Panic in the streets — the financial, political, and academic powers-that-be were taken completely off-guard by the poor jobs data released this morning . . . after only years of consistently prating that the jobs situation is not going to get better any time soon. Of course, none of this was remembered during the usual stock market surge earlier in the week in anticipation of an allegedly improving jobs picture.
Of course, we could get away from this jobs and stock market obsession just by enacting a Capital Homestead Act . . . but if we did the sensible thing, what would we have to complain about, and who would we blame when things go wrong? We'd have no one but ourselves, and finally have to take responsibility for our own actions.
We're a great believer in personal responsibility — when something happens around here, we're usually responsible. So here's what we've been doing to advance the adoption of a Capital Homestead Act by 2012:
• We finished and sent off our response to the criticisms of Supporting Life: The Case for a Pro-Life Economic Agenda. Perhaps not surprisingly, the rebuttal of the items raised in the critique is almost half again as long as Supporting Life! Why? There were a number of fundamental issues raised that required going back to the root of the criticism — and that required in-depth analysis to a degree that would ordinarily not be the case. When we get the chance, we're planning on editing the response for release as a CESJ publication, but, as the response was written in the form of a letter, we have to remove some references to specific individuals to depersonalize it.
• At the same time, we expect to have the "Kindle" version of Supporting Life ready for submission to Amazon by early next week. If this experiment works, expect to see a lot more short pieces available in this popular format at a very low price.
• Today we submitted the paperwork to get CESJ publications distributed in Australia through our print on demand subcontractor.
• We've been re-reading Harold Moulton's 1943 essay, The New Philosophy of Public Debt. It's interesting to see how the justifications for an ever-increasing public debt have changed over the years, sometimes to the extent of directly contradicting the previous justification. Reading some of Moulton's sarcastic (for him) comments, however, we get the sense that the powers-that-be will say anything if the end result justifies what they want to do anyway.
• As of this morning, we have had visitors from 46 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, Canada, the Philippines, Australia, and the UK. People in Venezuela, Portugal, Greece, India and Canada spent the most average time on the blog. The most popular posting this past week was "Aristotle on Private Property." "Thomas Hobbes on Private Property" dropped to second place, followed by "Nader Kindles Fires of Revolt," "Why the Old Jobs Aren't Coming Back," and the sixth posting on "Economic Recovery."
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 Global Justice Movement Website
This is the "Global Justice Movement" (dot org) we refer to in the title of this blog.
