As of this writing the stock market is up. This allegedly somehow reflects the improving
economy as seen in the lack of employment opportunities. How this is a good thing is a mystery, for in
this writer’s opinion the stock market is far from being the leading economic
indicators it’s touted to be.
This, however, is not the week we’ve chosen to rant about
the crazy stock market . . . much.
Instead, there have been some extremely interesting things happening:
• Guy Stevenson, Our Man In Iowa, has been putting together
a rather significant number of videos to explain the Just Third Way and Capital
Homesteading. As a financial professional,
Guy is probably in a better position than some to explain what strikes most
people as something so esoteric that they think they can never understand:
money, credit, banking and finance. It
would take too long to explain each of his videos in detail, but you can watchthem for free on his YouTube channel. If
you want to watch some short videos that will probably answer some of your
questions, pay a visit.
• Guy also came up with another interesting information
tidbit. Per the “Unemployment InsuranceWeekly Claims Report”
of the United States Department of Labor, a weekly report on (obviously)
unemployment claims released yesterday, May 16, 2013, the seasonally adjusted
claims rate for the week ended May 11, 2013 showed an increase of 32,000 over
the previous week. This does not bode
well for the students who will be looking for jobs as they graduate this month,
many of which assumed large burdens of debt in order to get jobs, and which
they now have little hope of repaying.
• Yesterday two very interesting reports came out of the
Vatican. One was essentially a call by
Pope Francis to break the “new, invisible and at times virtual, tyranny” of
finance.
This recalled Pope Pius XI’s comments
about the “immense power and despotic economic
dictatorship [over invested funds] . . . consolidated in the hands of a few.” This sounds like the “usual” barbs directed
at the presumably uncharitable rich.
Consider it, however, in light of Pope Francis’s call the same day formore active Catholics. This begins to sound as if Pope Francis has been reading Quadragesimo Anno and Divini Redemptoris, and may be looking
to revive “Catholic Action” as one instrument to restructure the social order
and restore the natural law in personal, social, and economic life. We believe that we have what the pope is
looking for in the Just Third Way, especially (for economic reform) as applied
in Capital Homesteading.
• The CESJ monthly Executive Committee meeting was held on
Wednesday, May 15, 2013. Most of the
discussion other than the required business focused on the possibility of
having a symposium in Cleveland later this year. Due to time constraints, a number of news and
information items were left for the June meeting.
• Norman Kurland had a few exchanges with Bill Still, the
monetary historian and theorist whose videos and talks have gained him a wide
following. We believe we may have
discerned certain differences in our Just Third Way understanding of money,
credit, banking, and finance that might preclude our coming together to effect
what we believe are necessary changes not only in existing institutions, but
our understanding of them. Mr. Still has
definite views on money that we do not necessarily share.
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 65 different countries and 49 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 India. People in Pakistan,
El Salvador, Turkey, Ireland, and Argentina 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,” “Defining Money, VII: Expanded Capital Ownership,” and “Why
a Central Bank, I: What Do Banks Do?”
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#