News from the Network, Vol. 2, No. 49

Based on the astoundingly good news that employers in November cut fewer jobs than expected, the stock market is soaring. Based on the depressing news that the future is expected to be based on high unemployment and slow growth, the stock market is experiencing a serious decline. Of course, whether the stock market is currently up or down at this minute depends on which drug the brokers on Wall Street are popping, sniffing, or snorting, or what rat hole the government has found to throw more money into. That upbeat intro being given, here are this week's news items.

• A recent newsletter from the International Quranic Center in Northern Virginia, headed by Dr. Ahmed Mansour, pointed out something that probably does not occur to most Christians, especially Catholics. The city of Mecca, the heart of Islam, is completely under the control of the government of Saudi Arabia. As a basic principle, of course, the Just Third Way believes that there should never be a theocratic State, that is, a political entity under the control of a religious power — which says nothing about the State not being subject to the natural moral law common to all religions. On the other hand, when there are sites that, for whatever reason, are centers of an international (or national, for that matter) religion, it is equally essential that the civil power not be in the position to control religion for political ends. A reasonable compromise would seem to be something along the lines of the Vatican City State, a few acres of land politically independent of any other civil power that clearly has no effective political or military power, however immense its moral authority. It violates a basic principle, but not in a material fashion, and thus can be allowed as an expedient. Christians and Jews could add their voices to moderate Muslims (politically moderate; we assume as a given that Muslims, in common with Christians and Jews, are fully committed to their faith) in demanding for Mecca a status similar to that of the Vatican City, and complete independence from Saudi Arabia if, after discussion, that would be a viable solution.

• On Tuesday of this week CESJ had a telephone conference to discuss identifying specific strategic initiatives to advance the "four prong" strategy to keep the Just Third Way moving forward. While we didn't get too deeply into identifying specific strategic initiatives, we did focus in on some tactical moves, particularly the "door opening" effort, directed at paving the way for Norman Kurland to meet with prime movers, especially political figures on "the Hill" in Washington, DC, i.e., Senators and Congresscritters. We think that once the Just Third Way is given a fair hearing, no politician will be able to resist the advantages to constituents that would come from sponsoring implementation of initiatives such as Capital Homesteading. Go through your connections and network and see what potential prime movers — or paths to prime movers — you can cultivate.

• CESJ received an invitation this week to attend a conference about restoring Christian civilization. There were several problems with the invitation, not the least of which is it arrived only a week prior to the conference, leaving no time to plan or even reorganize schedules. That, however, assumes that people from CESJ or the Just Third Way movement as a whole would want to attend. The general consensus after seeing who the presenters and organizers are and looking into some specifics of their background, is an unqualified "no." The most serious problem with the conference was the clear attitude of the organizers of the conference and the selected panelists that a country or a civilization could — in fact, must — be "Christian" (or "Muslim" or "Jewish") in the sense that the civil institutions would embody beliefs based not on the natural moral law, but on revelation(s) from a deity, that is, purely religious beliefs. The Just Third Way is based on universal principles of the natural moral law common to all religions. While many of us believe that the precepts of the natural moral law are most clearly expressed in Christianity, most particularly in the social teachings of the Catholic Church, the basic principles themselves are found in their fullness in all religions. (This says nothing about the truth or lack thereof of purely religious teachings, exclusive of the natural law, such as whether Muhammad is the Prophet, Jesus is the Son of God, or Moses received the precepts of the natural law in the Decalogue directly from Yaweh.) Thus, if by "Christian" — or "Muslim" or "Jewish" — civilization you mean that the social order is based on how people of those religions understand and apply the essential precepts of the natural moral law from their particular historical, cultural, and religious perspective in a manner that respects the dignity of each human person, there should be no problem. If, however, you mean that everyone must belong to that religion or acknowledge it as supreme in the State, if you want to extend the civil influence of a particular religion beyond interpreting and teaching basic moral precepts, if you want to enforce specific religious practices or even membership in a religion by force — which is what it appears that the organizers of the conference want to do — then you are changing the virtue of religion and organized religion itself from one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest, forces for good in society, into something evil. We declined the invitation.

• The proofs of Dr. Alamgir's book, Notes from a Prison: Bangladesh, have been sent to Dr. Alamgir for final approval. Final touches — including a new suggested title — have been put on the first draft Michael Greaney's short book based on this blog's series on personalism. Editing and review is scheduled for next week. The republication of Dr. Harold Moulton's The Formation of Capital (1935) has hit a few formatting difficulties which will delay release until after the New Year. Work is progressing on the forewords to the Ferree Compendium and The Act of Social Justice (1943), which should appear after the New Year as well. The "short version" of the money book is on hold until after the book on personalism is published.

• As of this morning, we have had visitors from 38 different countries and 46 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this blog over the past two months. Most visitors are from the United States, the UK, Canada, Philippines, and Brazil. People in Uganda, Aruba, Senegal, the United States and the Philippines spent the most average time on the blog. Of the top five postings, "Thomas Hobbes on Private Property" in the No. 3 spot is still the only one not in the "Personhood and the Ontology of Personalism" and related series.

Those are the happenings for this week, at least that we know about. If you have an accomplishment that you think should be listed, send us a note about it at mgreaney [at] cesj [dot] org, and we'll see that it gets into the next "issue." If you have a short (250-400 word) comment on a specific posting, please enter your comments in the blog — do not send them to us to post for you. All comments are moderated anyway, so we'll see it before it goes up.

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The Political Animal, Part II

We saw in the first posting in this series that, according to Aristotle, humanity is by nature neither solely individualistic nor purely social/collectivist. Humanity is, instead, an apparently unique combination of the individual and the social that Aristotle called political. The human condition is a paradoxical blend of individual rights and identity within a social environment. How well our institutions within the common good reflect that combination and are adapted to serve individual and social needs at the same time determines how effectively the social order assists each individual in acquiring and developing virtue, thereby becoming more fully human.

This sounds relatively simple. Human beings are both individual and social in nature — political. We consciously come together and organize with others in accordance with our dual nature and establish institutions to assist ourselves in the ultimate business of life: acquiring and developing virtue, that is, becoming more fully human by conforming ourselves ever closer to our own nature. That network of institutions within which we carry out the task of conforming ourselves to nature is called the common good.

The common good is not an aggregate of individual goods. It is, instead, something special, so special, in fact, that it defines us as human: the capacity to acquire and develop virtue, or (as America's Founding Fathers phrased it) the "pursuit of happiness." Paradoxically, this general (generic) capacity to acquire and develop virtue inherent in each human being manifests itself as particular institutions that provide the specific environment within which we pursue our individual good or goods. The most important of these goods is our individual realization of our personal capacity to acquire and develop virtue within a social context, thereby becoming more fully human.

This presents us with a problem — the same problem that faced Aristotle and which he (bound by certain preconceptions about human nature) failed to solve adequately. Not that we should blame Aristotle. People today are still making the same mistake. This mistake is rooted in the fact that it is all too common to confuse our individual capacity to acquire and develop virtue, with the institutions — social ("corporate") bodies — within which we acquire and develop virtue. This confusion seems to be the common ground on which the individualists and collectivists meet, even though they draw opposite conclusions from similar premises.

The individualist understands that each of us has an individual identity and natural rights. He or she recognizes that the exercise of individual rights is the chief means by which we acquire and develop virtue. Now, keep in mind that the individualist (in common with the collectivist) confuses his or her individual capacity to acquire and develop virtue, with the social network within which we acquire and develop virtue. The individualist then logically concludes that society is, one, completely unnecessary but tolerable, two, a necessary evil to keep order, or three, must actively be suppressed so that people can become more fully human. Institutions are, at best, only prudential, because they interfere with the functioning of individual rights. The individualistic analysis ignores the fact that rights, while individual, are just as much institutions as any other institution, and can only be realized within a social context.

