News from the Network, Vol. 6, No. 13

CESJ had a rather unpleasant situation crop up this past week.  We won’t go into details, but it serves as yet one more example of the incredible obtuseness of adherents of what we’re starting to call “the new socialism.”  Most of them, of course, deny that they are socialists, but anyone who abolishes private property, or would do so, given half a chance, is a socialist.

The Greatest Danger to Religion Today

Venerable Fulton Sheen (and St. Pius X, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, Pius XII, etc., etc., etc.) identified the greatest danger to Catholic doctrine today (and, oddly enough, to all religion, organized or otherwise) as the rejection of the first principle of reason.  This first principle of reason is that a thing cannot both "be" and "not be."

How Everyone Can Own Land Directly

Let’s take a brief break from the series on Poland.  Not that Poland is unimportant, but we noted in yesterday’s posting that there is a way in which all Poles can own — and own directly — the land and natural resources of Poland.

Mazurek Dąbrowskiego, VII: How the Poles Can Own Poland

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In the previous postings we’ve covered how ordinary Poles can own machinery and other forms of man-made capital, but what about the country itself?  Is there a way the people of Poland can actually own Poland?

Mazurek Dąbrowskiego, VI: Credit Vouchers, NOT Share Vouchers

The word “voucher” is pretty much a dirty word in Central and Eastern Europe when connected with “privatization.”  It gets almost the same kneejerk reaction as “school voucher” does in certain circles in the United States.  This writer recalls when he was in Moscow (Russia, not Idaho), he was told that just mentioning “voucher” in a barroom was as provocative as wearing an orange ribbon in certain areas of Chicago or Boston on March 17^th.

News from the Network, Vol. 6, No. 12

The “Cyprus Crisis” is the best recent example of how not to use your commercial and central banking system.  The banks in Cyprus are stuffed with cash, but the country is having a financial crisis.  How can that be?

Mazurek Dąbrowskiego, V: The Ownership Advantage

Question: When poor workers compete with rich owners for financing out of existing savings, who comes out on top?  Answer: Who cares?  Worker ownership can be financed better out of future savings than past savings.  In any event, worker-owned companies (well, those with Justice-Based Management features) tend to be more profitable than other companies.

Mazurek Dąbrowskiego, IV: Expanded Capital Ownership

As we saw in yesterday’s posting, the goal is to get capital ownership into the hands not just of ordinary workers, but everybody.  The question is, then, ownership of what?  Doesn’t everything already have an owner?

Mazurek Dąbrowskiego, III: A Different Look at Finance

In yesterday’s posting, we noted that the key to maintaining a just economy is to focus on the future.  What can exist is always much more than what does exist.  That being the case, why waste your time on what you can’t change anyway?

Mazurek Dąbrowskiego, II: Focus on the Future

Last week we mentioned that “John Smith,” a Polish journalist, thought he might be able to introduce the Just Third Way and Capital Homesteading into Poland.  This is an interesting prospect, because this writer’s first published article (in a now-defunct magazine) was on the original proposal to privatize State-owned companies.  Everything we predicted in the article came to pass — unfortunately.

News from the Network, Vol. 6, No. 11

The Big News this week is the election of Pope Francis — not “the First.”  You can’t have a “first” until you have a “second,” just as you can’t have a “first annual” anything.  (And the millennium did so start on January 1, 2001, because there is no such thing as “Year 0” in any calendar ever devised.)

Mazurek Dąbrowskiego, I: Poland is Not Yet Lost

The national anthem of Poland is Mazurek Dąbrowskiego, which translates as “Poland is Not Yet Lost.”  This is appropriate, for the country currently has the opportunity to implement a program of expanded capital ownership that will put it out far ahead of any competition in Europe.

State Sovereignty . . . Or Sovereignty of the People?

As the Preamble to the Constitution clearly states, “We, the People” are the source of all rights and powers that we have delegated to the government so that it may carry out its proper function.  This is in strict accordance with the political philosophy of Saint Robert Cardinal Bellarmine, with which most of the Founding Fathers were familiar through John Locke and Algernon Sidney, although George Mason of Gunston Hall may have read Bellarmine directly.

The Family of Man

A lot of people don’t realize it, but Family and Church are discrete societies of their own.  They are distinct from the civil order, the State, and are called "domestic society" and "religious society," respectively.

Legislation by Judiciary

Here’s today’s brief history lesson.  The Roman emperors preferred to respond to specific circumstances by deciding cases on an individual basis without getting a law passed.  This was to maintain the fiction that the Senate was still in charge, and only the Senate could pass laws.

News from the Network, Vol. 6, No. 10

It’s official (at least according to news reports): “ ‘We Hate Math’ 4 in 10 Americans — A Majority.”  Need we say more?  And we were beating ourselves up over how long it’s taking for people to catch on to the common sense of binary economics and the Just Third Way.

Gold is Not Enough, V: Debt Money v. Asset Money

As we have seen, the Keynesian solution to shortfalls in income is to increase government spending.  This can be done either by raising taxes, which leaves people less money to spend, or by issuing more debt to inflate the currency . . . which increases prices, causing people to spend less money.

Gold is Not Enough, IV: Productive and Non-Productive Activity

Today we continue publishing a slightly modified version of the letter we sent to Virginia Delegate Bob Marshall on February 27, 2013 in our ongoing effort to get Bob to talk to CESJ president Norman Kurland about Bob’s proposal to study the feasibility of implementing an all-gold currency in Virginia.

Gold is Not Enough, III: Rich Money, Poor Money

Yesterday we looked at some more reasons why gold is not adequate as the whole of the money supply.  The fact is, when you realize that all money is a contract, and (in a sense) all contracts are money, it’s rather silly to insist that gold be used to meet the terms of all contracts . . . even if what the people were exchanging is (for example), lawn mowing for wheat.

Gold is Not Enough, II: Gold and Supply and Demand

Today’s posting continues the most recent letter we sent to Virginia Delegate Bob Marshall.  (We split it up for easy reading and edited it somewhat for continuity — necessary when you split up a single letter over several days’ worth of blog postings.)

News from the Network, Vol. 6, No. 09

Guy S. out in Iowa has been pointing out that the so-called “Sequestration” cuts are being offset by the cash that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is pumping into the economy.  The effect, of course, is to divert money from government programs to holders of government debt whose bonds are being purchased.