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.
This includes people who would give the State control over
money and credit. Not just its proper
role in setting standards and regulating, but actually creating money by
emitting bills of credit . . . in the United States, a power that the
individual states do not have explicitly under the Constitution, and the federal government does not
have by deleting the power to emit bills of credit from the enumerated powers.
So why is the Federal Reserve doing nothing but monetizing
government debt and buying tons of toxic “assets”? Because people (especially politicians and
central bankers) don’t understand money and credit, or banking and private
property . . . all of which are traditional targets of socialism, old and
new. That’s one reason why we
demonstrate outside the Federal Reserve every April:
• Don’t forget to clear your calendar for Friday, April 26,
2013 and the annual rally at the Federal Reserve in Washington, DC to demonstrate
for democratic access to capital credit for a “Capital Homestead Act”
so ordinary people can become capital owners without redistributing the wealth
belonging to the rich or increasing government debt, and the money supply can
be backed with private sector assets instead of government debt. 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.
• “Bitcoins” seem to be all the rage these days.
In the past week alone we’ve gotten two enquiries about them. The authorities seem baffled by the system,
but if they understood money and credit, they’d realize that it’s simply an
electronic version of something that’s been going on for millennia: people
entering into and keeping promises, using a negotiable instrument (“money”) to
convey the consideration. Once you know
what a contract is and that money is anything that can be accepted in
settlement of a debt, it all falls into place.
• Despite all evidence to the contrary, most people still
insist that the only way to finance new capital formation is to cut consumption
and accumulate money savings. That means
we either need the rich to save to invest and create jobs (not likely as
technology replaces human labor, so the more the rich invest in advanced
technology, the fewer jobs are created), or the State to redistribute wealth or
take it over outright. Not considered is
the possibility, as Chesterton and Belloc pointed out, that ordinary people
might actually own some capital without either the rich or the State having to
be generous — just give people their natural rights to life, liberty and
property. Moulton showed us how,
while Kelso and Adler showed how to use advanced financing techniques to create
a “Nation of Owners.” Sadly, many
“Chestertonians” and distributists have gone over to the dark side of the new
socialism by refusing to consider — not necessarily accept, just consider —
the potential of the Just Third Way.
• This being “Holy Week” and concert week and extra rehearsal
week, etc., etc., etc., that’s all we know about. There’s doubtless a lot more going on, but
we’ve been too busy to look.
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 55 different countries and 51 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 Saudi
Arabia. People in Jamaica, Singapore, Indonesia, Sweden, and Norway 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,” “Some
Thoughts on Money, II: The Different Schools of Thought,” “Gold is Not Enough,
II: Gold and Supply and Demand,” and “State Sovereignty . . . or Sovereignty of
the People.”
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.
