect fair trade to Christian values including Catholic Relief Services, Presbyterian Church USA, and Lutheran World Relief. While promoting concern for the poor is essential, does Fair Trade coffee really help poor farmers and help in the fight against poverty?Free trade: Latin America’s last hope?
As tempting as populist policies may be, free trade does effectively integrate Latin Americans into the global economy. This makes it harder for those forces in Latin America desperate to preserve the deadening mercantilist status-quo to resist economic reform’s liberating effects.Bill Cosby is right, again
Bill Cosby and Dr. Alvin Poussaint of Harvard have a simple message in their new book: Moral and economic flourishing in the black community will be achieved only by individual blacks bestowing lives of virtue on the next generation, one child at a time.Who’s Afraid of Free Trade?
The late economist Friedrich Hayek was suspicious of conservatives because he worried that when push came to shove they would tend toward state intervention in the economy to ensure security. While Hayek’s analysis misses the mark when it comes to committed conservatives such as Ronald Reagan, a recent survey of the views of likely Republican voters reveals that Hayek might have been more right than we’d like to believe.Islam’s quiet revolution
As the nineteenth-century French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville observed long ago, economic freedom has a way of loosening those bonds that unjustly diminish other legitimate expressions of human liberty – including, it seems, in Muslim cultures.Abandon SCHIP: Big government returns
SCHIP programs shift money from the poor to the middle class.Central banking’s hazardous ways
Is the practice of central banking itself an exercise in moral hazard?Islam’s money problem
The Qur’an’s proscription of usury (riba) has caused considerable angst for Muslims for centuries.Democracy in Iraq
Democracy and liberty are simply not identical concepts, and we should take great care not to conflate them.Credit crunch, character crisis
With so many people’s economic well-being now partly determined by decisions of those working in financial industries, sound moral character in their employees and directors should be a premium asset sought by any bank or financial company. No amount of regulation — heavy or light — can substitute for the type of character formation that is supposed to occur in families, schools, churches, and synagogues.