The collectivist, on the other hand, realizes that institutions are necessary for each of us to acquire and develop virtue in a manner consistent with our nature. Recall, however, that the collectivist, too, is confusing individual acquisition and development of virtue, with the environment within which this happens. Within his or her frame of reference, the collectivist logically concludes that individual rights only get in the way of becoming more fully human. Individual rights are, at best, only prudential. This is because individual rights interfere with the functioning of institutions, that is, with the mechanisms by means of which the social order operates and which give a society its specific form. The collectivist analysis, too, ignores the fact that exercise of individual rights is as fully an institution as any other institution. (There is another view on this, equally valid, that we will get to presently, but it doesn't quite fit here.)

According to Aristotle, instead of contradicting ourselves by rejecting institutions in favor of individual rights, or dismissing individual rights to safeguard only (other) institutions, the task of the human person assembled in the polis is to organize and work with others to come to some accommodation between the two competing sets of institutions. The conflicting demands of individual rights and the other institutions of the common good need to be balanced in order to arrive at an optimal arrangement between the two so that society can function. This is why politics is considered the "art" (science, really) of the practicable.

There is, however, a serious problem, the solution to which ultimately eluded Aristotle — and which the failure to resolve results in the twin errors of individualism and collectivism. That is, how can an individual person affect social institutions, and how can individual rights and social institutions both be valid and have equal claims on us?

These are the issues we will start to examine in the next posting in this series.

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The Political Animal, Part I

As Aristotle declared in The Politics, "man is by nature a political animal." We begin this new blog series by asking the obvious question, "What does this mean?" Aspects of Aristotle's statement do not seem to be considered today in all their depth. When we examine it, we are in essence asking what we are as human beings, and then trying to understand the answer — a task on which we can spend our entire lives and still leave unfinished.

Because many people today tend to paint things in black and white, most responses to the question what we are as human beings usually fall into two basic categories — once they've decided that "political" is another word for "social," with social almost always construed as collectivist. Thus, people by and large declare us — the human race — to be either 1) individualistic, or 2) collectivist.

Because human beings are clearly individuals, some people claim we are only individuals. Any organized activity is automatically "collectivism" and is contrary to nature. They conclude that Aristotle was wrong — and not for the first time, either. Aristotle's "natural slave" argument is the quintessence of collectivism, and proves that everything he said is wrong.

Nevertheless, other people claim that we are only social. Human beings have always naturally collected themselves in groups. A number of people therefore conclude that individualistic activity is against nature; all human actions are exclusively social, the collective is everything. Aristotle managed to get the fact that we are social — collectivist — right, but his over-emphasis on individual rights and virtues negates everything else he said.

As we might expect, the truth lies somewhere between these two extremes. Aristotle is not wrong so much as misunderstood. He made mistakes, yes, but these mistakes were logical within his framework. They appear to have been corrected by Thomas Aquinas, for which (in part) the Catholic Church has recognized Aquinas as a "saint" (a person of exceptional holiness or "heroic virtue") and a "doctor" of the Church — someone whose learning is so great as to consider him or her an authoritative and outstanding witness to authentic Christian belief and practice.

Aristotle did not claim that humanity is either individual or social, but is both individual and social. This is a combination that the Philosopher called political. That is, individual human beings typically gather together and associate within the structure of a polis. Literally "the City State," Aristotle conceived the polis as an exemplar of human social activity, a system of consciously organized civic groups — institutions — within the common good, the common good being the network of institutions that give specific form to social life.

When this "social order" is adequately structured within the common good, it works to preserve both our individual nature and our social nature. Within the framework of Aristotle's thought, then, human beings are neither solely individualistic nor exclusively social/collectivist. We are, instead, something different. Although the concept has been around for at least 2,500 years, the fact has been around forever. Even though we see it in action every day, many people continue to be confused by the fact that the human person is something apparently unique on Earth: a political animal.

This makes the task of becoming more fully human confusing and contradictory if we focus exclusively either on strict individualism or undiluted collectivism. According to Aristotle, we become more fully human (conform ourselves more closely to our own nature) when each of us acquires and develops virtue. That is, when we build habits of doing good on an individual basis, but within a social context, we become more fully what we are as a combination of individual and social beings. Working out the conflicting demands between the individual and society as a whole is called "politics," the science of the practicable.

What confuses many people is the fact that the acquisition and development of virtue is an individual task, but done within a context that requires conformity to social norms. For its part, society cannot force virtue on anyone. Society as a whole can, however, demand that acts affecting other individuals, groups, or the common good as a whole conform to generally-accepted concepts of virtue, regardless of the personal opinion or beliefs of an individual who thinks otherwise.

The State can therefore coerce what the general consensus considers a virtuous act (though not virtue), such as paying just taxes, adhering materially to the terms of a contract, or keeping the peace. This is true whether or not the one carrying out that virtuous act is acting voluntarily and thus virtuously, or is being coerced into appropriate behavior (but without prejudice to his or her individual rights) for the common good. As important as it is for individuals personally to do good for the right motives, society is — or should be — indifferent as to whether people act in a virtuous manner (if not, strictly speaking, virtuously) out of fear of punishment, or with genuine virtue out of a desire to do the right thing and build the habit of doing good, becoming more fully human in the process.

We will begin looking at the implications of humanity's political nature in the next posting in this series.

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A Pro-Life Economic Agenda, Part V

A Pro-Life economic agenda sounds like a good idea, but it won't do any good if it doesn't work. Some people have asserted that the "Living (or Just) Wage" as described by Rev. John A. Ryan in his 1906 book, A Living Wage, is the only possible economic agenda for the Pro-Life movement. The serious flaws in the wage system, however, examined in detail by such diverse authorities as Karl Marx, Pope Leo XIII, G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc (the "Chesterbelloc"), and Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler, as well as Msgr. Ryan himself pretty much take any reliance on wages as the sole source of a viable living income out of the running.

We can therefore dismiss the two main systems that rely on the wage system, capitalism and socialism. The only real difference between the two is the identity of the small elite that owns or controls ownership of the means of production, anyway. What we propose, then, is something analogous to Chesterton and Belloc's "distributism," or an economic arrangement of society characterized by widespread direct ownership of the means of production.

Classic distributism adds that there is a preference (not a mandate) for small, family-owned farms and artisan shops. Further, Chesterton and Belloc assumed as a given that existing accumulations of savings are necessary to finance capital formation. The goal, however, is more important than the specific means used to achieve the goal — particularly if the means are contrary to sound principles of economics and finance, or somehow violate fundamental principles of the natural moral law.

As we saw in the previous posting in this series, Capital Homesteading gets away from the presumed reliance on existing accumulations of savings to finance capital formation by going back to sound banking principles. A commercial bank that has the power to act as a "bank of issue" (that is, can issue banknotes or create demand deposits — checking accounts), can take a real bill — a lien on something of value — as security from a borrower. This is backed up with a capital credit insurance policy for additional security, or "collateral." The bank can then print banknotes or create a demand deposit in the amount loaned on the bill, and hand the banknotes or checkbook over to the borrower.

The borrower takes the "money" and invests it in a project that is reasonably expected to generate enough profit to repay the loan, buy back the real bill, and provide sufficient income for the borrower on which to live. When the loan is repaid, the bank cancels the banknotes or the demand deposit, and returns the bill to the borrower, who in turn cancels the bill.

