News from the Network, Vol. 5, No. 15

The big news this week is next week: the annual "Rally at the Fed," co-sponsored by the Coalition for Capital Homesteading and the Center for Economic and Social Justice. The event will be on Friday, April 20, 2012 in front of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors building on Constitution Avenue from 11:30 am to 1:30 pm. If you are in the area, be sure to drop in. If you'd like to carry a sign or hand out literature, you're more than welcome. If you happen to look like Abraham Lincoln . . . have we got a job for you in this year that marks the 150th anniversary of the original 1862 Homestead Act. By next week all the brouhaha over the centennial of the Titanic going down will be old news, and we can concentrate on keeping this country and the rest of the global economy from hitting the skids. In other news this week:

• CNBC analyst Rick Santelli, evidently the inspiration for the Tea Party movement, seems to have an inkling of what's going on, but evidently has never heard of Capital Homesteading. As reported in The Blaze ("CNBC Analyst Loses It Over Obama's Buffett Rule: 'Absolutely Not!'" Jonathan M. Seidl, 04/12/12), Santelli went on what came across as a rant: "People don't really want to hear solutions. They want to change the dialogue, bait and switch, so we get more worried about what people pay, what's fair! You know what, how are my kid's opportunities affected by how many millionaires there are? I don't see that their opportunities are affected! You know what I see that's going to affect their opportunities? 15.6 Trillion!" As readers of this blog are aware, we're run the numbers, and nothing that anyone is proposing does anything to address the real problem which from a tax point of view can be stated as "erosion of the tax base." In English, people aren't making enough from labor to pay taxes, and the government is creating money to cover deficits. Capital Homesteading would solve the problems and more — but only if it's implemented.

• In the Washington Post today, Charles Krauthammer once again sounded as if he's been reading this blog. We always figured Dr. Krauthammer had something on the ball, and that would tend to prove it. If your paper carries his column, you can read what he says (ignoring the Titanic reference; on principle we're disregarding all of them until after April 15th) about "Free-Lunch Egalitarianism." If you get the Post, it's in the 04/13/12 issue, page A17.

• In today's Wall Street Journal, Anne Hendershott and Christopher White (co-authors of the upcoming Beyond the Catholic Culture Wars from Encounter Books — it's not out, we already looked) had an article, "Traditional Catholicism is Winning." (04/13/12, A11.) What is it "they" are "winning"? As the authors explained, after talking about the Young Turks who have turned into the Old Guard, "[I]t [the "aging generation"] is being replaced by younger men and women who are attracted to the church [we figure the editors changed it from "Church"] because of the very timelessness of its teachings. They are attracted to the philosophy, the art, the literature and the theology that make Catholicism countercultural." This is good news for the Just Third Way and its foundation built on the natural law. Frankly, all religions have been afflicted with a tsunami of relativism from both "left" and "right," all based on redefining natural rights and even the natural law itself, all in a fruitless effort to try and force the teachings of the Catholic Church and other faiths and philosophies to conform to the principles of Keynesian economics or some other currency principle school of economics.

• If you haven't read this month's issue of Inside the Vatican, do so. The article "Catholic Teaching and the Elections" is getting some attention in a few quarters, and it looks to get more.

• If you’re upset by the price manipulation of e-books, give yourself a break and download one of the new titles from Universal Values Media available for 99¢, or splurge and get Don’t You Wish! for $2.99.

• Don't forget the Rally at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors building in Washington, DC on Friday, April 20, 2012, from 11:30 am to 1:30 pm. If you can't attend in person, consider sending a sentence or two of support for Capital Homesteading to thirdway [at] cesj [dot] org that (if we have time) could be read at the Rally.

• As of this morning, we have had visitors from 56 different countries and 48 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 UK, India, and Pakistan. People in the Netherlands Antilles, the United Kingdom, the United States, Indonesia and Pakistan spent the most average time on the blog. The most popular postings this past week were "Thomas Hobbes on Private Property," "Guide to Capital Homesteading," "Aristotle on Private Property," "Why Did Nixon Take the Dollar Off the Gold Standard?" and "The Situation in Greece."

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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