It is, of course, too early to tell, but we’ve seen signs of
something of a sea-change in people’s attitudes toward the Just Third Way. The “official” jobs report is “encouraging,” the
stock market is shooting toward a new high (and will probably hit 15,000 again by COB
today), and so on.
Of course, at the same time, there seem to be an inordinate
number of people un- or underemployed.
It doesn’t matter where we go, people are either requesting direct help
or prayers to “find a job.” The soaring
market follows a drastic downturn a few days ago, and is completely unrelated
to the productive sector that it allegedly reflects. (There is also the rather chilling fact that Spring
of 1929 was also characterized by similar wild fluctuations in the stock market
and a downturn in productive activity as the market for consumer durables hit a
temporary glut.)
Anyway, here’s what we’ve been doing to try and stave off
disaster:
• We continue to get positive feedback from last week’s Coalition
for Capital Homesteading’s Rally at the Federal Reserve and the CESJ annual
celebration. The video of Dave Hamill’s
speech to his fellow Evangelical Christians
is being very well received and has received a number of positive comments on
Facebook.
• Earlier today we received a comment on this blog to the
effect that the CESJ “core group” seems to be regarded in the light of a
“professor of political economy extraordinaire.” This is very encouraging, especially in light
of recent comments to the effect that the CESJ core group is presumably not
promoting an understanding of binary economics consistent with the vision of Louis
Kelso.
• We do not agree that our understanding of binary economics
is flawed. We are, however, certainly
open to correction and discussion that explains where and how we may be wrong,
but simply asserting that we are wrong is less than helpful. In response to the assertions, however, we
are preparing a response that addresses all the issues that have been raised to
date. (We can hardly address issues that
have not been raised. If people remain
silent about what they think we’re doing wrong, they can hardly complain when
we fail to correct ourselves.) A link to
the response will be posted when it has been completed.
• Interestingly, this past week we received three
unsolicited comments from three unrelated individuals from three different
countries expressing concern over the exclusivity evidently being shown by
“Chestertonians” and “distributists,” that is, people who admire the work of G.
K. Chesterton and promote Chesterton’s economic vision, respectively. According to these individuals, there seems
to have developed a certain “my way or the highway” attitude that excludes or
ignores anything that does not adhere to the dicta laid down by an Inner Circle
of Chestertonians. This is a matter of
some concern to us, for (while we reject the socialism and “faith based
reasoning” that appears to have been injected into distributism), we think that
distributism — as conceived by Hilaire Belloc and Chesterton, anyway — is about
as close to CESJ’s Just Third Way as it is possible to get within a system
circumscribed by the slavery of past savings.
We differ on the source of financing for new capital formation and the
role of the State, but see nothing in the theory of distributism — as
originally conceived — that contradicts the Just Third Way.
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 58 different countries and 53 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, Australia, and Saudi Arabia.
People in El Salvador, Pakistan, Qatar, Portugal, and the United States 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,” “Social
Justice IV: The Characteristics of Social Justice,” “Some Thoughts on Money,
II: The Different Schools of Thought,” and “Defining Money: The Medium of
Exchange.”
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#