Because the money is created in the same or lesser amount of the present value of the investment, there can be no inflation unless the investment fails. In that case, of course, the money supply is reduced by the amount of the capital credit insurance proceeds paid to the lender. The capital credit insurance company pays off on the policy, and the bank takes the money and cancels the money, the same way the bank would have had the loan been repaid by the borrower in the usual way. This offsets the inflationary impact of the prior money creation for the failed investment.

Thus, by getting the right to go to a commercial bank and borrow up to, say, $7,000, and participate with the bank in creating money in this fashion, a "Capital Homesteader" could, with the guidance of a competent financial advisor, purchase part ownership in: 1) companies for which a member of the family works; 2) a company where the Homesteader has a monthly billing account; or 3) "qualified" companies that are well-managed and highly profitable. Companies could also establish Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) for their workers, and Consumer Stock Ownership Plans (CSOPs) for their regular customers to borrow funds repayable with future pre-tax profits, for the issuance of new shares, or for the purchase of existing shares.

Communities that adopt for-profit Citizens Land Cooperatives (CLCs) could attract interest-free credit to buy land for development or build new infrastructure. This would enable every citizen to participate as a shareholder in community land planning and governance decisions. Moreover, each citizen would share in the profits from rents and fees for the use of land and infrastructure. Through a Capital Homestead Act, access to capital credit — which today helps make the rich richer — would be enshrined in law as a fundamental right of citizenship, like the right to vote.

Using its powers under § 13 of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, the Federal Reserve System would supply local commercial banks with the money needed by businesses to grow. The central bank would discount the real bills presented to commercial banks, instead of allowing banks to create money on their own. This would stabilize the currency and provide immediate 100% "hard asset" reserves for all the money in the commercial banking system.

An important feature of Capital Homesteading is that the new money and credit for private sector growth would flow through Capital Homestead Accounts and other credit democratization vehicles. This would ensure that as many people as possible had the means to acquire and possess private property in the means of production. Capital Homesteading would thereby enable a country to comply with the recommendation expressed by Pope Leo XIII in what is generally considered the first "social encyclical," Rerum Novarum (1891),

We have seen that this great labor question cannot be solved save by assuming as a principle that private ownership must be held sacred and inviolable. The law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners. (§ 46)

Through a well-regulated central banking system and other safeguards (including capital credit insurance to cover the risk of bad loans), all citizens could purchase with interest-free capital credit, newly issued shares representing newly added machines and structures. These purchases would be paid off with dividends that the paying companies could deduct from their taxable income. Nothing would come out of anyone's existing accumulations of savings or reduce the income anyone uses for consumption purposes.

Once the acquisition loan was fully repaid, the Capital Homesteader would be the full, legal owner of the shares. Thereafter, the Homesteader would receive an adequate and regular income sufficient to meet common domestic needs from the earnings of the capital he or she accumulated over the years, and be able to pass it on to any children.

That is how Capital Homesteading is designed to work — although we have only hinted at the technical details of the proposal. It only remains to organize in solidarity with like-minded others, and get to work. The first step would be to visit the CESJ website and find out more about Capital Homesteading.

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A Pro-Life Economic Agenda, Part IV

"It sounds nice, but . . ." — or so goes the usual rejoinder when people wish to evade their individual and personal responsibility to work for the common good, first within their immediate milieux, and — always — with an eye toward the effect that every act has on the common good as a whole. This is what is called a well-formed "social conscience." Despite such equivocations, however, all of the excuses given for not promoting Capital Homesteading as a Pro-Life economic agenda either fall apart from the pressure of their own contradictions, or are clearly evasions of responsibility. To take only two,

" 'They' won't let us/you." What "they"? Who is this "they"? Please be specific! "They" is defined in the dictionary as "the generalized 'other'." A "generalized other" can do nothing. It takes a particular (that is, identifiable and specific) "other" to carry out an act as definite as preventing Capital Homesteading or anything else. What people usually mean when they say " 'they' won't let us/you," is that our social institutions are badly organized. If so, these institutions are inhibiting or preventing the practice of virtue, specifically, the acquisition and possession of private property in the means of production. That being the case, the solution (as Rev. Ferree makes clear in Introduction to Social Justice) is to organize and carry out "acts of social justice" to restructure our institutions so that they once again assist us in our acquisition and development of virtue instead of operating to our detriment.

"It's impossible." It's astonishing how often something people don't want to do or don't understand is "impossible." It's impossible to have a stable society without a god-king. It's impossible to sail across the ocean-sea without falling off the edge of the earth. It's impossible for a remote and heterogeneous collection of colonies to unite and break away from the mother country. It's impossible to fly. It's impossible to go to the Moon. On the contrary, as Rev. Ferree pointed out. As he explained in Introduction to Social Justice, "Another characteristic of Social Justice, . . . is that in Social Justice there is never any such thing as helplessness. No problem is ever too big or too complex, no field is ever too vast, for the methods of this Social Justice. Problems that were agonizing in the past and were simply dodged, even by serious and virtuous people, can now be solved with ease by any school child." (47)

And so on. Excuses could be multiplied ad nauseam, but what's the point? They are excuses, not reasons. The principles supporting Capital Homesteading have never been successfully challenged despite decades of demands that critics get explicit about what, exactly, is wrong with them. The best anyone has ever been able to do is to claim, based on other principles, that Capital Homesteading or the Just Third Way is crazy, stupid, evil, or some other handy pejoratives as helpful as they are scholarly. This, of course, is much easier than actually arguing. As Chesterton explained,

It is no good to tell an atheist that he is an atheist; or to charge a denier of immortality with the infamy of denying it; or to imagine that one can force an opponent to admit he is wrong, by proving that he is wrong on somebody else's principles, but not on his own. After the great example of St. Thomas, the principle stands, or ought always to have stood established; that we must either not argue with a man at all, or we must argue on his grounds and not ours. We may do other things instead of arguing, according to our views of what is morally permissible, but if we argue we must argue "on the reasons and statements of the philosophers themselves." (G. K Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas: "The Dumb Ox." New York: Doubleday Image Books, 1956, 95-96.)

So, aside from panic-stricken excuses, injured pride, and a general feeling of individual helplessness, there is nothing to prevent a "Capital Homestead Act" from being enacted. The only things remaining are to outline (briefly) how Capital Homesteading works, and figure out where the money is to come from. For the full-blown program, of course, interested readers should go to Capital Homesteading for Every Citizen (2004). Because the question as to where we are to get the money is of such paramount importance, we will cover it first.

The "money question" is actually easy to answer, once we understand a few basic concepts, the most important of which is that "money" is anything that can be used in settlement of a debt. The Capital Homestead Act proposes a number of programs so that every man, woman and child could get interest-free (though not "cost free") capital credit from a local bank. Consistent with the tenets of the classic "Banking School" of finance and the real bills doctrine, future earnings of the capital purchased would pay off the loans, including bank service fees and premiums to cover capital credit default insurance and reinsurance. Every member of a family would get access to this special credit by setting up a tax-sheltered Capital Homestead Account (CHA) — like a "Super-IRA" — at a local bank or other financial institution.

It is critical to understand that no money is or can be created under Capital Homesteading until and unless a "financially feasible" capital project is brought to a commercial bank for financing. It is not a case of creating money, then spending it. Instead, a sound investment is identified, properly vetted by the bank and the insurance company, and then — and only then — is the money created to loan to the "Capital Homesteader."

This is based on classic banking theory embodied in the real bills doctrine. Briefly, a commercial bank can create money — remember, defining "money" as anything that can be used in settlement of a debt — at will, without inflation or deflation. This, however, is only so long as the amount of money created does not exceed the present value of an existing asset or future stream of income from an asset to be financed by taking a lien on the future asset to a bank for "discounting" (sale to the bank).

