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Is Pete Buttigieg right that opposing a $15 minimum wage ‘taunts’ God?
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By Rev. Ben Johnson • August 7, 2019
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Are those who oppose raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour transgressing the Scripture and mocking the Lord God Almighty? One might get that impression from watching last week’s Democratic presidential debate, when one of the participants explicitly made that argument. The allegation came when South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg offered his exegesis of Proverbs 14:31. “[T]he minimum wage is just too low,” Buttigieg said. “And so-called conservative Christian senators right now in the Senate are blocking a bill to raise the minimum wage, when Scripture says that ‘whoever oppresses the poor taunts their Maker.’” While it is encouraging that our national leaders are encouraging people to think about the intersection between faith and economics, this proposal is not where they converge.
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Acton Line Podcast: Discrimination against faith-based adoption agencies; Lessons from the fall of ancient Rome
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August 7, 2019
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A crisis in the adoption and foster system is currently plaguing the nation. With over 400,000 children in need of homes, a shortage of placements is driving some states to desperate measures, even housing children in hotels and office buildings. States should be working to support and safeguard the work of adoption and foster care providers, however discrimination motivated by anti-religious bias is posing an obstacle to some state contracted and private agencies. Kate Anderson, senior legal counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, joins the podcast to explain how faith-based adoption agencies are being increasingly threatened due to their religious beliefs and why faith-based agencies are crucial in the adoption and foster system. On the second segment, President emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Education, Larry Reed, speaks with Acton's Samuel Gregg about how many trends of our day echo those of ancient Rome, making the lessons of its fall all the more relevant, even pressing, for us now.
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Trending on the Powerblog
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On Sunday, the nation’s heart broke again as 21-year-old Patrick Crusius opened fire inside an El Paso Walmart, killing 22 people. Minutes before the shooting, Crusius took to the website 8chan to post a manifesto that cobbles together racial and economic collectivism with environmental extremism in a way distinctive of the Alt-Right.
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Milton Friedman, the brilliant "neoliberal" thinker, warned in a 1977 speech that “The two greatest enemies of free enterprise in the United States, in my opinion, have been, on the one hand, my fellow intellectuals and, on the other hand, the business corporations of this country."
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In an age of deep partisanship and political division, there’s one thing about which America’s political class appears to agree—the public debt being incurred by the U.S. Government. For all the talk among fiscal conservatives on both sides of the aisle about the need to address America’s ballooning public debt, neither the left nor the right seem to be willing to do anything about it.
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Corporations are no more inherently noble than villainous. Indeed, we spend a lot of space at Acton pointing to the problem of cronyism. However there wasn’t any nuance on display at last week's Democratic presidential debate. Corporations were portrayed as universally bad. This cartoonish contrast, based on zero empirical evidence, doesn’t belong in the public square.
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On Monday, the Treasury Department took the unusual step of designating China a currency manipulator. Secretary Mnuchin, under the auspices of President Trump, made the change, saying, “In recent days, China has taken concrete steps to devalue its currency, while maintaining substantial foreign exchange reserves despite active use of such tools in the past.”
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