Breathe easy. The CIA
has just released a report on “Area 51” in Nevada. In a stunning revelation, it has absolutely
nothing to do with extraterrestrial beings.
Instead, Area 51 was used to test the U-2 spy plane . . . which has
nothing to do with Bono (or Cher).
Or does it? After
all, Sonny Bono was mysteriously killed, probably on secret orders from the CIA
after he did too many favors for Mickey Mouse, the corporate logo for America,
Inc., and a suspicious character, whose popularity in the media may have been
endangering that of the Irish rock group that has never given a concert in
Roswell, New Mexico.
Coincidence? We think
not.
And if you think that is atypical of the sort of
argumentation that seems to persuade people today, late last week someone
attempted to clinch an argument against the monetary and fiscal policy of the
Just Third Way by declaring that taxes are the rent we pay on the money created
by government. . . .
To counter this sort of thinking (or lack thereof), here is
what the Just Third Way network has been doing for the past week:
• Tuesday’s Wall
Street Journal had an interesting op-ed piece on the late Howard Zinn by
Dr. David J. Bobb. Zinn seems to have
epitomized, if not been one of the inspirations for the “Double V” of modern
academia: Vitriolic and Vindictive (or Venal and Vicious, if you prefer). Zinn’s work helped inculcate generations of
American students with a near-pathological contempt for and loathing of America
as well as the natural rights of life, liberty, and property. Someone once commented that Zinn’s book, A People’s History of the United States
(1980), became a bestseller due to so many professors forcing their students to
buy it. An avowed communist and atheist
who has been all-but canonized by the Catholic Worker movement, Zinn had an
enormous, if often uncredited, influence on popular understanding of what is
incorrectly termed “social justice,” that which
solidarist economist Dr. Franz Mueller called “meliorism,” i.e., the demand that the material needs of “the poor” come above
everything else, and are the sole focus of all activity, domestic, civil, and
religious — a view specifically condemned by the late Pope John Paul II (Ecclesia in America, § 67). Zinn had
his imitators, conscious or not. The
books of bestselling author Kirkpatrick Sale come to mind, e.g., The Conquest of
Paradise (1991), “paradise” being the theocratic Aztec Empire that
practiced cannibalism and human sacrifice on a gargantuan scale, and engaged in
genocide to provide sufficient victims for the altar and the dinner table.
• The “long lost” book by Fulton Sheen that shows the
importance of freedom to religion, and of private property in capital
(“creative wealth”) to freedom, is in the final stages of pre-press before
being submitted to the printer. The
projected release date is September 2, 2013, Labor Day, not September 1 as we
originally reported. A number of
prominent figures have said they are considering giving endorsements, and
possibly writing reviews.
• The stock market has been taking a beating this week, in
our opinion because of the uncertainty over the situation in Egypt combined
with the general aimlessness of the “recovery” efforts. The real problem, of course, is twofold. One, production and consumption have been
separated by the concentration of capital ownership, by a private sector elite
in capitalism and a public sector elite in socialism. Since, as Adam Smith pointed out in The Wealth of Nations (1776) as the
fundamental principle of economics, the whole purpose of production is
consumption, the solution is obvious: reconnect production and consumption by
an aggressive program of widespread capital ownership. Two, when the financing of new capital
formation is restricted to existing accumulations of savings, ownership
(control) of all new capital is, as a rule, restricted to those who are already
rich, or to the State bureaucracy who control the coercive power of the State
to force redistribution. Shifting to
future savings as the source for all new financially feasible capital and
replacing traditional forms of collateral with capital credit insurance and
reinsurance has the potential to make every child, woman, and man a direct
owner of capital, reconnecting production and consumption.
• Out of the blue this morning we received notice of another
“long lost” work by Fulton Sheen on the reasons why socialism is antithetical
to the fundamental principles of all religions.
Also in the document is testimony from a Rabbi and a Protestant
minister, both of which state their agreement with Sheen. At the same time, we came across the full
text of Orestes Brownson’s 1849 essay on socialism. The two could very easily be combined with
Pope Leo XIII’s “forgotten” encyclical warning against the dangers of “Christian
socialism,” Graves de Communi Re (“On
Christian Democracy”), 1901, for a short pamphlet reemphasizing the importance
of widespread capital ownership.
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 51 different countries and 48 states and provinces in the United
States and Canada to this blog over the past two months. Most visitors are from
the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and India. The most
popular postings this past week were “If You Have a Free Moment,” “Thomas
Hobbes on Private Property,” “Shakespeare Speaks! (Again),” “News from the
Network, Vol. 6, No. 30,” and “Some More Questions About Future Savings.”
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#