The piece of paper or other medium that conveys a lien (a legal claim to an asset — "a charge or security or incumbrance upon property," Black's Law Dictionary) is called a "bill." If the bill represents something of actual, definable value, it is a "real bill." If it is fraudulent, it is called a "fictitious bill." Having value, a real bill can be exchanged for something else of value, thereby functioning as "money."

That answers the question as to where the money is to come from. In our next and final posting in this series, we'll look at how Capital Homesteading would work.

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News from the Network, Vol. 2, No. 48

It's one of the imponderables of the financial world why Black Mondays and Black Tuesdays are bad, but Black Fridays are good. The financial news coming in from around the world is that, due to something going on in Dubai, stock markets are plunging. In the U.S. (which as of this writing hasn't opened yet) the speculators are hoping with crossed fingers that the American consumer, suddenly relevant again, will somehow be able to make enough purchases today to account for the usual 10% of annual retail sales.

How this is supposed to happen when an increasing number of consumers 1) don't have jobs, 2) have tapped out their credit, 3) aren't receiving redistributed wealth through welfare, and 4) aren't sure they will have any source of income for the coming year remains a mystery. As Jean-Baptiste Say pointed out almost two centuries ago, people do not make purchases of what other people produce with "money," but through the medium of money with what they themselves produce. If some goods and services remain unsold (as may be the case today), it is because other goods are not produced.

The solution to the situation is not to give increasing amounts of money to bail out failed companies and rescue speculators and gamblers, or to extend greater amounts of consumer and government credit that have less and less of a chance of being repaid, but to enable people to acquire and possess an adequate ownership stake of productive assets — thereby empowering them to produce goods and services that they can exchange for the goods and services produced by others.

This week's news items reflect CESJ's efforts to reach that goal:

• CESJ held its monthly executive committee meeting on Tuesday, November 24, 2009. A number of items were discussed, most notably the effort to bring the powers-that-be and the public at large to a better understanding of money, credit, and banking. Briefly (as we have noted a number of times on this blog), the world is currently trapped in the assumption that only existing accumulations of savings can be used to finance capital formation. This leads to a number of extremely damaging conclusions, such as the only way in which the great mass of people can gain a living income is via the wage and welfare system, that ownership of the means of production must be concentrated, and that the State necessarily exercises total control of the economy through a monopoly over money and credit.

• A decision was tentatively reached to schedule the annual rally at the Federal Reserve for April 15, 2010, to be followed by the Second Social Justice Collaborative, and then the CESJ annual celebration. Much of this relies on how matters develop over the next couple of months, especially how many new people can be brought in both to participate and to help run the events.

• The editing draft of CESJ's booklet, Common Ground: Personhood and the Ontology of Personalism, has been turned into a .pdf and distributed to members of the CESJ Executive Committee for comments and editing. The book is based on the blog series that concluded last week, and which has received a great deal of favorable comment from a number of quarters. Common Ground may be available for bulk purchase before the end of December.

• Dr. Alamgir's book, Notes from a Prison: Bangladesh, has been delayed due to factors beyond the control of Economic Justice Media, CESJ's publishing imprint. Assuming that the new schedule can be adhered to, the book will be available for bulk purchase before the end of December.

• A number of door opening efforts have taken place during the week. While the percentage of these efforts that eventually bear fruit is relatively low, the more efforts are made, the greater the success. Local radio shows that are open to doing interviews over the telephone are a good place to start, writing a letter or sending an e-mail to a local talk show host and suggesting an interview with Norman Kurland. Newspapers and magazines are also good places to suggest interviews or feature articles.

• As of this morning, we have had visitors from 35 different countries and 49 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this blog over the past two months. Most visitors are from the United States, the UK, Canada, Philippines, and Brazil. People in Uganda, Aruba, Senegal, the United States and the Netherlands spent the most average time on the blog. Of the top five postings, "Thomas Hobbes on Private Property" in the No. 3 spot is the only one not in the series on "Personhood and the Ontology of Personalism."

Those are the happenings for this week, at least that we know about. If you have an accomplishment that you think should be listed, send us a note about it at mgreaney [at] cesj [dot] org, and we'll see that it gets into the next "issue." If you have a short (250-400 word) comment on a specific posting, please enter your comments in the blog — do not send them to us to post for you. All comments are moderated anyway, so we'll see it before it goes up.

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A Pro-Life Economic Agenda, Part III

If you were looking for something for which to be thankful tomorrow, you may need to look no further. As we hinted in the two previous postings in this series (as well as in the series on the ontology of personalism), the situation is far from hopeless. While the individual is frequently helpless to effect change in social situations, the remedy of social justice is open to every single human being.

Each member of the human race, by virtue of the fact that he or she is human and therefore a "natural person" (that is, a person by the mere fact of being human at whatever stage of physical, mental, spiritual, economic, or political stage of development), has the capacity to organize and act directly on the common good not as an individual per se, but as a member of a group. If we are faced with unjust structures that inhibit or prevent us from owning an adequate stake in the means of production sufficient to generate a living income, then we do not need to go, hat-in-hand, either to a rich private elite and beg for alms, or to the State and surrender our personal sovereignty in exchange for our vote and a bare sufficiency to meet our material needs. The only thing we need is a specific plan, for — without that — we might as well just stay where we are. If you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there . . . and rather quickly, at that.

Such a plan is Capital Homesteading, a concept embodied in a proposal called the "Capital Homestead Act."

The Capital Homestead Act is a modern version of Abraham Lincoln's 1862 Homestead Act that (usually — there were some exceptions) offered a quarter section of land (160 acres) on the frontier to anyone 21 years of age or over, and who was an American citizen or declared the intent to become one. While there are many modern critics blessed with 20/20 hindsight who can point out the flaws of the Homestead Act, it cannot be denied that the Act was the most successful economic initiative in American history, excepting only the fact of America itself. The Homestead Act laid the foundation for America's rise as the world's greatest industrial power, and embedded ownership of the means of production as the road to economic and political independence deep in the American psyche, from which more than a century of effort by the State and other forces have been unable to root it out entirely.

Unfortunately, land has a singularly unique drawback. There is, generally, only so much to go around, and the land eventually runs out. There is, however, a frontier that, to all intents and purposes, cannot run out. That is the technological frontier, the sector of the productive economy made up of industrial and commercial enterprises.

Admittedly, hostility toward technology is also embedded deep in the American psyche. This is not because technology is evil, per se, but (as Hilaire Belloc pointed out in The Servile State, 1912, as did Kelso and Adler a generation later), because methods of corporate finance virtually guaranteed that ownership of the new technology would be concentrated in the hands of a very few people. Since (as Daniel Webster observed in the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention of 1820), "power naturally and necessarily follows property," concentrated ownership of the means of production automatically means concentrated power.

Americans hate concentrated power.

That's not to say that other people do not hate concentrated power. There is, however, just something about the proud, the arrogant, those who exercise raw, naked power — as did the United States Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade — that excites a profound and visceral reaction in the American spirit. This aspect of the American spirit can only be ameliorated or all but extinguished through intensive and continuing — and State funded, of course — propaganda, and the fostering of a servile class ready, willing, and able to look to the State as the source of all that is good. This is in sharp contrast to what Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the early 19th century of the habit Americans had of organizing and taking care of matters themselves without the bumbling interference of the central government.

Nevertheless, despite the debilitating results of training people to look to the State as the source of every blessing, the fire of the American spirit is not so easily extinguished. Rather, the state of society in which we seem to be trapped today is the result of the fact that most Americans were never given a chance to share in the ownership and profits of our high-tech industrial and commercial frontier, which (unlike land) has no known limits.

