From the perspective of trying to educate our policymakers and the academic economists who indoctrinate our policymakers in the dogmas of Keynesian economics, the outlook for the economy is extremely grim. We are told repeatedly that the recession is over, that recovery is underway, and so on, so forth.
At the same time, we hear how the government is planning to spend itself (or, more accurately, us) into oblivion, a new housing crisis is imminent, employment statistics will improve only slowly (if at all), blah, blah, etc., etc. (To save trouble from here on, we will simply use "BBEE" in this edition instead of taking the time to write it out.)
To be blunt, the so-called "recovery" seems to be benefiting only those people and organizations that were instrumental in causing the whole thing: feckless speculators, wild gamblers, companies and financial institutions engaged in shady practices, BBEE. The proposed solution is to get out of debt by spending more, ignore the need to rebuild America's productive economy, redistribute, screw foreign creditors, chastise our allies for unimportant slips of the tongue, BBEE.
Since I'm now tired of even writing BBEE, I will simply point out that some extremely interesting things are happening, although you'd never know it from watching or reading the news. Nevertheless, the Just Third Way has been making great strides over the past couple of months, with a number of important events happening over the past week:
• The Big News this week (and it really is) is a telephone call we received from a newspaper in Poland. A co-editor of the financial website www.obserwatorfinansowy.pl operated under the auspices of the National Bank of Poland is putting together a retrospective on the five years that have passed since the death of His Holiness Pope John Paul II. They wanted to get CESJ's perspective on the pope's extraordinarily positive reception of CESJ's ideas on economic personalism embodied in the Just Third Way as shown in the two papal audiences and the series of seminars at the Vatican on the importance of private property in securing and protecting the dignity of each person.They spent an hour and a half on the phone with Dr. Norman Kurland and Mr. Michael Greaney, and is working to see if they can arrange their schedule to appear as a special speaker at the annual peaceful "Own the Fed" rally in Washington, DC on April 15, 2010. In the next couple of days they will be meeting with Ms. Anna Walentynowicz, the woman whose firing from the giant Gdansk Shipyard provided the spark that led to the formation of Solidarity. They stated they expected her to be very enthusiastic about the Just Third Way as an ethical and financially responsible way to address the growing problems in Poland. They also plan to explore the possibility of translating a number of CESJ's books and other materials into Polish and German.
• CESJ's monthly Executive Committee meeting was held Wednesday of this week. A number of important topics were covered, the most important of which were the initiative in the city of Detroit and the planning for the annual peaceful demonstration outside the Federal Reserve in Washington, DC on April 15, 2010.
• The President of Ireland, Ms. Mary McAleese, issued a letter to all people of Irish birth or descent in the world on St. Patrick's Day. Prominent in the message was a call for help for Ireland's economy: "The commitment of our global Irish family is now being harnessed as never before with initiatives like the Farmleigh Conference and the new Global Irish Network, all intent on putting their talents and ideas at the service of Ireland's economic recovery." Clearly, it is our personal responsibility to draw the attention of our leaders and others in influential positions to the possibilities inherent in proposals such as Capital Homesteading for Every Citizen that has the potential to empower each and every person both economically and, following Daniel Webster's dictum that "power naturally and necessarily follows property," politically as well. In this way the declaration contained in the Easter Proclamation of 1916 can be fulfilled: "We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible. The long usurpation of that right by a foreign people and government has not extinguished the right, nor can it ever be extinguished except by the destruction of the Irish people. In every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty: six times during the past three hundred years they have asserted it in arms. Standing on that fundamental right and again asserting it in arms in the face of the world, we hereby proclaim the Irish Republic as a Sovereign Independent State, and we pledge our lives and the lives of our comrades-in-arms to the cause of its freedom, of its welfare, and its exaltation among the nations."
• CESJ's publications project is moving forward. We expect to have a definite date set soon for the release date for Dr. Harold Moulton's 1935 classic, The Formation of Capital.
• CESJ friend and supporter Dr. Norman Bailey, former chief economic advisor to the National Security Council under President Reagan, will be traveling soon to Poland to take part in a presidential conference on the future development of that country.
• As of this morning, we have had visitors from 43 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, Brazil, and Ireland. People in France, Ghana, the United States, Namibia, and the United Kingdom spent the most average time on the blog. The most popular postings are "Thomas Hobbes on Private Property." Guy Stevenson's "Expanded Capital Ownership Now," "Aristotle on Private Property," Part 20 of "The Political Animal," and Part 3 of the Restoration of Property series are the most popular postings.
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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