News from the Network, Vol. 2, No. 12

Despite a slight decline early today in the stock market, it does not yet appear that the gamblers and speculators on Wall Street have caught on to the fact that the announcement earlier this week that the Federal Reserve plans to pump $1.2 trillion into the market is not exactly a "good thing." Creating money to purchase existing equity shares and debt instruments is a very serious mistake, and one of the primary causes of the current financial and economic meltdown as well as the Crash of 1929.

New money that is not linked directly through private property to the present value of production, whether existing production, or investment in new capital formation intended to produce future marketable goods and services, is purely inflationary. Any rise in share values that results from such an infusion of cash is completely artificial and is not related to an actual increase in the real value of the company underlying the shares. It is, in effect, trying to solve the problems caused by the previous bubble by blowing it up again, thereby setting the system up for another, worse decline.

Nevertheless, our efforts to insert some sanity into the system continue:

• We received word yesterday that the annual rally at the Federal Reserve building in Washington, DC, has been moved from the previously-announced date of Friday, April 17, 2009, to Wednesday, April 15, 2009. Anyone who has managed to file his or her annual declaration of tax dependency (a.k.a., "Federal Form 1040" or some variation thereof) is urged to attend in order to politely and respectfully protest policies by the Federal Reserve and the federal government that distort what should be a just, straightforward, and easy-to-understand tax system for raising revenue to meet current government expenditures without borrowing, and to suggest reforms of the system to restore the Federal Reserve and the Internal Revenue Service to their original functions. Again: The annual rally at the Federal Reserve has been moved to Wednesday, April 15, 2009. Further details will follow.

• CESJ's monthly "Executive Committee Meeting" was held on Wednesday, March 18, 2009. This marked the beginning of an experiment with a new format, in which the business meeting required by the bylaws is held on a different day from the news and information session, used mostly for instructional and educational purposes.

• Review copies of CESJ's publications, Curing World Poverty (1994), Capital Homesteading for Every Citizen (2004), In Defense of Human Dignity (2008) and William Cobbett's The Emigrant's Guide (2008) were, at the suggestion of Anna Lemaire of Liguorian magazine's advertising department, sent to that magazine. The Reverend Cassian Yuhaus, C.P., Rector of the Shrine of St. Ann's Basilica in Scranton, Pennsylvania, also requested a copy of In Defense of Human Dignity.

• Ms. Shirley Starke, coordinator of the "Irish Special Interest Group" of American Mensa, Ltd., sent in some commentary on our "Easter, 1916" posting on March 17, 2009. Ms. Starke stated that the posting was "wonderful," and requested permission (granted) to include the posting in the next issue of the SIG's newsletter.

• We sent a letter to the "Redemptorists," a Catholic religious congregation, that (according to news reports), lost approximately a third of their assets in the Madoff ponzi scheme. We invited them to dialogue with us on ways to implement the Just Third Way as one possible means to help prevent such scandals from reoccurring. If your organization was similarly affected, or if you are simply interested in advancing the cause of economic justice for all, check out the volunteer opportunities listed on the CESJ web site, and consider participating in the rally at the Federal Reserve on April 15, 2009 in Washington, DC.

• As of this morning, we have had visitors from 47 different countries and 50 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this blog over the past two months. Most visitors are from the United States, with Canada, the UK, the Philippines, and Finland rounding out our "top five" countries where we're read the most. The top spots for the average time spent on the blog, however, go to Venezuela, Jamaica, Ghana, New Zealand, and Brazil, in that order. Our most popular posting is still the one on Abraham Lincoln's 1862 Homestead Act. Of the remaining "Top Ten," except for one news notes posting, all are concerned with the flaws of Keynesian economics. For some reason, the average time spent reading the posting on the Keynesian "paradox of thrift" is more than an hour and a half, which suggests that some people may be studying this particular Keynesian fallacy very closely.

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.