Capital Homesteading would take nothing away from present owners, who would be left with their current accumulations intact. They would only lose the virtual monopoly they now have over ownership of future capital.

By returning to a sound understanding of money, credit, and banking and employing advanced techniques of corporate finance, Capital Homesteading would link every American (especially the poorest of the poor and those previously economically disenfranchised) to the profits from sustainable economic growth. Every citizen could gain a share in power over technological progress and the tools and enterprises of modern society. Through widespread, direct ownership of the means of production everyone would participate in a more democratic economic process, just as they now participate in the democratic political process through access to the ballot.

The only question remaining is how Capital Homesteading would probably work — and why people seem to think it won't. We will look at those questions in the next posting in this series.

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A Pro-Life Economic Agenda, Part II

In the previous posting we discovered that, to understand Capital Homesteading (particularly as a Pro-Life economic agenda) we have to reject outdated notions of money and credit, as well as discredited Malthusian concepts of scarcity. Once we separate the in-depth thinkers from the not-so-in-depth thinkers and get over that admittedly revolutionary Pons Asinorum, we can get on to the even more radical ("radical" in terms of today's ossified thinking, that is) particulars of Capital Homesteading.

Throughout history the rich and powerful have owned the things that produced the wealth. When land and people produced wealth, the rich and powerful owned land and people. Today what produces most of the wealth are land and technology — "capital," that is, non-human (non-person) things. This is why Kelso and Adler (mistakenly, in our opinion) characterized the modern economy as capitalist. In particular, technologies such as machines, robots, rentable structures, and advanced information systems are replacing people at their workplaces and threatening their family incomes.

Obviously, then, the people who own the land and the technology (productive capital) are today's "rich and powerful." Due to flawed thinking about money, credit, and scarcity, many people accept the concentration of ownership of the means of production as a given. Unfortunately, this results in a state of society in which too few people own income-producing wealth (capital) and too many people own nothing. The result is a society in which many people owe more than they own, and the great mass of people are utterly dependent either on a private elite (as in capitalism), or a State elite (as in socialism). The tragedy is that many otherwise thoughtful people reach the conclusion that this situation is somehow normal or consistent with the natural moral law.

The bottom line is that anyone is economically vulnerable if he or she doesn't own — as private property — a just and adequate private property stake in the land and technology that produce most of today's wealth. To make matters worse, economic power is tied closely to political power. Political power comes from property (the rights and powers of ownership) and the means to acquire possess private property in the means of production: capital. In today's global economy, the most significant forms of capital are in advanced technologies. These can be and in many cases are directly owned, but most capital today is owned through unique social tools called corporations — the ownership of which (due to how capital formation is financed) is highly concentrated in the hands of a very few people.

When ownership is concentrated, power is concentrated. This is why a few people are very powerful, and most people are virtually powerless. The wealth-producing power of an individual worker — as "pure labor," sans technology — has not increased appreciably over the last thousand years. Poor people and most non-property-owning workers can only produce insecure subsistence incomes from their jobs. Some people, however, profit from the work that technology can do by owning shares in the companies that use that technology. These people become rich and powerful because they own the things (capital) that produce most of our wealth.

In a democratic and just economy everyone should have an equal opportunity and equal access to the means to own shares in companies that use advanced technology. The U.S. economy, for example, should have programs that lift artificial tax and credit barriers to help every American become an owner of American Industry. Every family could then earn income from jobs and income from capital that each family member would own.

The question is, how?

Today many people, even the poor, can buy consumer items such as cars, TV sets, clothing, and homes on credit. These purchases are not, however, "capital": income-earning property. Borrowing for such things makes the debtor more economically vulnerable than otherwise. Meanwhile, every year America adds about $2 trillion worth of new productive assets in both the public sector and private sector, or approximately $7,000 for every man, woman, and child. The way we finance these new assets creates few new owners and widens the gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots."

Constrained by bad definitions of money and other flawed institutions, the usual solution takes two forms. One, capitalism is "socialized," and the State takes over control of the economy indirectly by mandating prices, wages, interest rates, and so on. Two, the State takes over direct control of the economy — socialism by any name. This can be done through subsidies and bailouts of businesses considered too big to fail, or by taking over actual ownership (control) of companies.

Whether by socializing capitalism or by implementing socialism outright, those in authority (usually the State, but it could be a private elite) circumvent institutional flaws by redistributing existing wealth. This is not only ineffective and counterproductive, it is inadequate even within its own framework and works only for a short time. Redistribution is usually carried out either directly, through the tax system, or by manipulating the currency through inflation or deflation, depending on whether the State wishes to favor debtors or creditors, respectively.

There is, however, an alternative to the current system that is neither socialism nor capitalism. This "Just Third Way" would be a free enterprise economy, generating private sector profits — but with ownership of the new growth systematically flowing to every individual citizen. With access to capital credit repayable with the full pre-tax earnings of the capital itself, everyone could gain ownership in America's expanding technological frontier. We wouldn't have to take away wealth from those who already own capital, or rely on an allegedly beneficent and all-powerful State to distribute largesse to the presumably needy and those deemed sufficiently worthy.

An application of the principles of the Just Third Way is called "Capital Homesteading," as in the title of the book, Capital Homesteading for Every Citizen. The Capital Homesteading concept has been developed into a specific proposal called the "Capital Homestead Act," which we will look at in the next posting in this series.

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A Pro-Life Economic Agenda, Part I

In the previous series on "Personhood and the Ontology of Personalism," we closed with the comment that anyone interested in the details of a possible Pro-Life economic agenda should visit the website of the Center for Economic and Social Justice ("CESJ"), www.cesj.org. Specifically, interested parties should look over the materials on "Capital Homesteading," especially the book, Capital Homesteading for Every Citizen (2004), available as a free download on the CESJ website, as well as in paperback from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

As we noted in the "Personhood" Series, we've stated the basic principles of Capital Homesteading a number of times on this blog. Still, we felt it would be useful to reiterate the concept, especially in light of the astonishing popularity of the series of postings on personalism. Capital Homesteading is, after all, the best, most consistent, and "person-centered" approach to economic development we've yet come across, although we're open to suggestions about improvements and even other proposals that can demonstrate as close a consistency to the natural moral law as Capital Homesteading.

A couple of caveats need to be inserted here. First, this particular series can only give the broadest and sketchiest outline of Capital Homesteading. If the concept interests you at all, or if you think you find flaws in what is said here, go first to the CESJ website and read up on the subject.

Second, be aware that Capital Homesteading uses a different definition of "money" than the one with which you may be familiar. This is something of which we ourselves only recently realized the full import. Briefly (for we've tried to make this clear as well in previous postings), Capital Homesteading — consistent with CESJ's Aristotelian/Thomist natural law orientation — defines money by its nature and proper use, not as a creature of positive law, that is, of direct State action.

In other words, CESJ understands "money" in ontological terms of what it is, instead of what it happens to do or (more immediately) can be forced to do. The former is based on nature, the latter on will — usually that of the State, which thereby tries to take on the divine aspect of being able to determine reality. This latter is the view of the Keynesian, Monetarist, and Austrian schools of economics. (See, e.g., John Maynard Keynes, A Treatise on Money, Volume I: The Pure Theory of Money. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1930, 4.)

CESJ defines "money" as anything that can be used in settlement of a debt; it is the "medium of exchange." You don't ordinarily need anybody's permission, especially that of the State, to trade what you have for that which someone else has. As Jean-Baptiste Say explained in his refutation of the scarcity-based economics of Reverend Thomas Malthus, you don't make your purchases of what others produce with "money," per se, but with what you produce by means of your labor or capital. "Money" is simply a "social tool" to facilitate transactions. If some people cannot sell all they produce, it is because other people are not producing. (Letters to Mr. Malthus, 1821, 2)

This definition of "money" is implicit in the tenets of the "Banking School," as well as in the work of Dr. Harold Moulton (notably in his 1935 classic, The Formation of Capital), the binary economics of Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler, and even the venerable Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (1776). This is emphasized in the subtitle of the second book Kelso and Adler co-authored in 1961, The New Capitalists: "A Proposal to Free Economic Growth from the Slavery of Savings."

