News from the Network, Vol. 4, No. 21

This has been a slow week for "hard news." It seems that most of our time has been taken up in philosophical discussions. Consequently, we simply cut and pasted our blog postings from a copy we had of the paper on the Abraham Federation. Unfortunately, we were using an outdated version of the paper that needs revision. Since we were posting the paper to save the trouble of writing something ourselves, it would have defeated the purpose to do the necessarily revisions before posting. We took the easy way out. We posted something innocuous (ha) to replace yesterday's posting, and "suspended" posting the rest of the paper until "further notice" (which is author talk for "until somebody else does all the work"). The rest of the news items for this week are important, if not particularly exiting to hear about:

• Our CESJ Summer Fellows from Mauritania and Niger have been delving very deeply into the Just Third Way. They seem particularly enthusiastic about the potential of the Just Third Way as applied in Capital Homesteading to solve what seem to be perennial problems in Africa.

• The Fellows were introduced to Pollant Mpofu in the U.K. (via skype, of course). They seem to think there is a great deal that can be done to advance the Just Third Way through collaborative effort and opening doors.

• A professor of Medieval philosophy, along with Catholic and Muslim thinkers, has supported CESJ's position on the basis of the natural law: human reason. Faith is, of course, important, and can even help remove barriers to our understanding, but has its own role to fill, and does not replace reason. This is a critical issue, for we believe that Kelso and Adler's three principles of economic justice, as well as the four pillars of an economically just society, can be known by reason, or (as Aquinas put it) "not on documents of faith, but on the statements and reasons of the philosophers themselves." Basing the natural law on anything other than reason justifies the imposition of religious law and beliefs by force.

• Our revision of Capital Homesteading for Every Citizen is coming along. If you have the current version — don't worry, it's still valid. We just want to update figures and clarify our proposals to reform banking and financial institutions, as well as eliminate some redundancies and integrate the material in the appendices more into the main text. In short, it's mostly a "housekeeping" thing, and does not change the basic principles or theory.

• Wendy in Denver has been moving one or two mountains (and, given the size of the "hills" around Denver, that's something to brag about) to make connections, network, open doors, and set up meetings with potential prime movers. As a result, we may be able to send a delegation to the National Lawyers Association conference in June, and combine it with other important events.

• Our draft of the "brief" study of the monetary, credit, financial and banking theory behind binary economics and the Just Third Way is finished — at least this writer's part. We still need to add in material about the theory behind Justice-Based Management, and review the adaptation of Norman Kurland's Prices and Money paper.

• As of this morning, we have had visitors from 50 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, India, Canada, and Australia. People in Ghana, Barbados, Qatar, Belgium and India spent the most average time on the blog. The most popular posting this past week was once again "Thomas Hobbes on Private Property," followed by "Aristotle on Private Property," "Finding the Right Negatives," "In the Blink of an Eye," and the tribute to Robert Woodman.

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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