In recent years, prominent scholars and politicians have advocated reforming America’s economic model to embrace "common-good capitalism." Catholic social teaching is a major influence on this movement. According to Dr. Salter, we can better understand common-good capitalism by exploring the political economy of distributism, a response formulated by prominent Catholic thinkers in the early 20th century to Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum. Professor Salter argues that the distributist political-economic vision contains profound insights about the nature of liberty and the social foundations of human dignity. Is common-good capitalism compatible with the American commitments to private property rights and ordered liberty? What resources from Catholic social teaching can help orient free enterprise towards the common good? Dale Alquist, the well-known proponent of distributism who has proposed renaming it “localism”--a synonym, he says, for the principle of “subsidiarity”--will provide comments on Dr. Salter’s lecture.
Georgie G. Snyder Associate Professor of Economics
Alexander William Salter is the Georgie G. Snyder Associate Professor of Economics in the Rawls College of Business and the Comparative Economics Research Fellow with the Free Market Institute, both at Texas Tech University. He is a co-author of Money and the Rule of Law: Generality and Predictability in Monetary Institutions, published by Cambridge University Press. In addition to his numerous scholarly articles, he has published nearly 300 opinion pieces in leading national outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Fox News Opinion, and The Hill.
Salter earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics at George Mason University and his B.A. in Economics at Occidental College. He was an AIER Summer Fellowship Program participant in 2011.
President
Dr. Dale Ahlquist is President of the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, creator and host of the EWTN series “G.K. Chesterton: The Apostle of Common Sense,” and Editor and Publisher of Gilbertmagazine. The author of six books, in addition to hundreds of published articles and speeches, and editor of eleven books on Chesterton, he has been called “probably the greatest living authority on the life and work of G.K. Chesterton.”
He is also the co-founder of Chesterton Academy, a top-rated Catholic classical high school in Minnesota, and the head of the Chesterton Schools Network, which now includes over sixty schools in five countries.