Finally, be aware that Kelso and Adler made two "mistakes" in the title of their book. One, they carried over the vague term "capitalism" from their first collaboration, The Capitalist Manifesto (1958). In The Capitalist Manifesto they explain that by "capitalism" they mean an economic system in which capital, not labor, is the predominant factor of production. This is less than helpful, for the definition also fits socialist economies. As Chesterton remarked, "If the use of capital is capitalism, then everything is capitalism." (G. K. Chesterton, The Outline of Sanity, 1927, Ch. 1.)

Two, this is not really an error, but the phrase "Slavery of Savings" implies a hostility toward or a rejection of savings. On reading The New Capitalists, however, we quickly discover that the "slavery" to which Kelso and Adler refer is dependence on existing accumulations of savings to finance capital formation. Dependence on past savings or reductions in current consumption restricts capital ownership to those who can afford to save, or who receive redistributed capital from the State (in which case they cannot truly be said to own that wealth).

What Kelso and Adler proposed was to replace past savings with future savings. That is, instead of cutting consumption and accumulating in order to invest, the process is reversed so that investment in new capital generates its own repayment — a basic principle of finance. It is no longer (and never actually was) necessary to cut current consumption. Instead, by creating money backed by the present value of the future stream of income to be generated by the newly-formed capital, current consumption levels can be maintained, even increased, at the same time that income is generated to repay the financing of the very capital that generates the income.

By future savings, we do not mean forced or involuntary savings, terms which have a completely different — and much more complicated — meaning in most modern schools of economics. (It's so complicated and contradictory that it would be counterproductive even to try to explain it here.) We have, confusingly, used "future" and "forced" savings as synonyms in the past — and might in the future (nobody's perfect) — but the reader should be aware that there is, in fact, a significant difference between the future savings concept in binary economics, and the forced savings theory in Keynesian, Monetarist, and Austrian Schools of economics.

Thus, to understand Capital Homesteading, keep in mind that the proposal uses a different understanding of money than is usual today, and that it rejects Malthusian concepts of scarcity as invalid. We will begin to look at how to apply these "revolutionary" ideas in the next posting in this series.

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News from the Network, Vol. 2, No. 47

As unpredicted, the stock market is up. I mean down. I mean it's . . . un-bear-a-bull. Here is a reliable stock market prediction. Once Capital Homesteading is adopted, the secondary market for debt and equity will settle down and stabilize into a pattern of steady growth reflecting the actual growth of the economy, having abdicated its position as pretender to the position of driver of the economy.

Getting away from the fantasy world of Wall Street and Washington, this week's happenings, while superficially sparse, are of much greater moment than the antics in the world of finance and politics:

• Due to the press of outside business, the monthly CESJ executive committee meeting was postponed until next week. Everyone in CESJ is a volunteer and receives no compensation for filling a position. Thus, when the immediate need of making a living intrudes on the work of civilization CESJ carries out, CESJ business must wait. Consider volunteering some of your time to the Global Justice Movement in general, and CESJ in particular, in order to broaden our resource base and expand the number of people we can rely on to fill critical roles in times like these when people are becoming stretched very thin as a result of a global economy that limps along without Capital Homesteading. Check out the volunteer opportunities and the application on the CESJ website.

• As noted, the CESJ monthly executive committee meeting has been moved to next week, Tuesday, November 24, 2009, from 10:00 am to 12:30 pm. If you wish to listen in on the discussions (direct participation is usually limited to the executive committee and board members), send an e-mail to CESJ at the contact information on the website and ask to be put on the list to receive the access code for the telephone conference.

• Due to the press of other business (see above), the final editing of Dr. Alamgir's book, Notes from a Prison: Bangladesh, has been delayed another week. This book is important not because of Dr. Alamgir's economic framework — as former Minister of Planning, he is an expert not in the Just Third Way, but in getting the most out of the admittedly flawed existing system in the most ethical manner possible — but because of the principles of social justice he exhibited in organizing and working for the common good, both while unjustly incarcerated and afterwards by working to call attention to flaws in social institutions. That is why CESJ is publishing the North American edition under a new imprint, "Social Justice Publications," not "Economic Justice Media."

• Because of the popularity of the recently-concluded blog series on "Personhood and the Ontology of Personalism" (the title suggested by Mr. Guy Stevenson of Iowa), the series will be turned into a monograph for republication in book form after editing and some expansion of the text. If you would like to receive a pre-publication copy in electronic format for review and comment when it is ready, please send CESJ an e-mail at the contact information on the CESJ website. The working title for the book is Common Ground: Personhood and the Ontology of Personalism. The idea of turning some of the blog series into short publications was suggested by Dawn K. Brohawn, CESJ's Director of Communications. If "Common Ground" is successful, we anticipate a significant number of new publications, first from among the large amount of material CESJ already has on hand, but later soliciting new works consistent with the principles of the Just Third Way as found in the economic justice principles developed by Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler, and in the social doctrine of Pope Pius XI as analyzed by Rev. William J. Ferree, S.M., Ph.D., "America's greatest social philosopher."

• CESJ (and Equity Expansion International, Inc., a for-profit company with which many of the members of the CESJ core group are affiliated) now has a presence on "Linkedin." Earlier this week, at the suggestion of Mr. Steven Gajdosik, president of the Catholic Radio Association, Michael D. Greaney created a profile on the networking service and joined the "Catholic Radio Group" (not the "Catholic Radio Association Group," the confusingly-named not-for-industry-outsiders professional group).

• As of this morning, we have had visitors from 39 different countries and 45 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this blog over the past two months. Most visitors are from the United States, the UK, Canada, Aruba, and Brazil. People in Aruba, Uganda, Argentina, the United States and the U.K. spent the most average time on the blog. As noted, the recent postings on personalism have generated a surprising amount of interest, suggesting that people are starting to wake up to the need for a new approach. The personalism articles are followed by "The Slavery of Past Savings," and "No One Can Breathe Against Their Will" — all on the same general topic of the essential dignity of the human person under God. The weekly news updates, still retain their usual readership, but far more visitors to the blog are looking at the postings on the natural moral law.

Those are the happenings for this week, at least that we know about. If you have an accomplishment that you think should be listed, send us a note about it at mgreaney [at] cesj [dot] org, and we'll see that it gets into the next "issue." If you have a short (250-400 word) comment on a specific posting, please enter your comments in the blog — do not send them to us to post for you. All comments are moderated anyway, so we'll see it before it goes up.

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Personhood and the Ontology of Personalism, Part XV

As we saw in the previous posting, the belief that abortion is a constitutionally-protected right is both the Pro-Choice movement's greatest strength and, paradoxically, its greatest weakness. No one can claim a right to choose to have, materially assist in procuring, or support abortion without at the same time acknowledging the right of others to choose not to have, materially assist in procuring, or support abortion.

If some people are denied the right to choose in order to secure the right of choice of others, then the presumed right to choose abortion is not, strictly speaking, a true right, but (just as Justice Bryan White declared) an exercise of raw judicial power — an act of tyranny by means of which one group forces its will on another group or groups. The Pro-Life movement can therefore justly demand that all forms of government support for abortion cease immediately — or force the Pro-Choice movement to admit that the alleged choice they themselves are demanding applies only to them, and is not, in fact, a right at all (which implies the functioning of justice), but the creation of a privileged class or establishment of a State religion that has been granted the power to rob the taxpayer for its own benefit.

