Public Discourse

In his first encyclical, Pope Leo XIV writes: “When subsidiarity is not linked to solidarity, it ends up becoming merely the protection of particular interests; when solidarity is not supported by subsidiarity, it degenerates into a form of welfare that does not foster responsibility.” The principle of subsidiarity insists that higher authorities exist to assist, not absorb, the lower associations of family, parish, township, and state.

In 1888, George Eastman marketed the Kodak camera with the memorable advertising promise: “You press the button, we do the rest.” Photography, a complicated task requiring considerable technical knowledge, suddenly became accessible to ordinary consumers. Eastman created a company that became an early practitioner of welfare capitalism. Eastman issued weekly paychecks and distributed bonuses and profit-sharing payments.

This year marks the 250th anniversary not only of the United States but also of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. The book was first published on March 9, 1776, three months before the Declaration of Independence. Since then, Smith has often been caricatured as a proponent of cold, unbridled self-interest and the “invisible hand.” But his thought is much broader and more nuanced than simplistic portraits sometimes make it seem.

How did you spend this Labor Day weekend? If you joined friends and family at an end-of-summer barbecue and enjoyed a beer or two, you actually may not be far off from the origins of the holiday. The first Labor Day celebration took place in New York City on September 5, 1882. A rather unfavorable description of the event appeared later that week in the New-York Tribune. The reporter noted wryly that, for participants in a labor demonstration, the laborers in question didn’t seem very downtrodden.

The technical economic issues and questions surrounding artificial intelligence are myriad. Perhaps the most fundamental set of issues, however, relates to the implications of AI for our work. If AI lives up to the most optimistic forecasts and does at least some of what the most enthusiastic analysts hope it will do, what impact will that have on the human condition here on earth as relates to work? Start your day with Public Discourse Sign up and get our daily essays sent straight to your inbox.

Pope John Paul II once said: “the continuing success of American democracy depends on the degree to which each new generation … makes its own the moral truths on which the Founding Fathers staked the future of [the] Republic.” One of those truths is that, through virtue and law, national unity can coexist with local diversity: public order and private freedom are not enemies. “E pluribus unum,” as the currency says: out of many, one people can come to be.

The constitutional debate over social media bans seems to be moving away from regulating speech and content toward scrutinizing product designs and their resulting harms. Once bans are viewed through that lens, federal and state legislatures in the United States take on a much broader constitutional authority to protect children in their “traditional social environment” online than many First Amendment debates would suggest.

Studies suggest that almost half of American young adults ages 18–29 have used a dating app. When millennials are included in this cohort, the slightly smaller percentage still encompasses more than a third of the population. In other words, well over half of currently unmarried people know how dating apps work, which ones to pick when looking for lasting love (versus hookups), and above all, how rarely their use has made them happier.

When the presidents of the world’s episcopal conferences gather for a week in Rome in October, at Pope Leo’s invitation, it will mark the tenth anniversary of the publication of Amoris Laetitia, his predecessor’s apostolic exhortation on marriage and the family.

Common sense may be common to us all, but it doesn’t always win the day. Good for the Supreme Court for making sure it does in the recent decision of West Virginia v. B. P. J. West Virginia enacted a law in 2021 that school sports teams for the female sex would not admit the male sex—crucially, with sex being determined by biology. B. P. J. was a boy who identified as a girl and started socially transitioning while in third grade, adopting a new name.