Washington Post: "Economic Signs Turn From Grim To Worse"

In the musical 1776, the John Adams character spends the first few minutes of the show loudly singing about how Congress should begin discussing his proposal on independence for the American colonies. The other characters sing back (even more loudly), telling John Adams to sit down and be quiet so that they can get back to swatting flies and moaning and groaning about how bad things are — the important issues in Philadelphia in late June of 1776.

As readers of this blog and participants in the binary economics discussion group are aware, the Global Justice Movement in general and CESJ in particular have been working very hard to try and bring Capital Homesteading to the attention of the powers-that-be. We've had some success, but by and large have not yet gained the ear of anyone in a position to do anything. Instead, we are treated to headlines like those in today's Washington Post that inform us on page one of "Another Wave of Evidence Of a Deepening Recession."

The time may be ripe to get politicians to listen to proposals on Capital Homesteading . . . if they can be persuaded that, far from being hopeless, the current crisis is the best opportunity in a long time to implement something for which the time is always ripe: the Just Third Way. Write to your legislator, president, prime minister, prince, or pooh-bah, and let him or her know that there is an alternative available to what even the Post is now describing as a grim situation. Otherwise, we may soon become accustomed in our daily newspapers to reading such heartening opening sentences as, "On the eve of what is expected to be the clearest evidence yet of the nation's deepening recession, bad news rolled in from across the economy and the world."

As Father William Ferree pointed out in his short pamphlet, Introduction to Social Justice, there is no excuse for this sort of thing — nor are we helpless. After reminding us that we each have a personal responsibility to work together to change things, he concluded,

No problem can ever be too big, too complex, too widespread, too vast for Social Justice to tackle. There is in the field of Social Justice no such thing as an impossible situation. . . . The completed doctrine of Social Justice places in our hands instruments of such power as to be inconceivable to former generations. . . . The power that we have now to change any institution of life, the grip that we have on the social order as a whole, was always there but we did not know it and we did not know how to use it.

Now we know.

That is the difference.