Still, useful and effective as removal of all federal, state, and local government support for abortion would be, it is clearly not enough. Abortions took place long before anyone had the idea that there was any kind of right involved, or even before there was any kind of State subsidy or support. Once all government support for abortion has been eliminated, then, two things remain to be done.

First, people must be educated to realize that the fetus is a human being, is thus a person, and thereby entitled to the full spectrum of natural rights that necessarily accompany the human condition. The Pro-Life movement has been perfecting its techniques in this effort since 1973, and, considering the massive amounts of money spent by the Pro-Choice movement and the government support it enjoys, has been astonishingly successful. Nothing should be done to decrease current efforts. A good case can and should be made that efforts must, on the contrary, increase dramatically. No day should pass without continuous protests outside any and all facilities providing abortions; no magazine or newspaper should be without its educational Pro-Life advertisement or article; prime time radio and television, as well as the internet, should carry a full load of both informational and educational advertising. Denial of media access should be the basis for a lawsuit on the grounds of denial of free speech.

People in the Pro-Life movement might want to consider refusing to take even legitimate tax deductions for contributions for Pro-Life purposes. While any legal justification for denying tax deductibility is shaky — many Pro-Choice advocates claim to support the aims of the Pro-Life movement other than an end to abortion, and it is highly questionable whether even the United States Supreme Court would move to so abridge or discourage freedom of speech — such a move would be another great moral victory at a relatively small cost. Most people who contribute to Pro-Life organizations or causes do not consider the tax effects in any event, and voluntarily surrendering a legitimate tax deduction removes the possibility that the Pro-Life movement would be labeled hypocritical for demanding an end to tax deductions for contributions to Pro-Choice organizations or causes, while continuing to take advantage of them to present an opposing view.

There is, however, one remaining thing that must be done. The charge of hypocrisy has already been leveled at the Pro-Life movement, chiefly on the grounds that people in the movement care only what happens to the fetus, not about the quality of life of the baby once born. This, up to a point, is a legitimate criticism, but hardly of the magnitude to be termed hypocritical.

The adoption of a Pro-Life economic agenda, first for the United States, and then the world would not only remove the charge of hypocrisy from the Pro-Life movement, it would in large measure remove any and all economic justification for abortion. One program that should be investigated that may have the potential to open up the opportunity for each family to generate income sufficient to meet common domestic needs adequately is Capital Homesteading for every citizen, from the book with the same title.

Capital Homesteading has been described many times on this blog, and a large amount of material is available on the website of the Center for Economic and Social Justice (CESJ), including a free download of the book, Capital Homesteading for Every Citizen, which is also available in paperback from Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Some of the philosophical orientation of the Just Third Way can be found in, In Defense of Human Dignity, also available in paperback from Amazon and Barnes and Noble. (Anglophiles and UK residents can also find both books on Amazon UK: Capital Homesteading for Every Citizen, In Defense of Human Dignity.) Anyone wanting to help promote these ideas might want to consider writing a review of (and giving a high rating to) either of these books.

Anyone interested in promoting a Pro-Life economic agenda — and, incidentally, a possible way out of the current Great Recession (a.k.a., "The Jobless Recovery") — should look over the material on the CESJ website, and consider in what way he or she could advance the effort. One of the better ways is to spread the word, and open doors to "prime movers" such as Barack Obama who might be open to hearing about something that has the promise to deliver justice instead of inflation, joblessness, war, poverty, and death.

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Personhood and the Ontology of Personalism, Part XIV

In the previous posting in this series we noted that individual or individualistic approaches to fundamental social change are, absent some miracle, usually ineffectual. That is because individual methods are generally useless in addressing a social situation. We are, however, left with a serious problem. It is contrary to the principles of natural law on which this country is explicitly based to force anyone to participate in an act that person regards as evil. Forcing citizens to participate in a morally repugnant act is, in moral philosophy, legitimate grounds for changing rulers, even (in extreme cases) the form of government. (Aquinas, De Regimine Principum, I.vi; Bellarmine, De Rom. Pont. Eccl. Monarchia, Lib. I, Cap. VI. Nota quarta. De Laicis, Cap. VI; also Recognitio, Libri Tertii De Laicis.)

Nevertheless, we have to acknowledge that, in the present state of society, unilaterally abolishing legalized abortion is not practicable, even if it could be done tomorrow. Such a move would, in all likelihood, cause even more immediate harm to the social order than that inflicted at present by abortion and other activities that the Pro-Life movement considers related. As Rev. William Ferree points out in Introduction to Social Justice, the primary law of social justice is that the common good must be kept inviolate. (35) As "America's greatest social philosopher" explains,

To attack or to endanger the Common Good in order attain some private end, no matter how good or how necessary this latter may be in its own order, is social injustice and is wrong. The Common Good is not a means for any particular interests; it is not a bargaining point in any private quarrel whatsoever; it is not a pressure that one may legitimately exercise to obtain any private ends. It is a good so great that very frequently private rights — even inviolable private rights — cannot be exercised until it is safeguarded. (Ibid.)

This is not to say that continued legalized abortion will not inflict even greater harm on the common good in the long term. It is a case of dealing with the lesser — that is, the most immediate — of two evils (maintaining order in society in the face of obvious, even horrifying injustice), not an admission that abortion is somehow a good. Direct participation in abortion is always evil, but at present the anticipated evil of the serious disruption or destruction of the social order should abortion be outlawed is of more immediate concern.

There is, however, a possible "common ground" that can exist in the debate, and gives us a basis for achieving the only possible compromise between the Pro-Life and the Pro-Choice positions: the Pro-Life economic agenda. If abortion supporters are truly "Pro-Choice," then they should be the strongest supporters of a Pro-Life economic agenda designed to remove entirely any economic incentive to procure an abortion, thereby bringing an end to the undue influence on free choice exerted by economic institutions.

Consistent with that, Pro-Choice advocates should also be in the forefront in the effort to remove all government financial support for abortions, direct or indirect, thereby taking away the implied political and social endorsement for abortion, the effects of which can obviate "free" choice even more effectively than economic forces. A fully consistent Pro-Choice position would be to deny any and all deductions for taxpayers who give money to support or procure abortions. This is because tax deductibility involves a substantial degree of government support, as well as providing what amounts to a subsidy that must be made up by increasing taxes paid by all taxpayers.

In view of the political realities of the situation, the Pro-Life movement may be able to give a reassurance to the Pro-Choice movement that, consistent with the democratic process, abortion will not be criminalized until such time as an overwhelming consensus is reached that this should, indeed, be the case. This is, to all intents and purposes, a meaningless concession. Such a law would be ineffective anyway until and unless an overwhelming consensus is reached, something of which the Pro-Choice movement should be fully aware.

Still, should the Pro-Choice movement balk at eliminating all forms of government support (financial and otherwise) for abortion, the Pro-Life movement must seek legal redress. As we have seen, it is both inconsistent and unconstitutional for the Pro-Choice movement to demand the right to choose whether or not to have an abortion, or support or promote abortion, and yet at the same time deny others the right to choose whether or not to pay for that abortion through the use of their tax monies. A challenge to federal, state and local government support in any form for abortions should, on legal grounds, have a good chance of becoming law — to say nothing of saving massive amounts of money that, in these times of economic turmoil, could certainly be put to better use.

