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.)
Be that as it may, it looks as if there’s going to be a
turnover of a lot of the “upper management” at the Vatican, which is all to the
good. It may be that we’ll get some more
openness toward the Just Third Way at least equal to what we’ve had. To further that, here’re this week’s news
items:
• Don’t forget to clear your calendar for Friday, April 26,
2013 and the annual rally at the Federal Reserve. We don’t have all the details yet, but it
looks as if there is going to be some entertainment and a number of interesting
speakers.
• On Monday we had a “get acquainted” meeting with Mary T.,
an attorney from the west coast who has been involved in the privatization of
State-owned enterprises and intercultural litigation.
• CESJ prepared an explanation of how the Just Third Way
might be applied in Poland — and, of course, in the United States or any other
country.
• We’ve started getting rejections for the articles we sent
out this week on the subject of violating the “first principle” of reason. The problem is that many of today’s “experts”
take for granted that something doesn’t have to make sense. It just has to be popular. That being the case, if you can get enough
people to go along with something, no matter how nutty (like Daylight Savings
Time), you can do it. The first
principle of reason, of course, is that a thing cannot both “be” and “not be”
at the same time. Get away from that
fundamental precept of common sense, and everything falls apart. As Fulton Sheen said, you commit “mental
suicide.”
• CESJ president Norman Kurland attended an “Atlantic”
conference. A number of “names” were
there, but nothing substantive was discussed.
• Pope Francis is telling Argentinians not to come to his
inauguration mass, but to give the money to the poor. That's the right idea — drain existing savings out of the
system by putting the money to use right now, and change the way you finance
new capital investment and concentrate ownership. Implementing an aggressiveprogram of expanded capital ownership financed with the present value of future increases in
production instead of past cuts in consumption would free much more in the way
of resources to help the poor — and
put more of the poor in the position of being able to help themselves. The
result would be more money for the poor, and fewer poor that need help.
• The Coalition for Capital Homesteading had a meeting
today, further solidifying plans for Rally at the Federal Reserve on April
26. Things are moving along very well.
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 55 different countries and 52 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 United Kingdom, the Philippines, and India. People
in Nepal, Morocco, Estonia, Argentina, and Singapore spent the most average
time on the blog. The most popular postings this past week were “Thomas Hobbes
on Private Property,” “Aristotle on Private Property,” “A ‘Virginia-Only’
Currency,” “Avoiding Monetary Meltdown, I: Andrew Jackson’s War on the Economy,”
and “Avoiding Monetary Meltdown, II: Salmon P. Chase and the Greenbacks.”
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.
#30#