Failing that, an option that might be considered is a "tax revolt," although such action cannot be recommended except as a last resort against a State that has, in effect, become a tyranny. Although the position was equivocal (being based on private judgment about the morality of the action), during the Vietnam War, a number of people either refused to pay taxes at all, or withheld a portion of their taxes. Many of them ended up in prison, but if the 51% of the population that, according to a recent Gallup Poll describe themselves as "Pro-Life" refused to pay unjust taxes, the government would be forced to capitulate. Such a move, of course, would be feasible only after all legal means were exhausted, including bringing the case to the Supreme Court, which, if it wishes to retain its credibility, could not rationally allow free choice to obtain an abortion while denying free choice to pay for it.

Removal of all forms of government support at all levels for abortion in any way shape or form is only a part of the solution, although it would constitute in and of itself a major victory. Such an effort should, in the interests of equal rights for all, be led by the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU would otherwise have to admit publicly that the rights they demand for their preferred groups and causes do not, in fact, apply equally to all.

Further, removing all forms of government support at all levels would convince a great many people, trained to look to the State as the arbiter of right and wrong, that abortion might not be quite as fundamental a right as Pro-Choice adherents insist, and go a long way toward persuading people that all human beings, including fetuses (Latin for "unborn human being") are persons within the natural law context of the United States Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence which (while not itself law) gives context to the Constitution.

Two more things are necessary, both of which we will cover in the next and final posting in this series.

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Personhood and the Ontology of Personalism, Part XIII

In the previous posting in this series we noted that, according to Rev. William Ferree, eulogized on his death in 1985 as "America's greatest social philosopher," even super-heroic individual virtue has little if any chance of ameliorating a social evil. As the paraphrase of the passage from Introduction to Social Justice pointed out, "Her [Jane Jones'] mistake was to attack a social evil with only individual means." The question becomes, "How should she have gone about it?"

The Personhood Movement and the Pro-Life movement could, of course, continue to do exactly what they are doing: stage public demonstrations and distribute propaganda (in the good sense) with the end of enacting a law or adopting a constitutional amendment the object of which is to prevent abortion. We have seen, however, that simply passing a law or even amending the Constitution is, absent public support, ineffectual and can even bring about greater evils than the one presumably being eliminated.

The ineffectiveness of the usual approach (aside from its implicit denial of individual sovereignty within the social order and its reliance on the coercive power of the State to impose desired ends) is evident once we internalize the basic principles of social justice. Primarily, as Father Ferree points out in his unfinished ms., Forty Years After . . . A Second Call to Battle (c. 1985), such demonstrations, necessary and useful as they might be to raise public consciousness of an issue and even in saving infants' and mothers' lives on an individual basis, all have one fatal weakness: they are all inevitably demands that somebody else do something, i.e., stop having, performing, supporting, or promoting abortions. The demonstrator is, socially speaking, completely ineffectual, although left with a feeling of great virtue and vast superiority over other, less enlightened people who "don't get it." The institution of abortion as a socially acceptable thing is left unchanged, except perhaps to strengthen the resolve of Pro-Choice adherents to resist the efforts of the "antis" to take away their right to choose.

We find the answer to this seemingly insoluble situation in the laws and characteristics of social justice. As Father Ferree explains in Introduction to Social Justice (52),

Another corollary of this characteristic of Social Justice (that it is never finished) is that it embraces a rigid obligation. In the past when it was not seen very clearly how the duty of reform would fall upon the individual conscience, the idea became widespread that reform was a kind of special vocation, like that to the priesthood, or the religious life. It was all very good for those people who liked that sort of thing, but if one did not like that sort of thing, he left it alone.

All that is changed! Since we know that everyone, even the weakest and youngest of human beings, can work directly on the Common Good at the level where he lives, and since each one "has the duty" to reorganize his own natural medium of life whenever it makes the practice of individual virtue difficult or impossible, then every single person must face the direct and strict obligation of reorganizing his life and the life around him, so that the individual perfection both of himself and of his immediate neighbors will become possible. This idea should not be taken alone, it should be held only in conjunction with the characteristics we have already seen, namely, that one cannot practice Social Justice alone as an individual, but only with others; and that the realization of Social Justice takes time.

That is, when individual virtue cannot function, or does so partially or inadequately, the solution is to organize with others, and work directly not on the specific problem itself, but on the surrounding institutions of the common good that are "allowing" the problem to continue or, in extreme cases, causing the problem.

With respect to abortion and the effort to get the fetus recognized as a person in conformity with the principles of the natural moral law on which the United States was founded, this is a two-step process, which we will begin examining in the next posting in this series.

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Personhood and the Ontology of Personalism, Part XII

As we have seen in the previous postings in this series, the Pro-Choice position seems to have the Pro-Life position completely boxed in. In substantiation, we have the clear teaching in moral philosophy that if a bad law, even a very bad law, does not force us personally to do evil, we must permit the law to continue, if our taking action would reasonably be expected to disrupt significantly or destroy the social order. Social order — the network of institutions known as the common good — is such a great good that we must allow even incredible evil to continue if stopping the evil would destroy or materially harm the social order. To put an end to the matter, we are constantly told that abortion on demand is the law of the land. It must be permitted and supported without question with all the resources of the State and the people.

Regardless of the shoddy legal and social reasoning behind such assertions, the Pro-Life movement, and (evidently) the Personhood Movement to some degree appear to have accepted this understanding of the situation. Consequently (so the reasoning seems to go), if the law can be changed, then the coercive power of the State and all the resources of the nation can be used to stop abortion rather than protect and promote it. This understanding ignores both political and social reality, and the act of social justice.

As we previously noted in this series, simply passing a law — whether in the form of an Amendment to the Constitution or a Supreme Court decision — does nothing to change a situation if people don't want it to be changed. Prohibition, for example, while intended to eliminate the presumed scourge of drunkenness and all the crime and sin associated with the consumption of alcohol, caused massive upheaval in the social order. Public opinion was opposed to Prohibition to such an extent that conventional government and rule of law virtually disappeared in some areas of the country.

The Supreme Court's decision in Scott v. Sandford (60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857)) that upheld the right to own slaves everywhere in the United States and overturned the Missouri Compromise of 1820 was itself effectively overturned within five years by the bloodiest war in American history. The Supreme Court's role in exacerbating the conflict between Pro-Slavery adherents and Abolitionists in the Dred Scott decision, combined with the presumed economic necessity of chattel slavery argued in David Christy's 1855 Cotton is King, has not been adequately studied or appreciated as a direct cause of the Civil War.

The situation seems hopeless — which is precisely what it is . . . at least from the standpoint of individual and individualistic efforts to solve the problem. To illustrate this, let's paraphrase a passage from Rev. William Ferree's, Introduction to Social Justice (44-45), substituting "abortion" for "honesty."

The question is: What can Jane Jones do as an individual? She might, for instance, decide to give the community "a good example" of a Pro-Life approach to the problem. That is, she could refuse to obtain an abortion, regardless of the circumstances surrounding her situation (e.g., rape, incest, lack of adequate or secure income, social embarrassment, etc.), and allow herself to be showcased as an exemplar of adherence to Pro-Life principles. This sounds good; but, remembering that what is wrong with that community is that everyone considers it normal to have an abortion under these and similar circumstances, we might readily calculate the chances that Jane Jones' heroic adherence to Pro-Life principles would have of reforming the community. When she refuses to go along with the dictates of public opinion, she will be idolized briefly by a relatively small segment of the population, vilified and ridiculed in the media, and shunned by family and friends for making the wrong choice. As soon as the next cause célèbre comes along, she will be forgotten, having lost in the interim her job, her reputation, and virtually all hope of a normal life in society. It is unlikely that her example will attract many followers among women seeking abortions or men promoting them. Her mistake was to attack a social evil with only individual means.

The question becomes what to do about this situation. We will start to look at that in the next posting in this series.

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