As the capitalists and socialists continue their past
savings-based “tastes-great-less-filling” argument that manages to avoid any of
the real issues (such as why do both insist that only past savings can be used
to finance new capital formation), the stock market is wavering.
Not that the stock market, up or down, is any real
indication of what’s going on in the real world, but it is something of an
economic indicator. Not of economic
growth or decline, of course, but of the gamblers’ confidence in how various
factors will affect their bets on the economy, so that they will know whether
to place their bets to go long or short.
For example, employment figures are important not because
human labor is responsible for the bulk of production in a modern economy, but
because it means that consumption income for those now employed will come from
the private sector cost-push inflation instead of public sector demand-pull
inflation.
Translation: Paying higher wages drives up the cost of
producing marketable goods and services, which costs are passed on to the
consumer. Multiplying or creating jobs
when technology can do the same thing cheaper also increases costs that are
passed on to the consumer. This is
“cost-push inflation” — the rising cost of an input to production “pushes”
prices up.
This is not to say that higher wages and unnecessary “job
creation” also contribute to “demand-pull inflation.” When the wages and job creation are
subsidized, the money comes out of increased government debt — money
creation. Whether paid to consumers as
welfare or to workers whose employment is effectively boondoggling, effective
demand in the economy increases, which “pulls” prices higher in response,
hence, “demand-pull inflation.”
Of course, all this would be moot if 1) all people were capital
owners and the price of labor could rise or sink to its “real” level, 2) all financing
for new, non-speculative capital investment came out of future savings instead
of past savings, and 3) government was prohibited from creating money (“emitting
bills of credit”), living within its tax revenues, and borrowing out of
existing savings to cover temporary shortfalls or meet emergencies.
That’s what Capital Homesteading would do. To bring this about, here’s what we’ve been
doing this past week:
• All eyes this week were on the re-enactment of the “March
on Washington,” even more than were on the sesquicentennial of the Battle of
Gettysburg earlier this year. What is
interesting about the comparison is that, where Gettysburg contributed greatly
to bringing the Civil War to a successful conclusion, the March on Washington
set the stage for great advances in securing and protecting civil rights
equality. The difference is that where
the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments and the success of the Homestead Act
followed Gettysburg, the Civil Rights movement failed to secure its gains by
building capital ownership into ordinary people. All the rhetoric in the speeches during the
reenactment was for “jobs” instead of ownership, and government action instead
of the “people power” that Martin Luther King, Jr. was able to mobilize.
• The “Just Third Way Edition” of Fulton J. Sheen’s 1940
opus Freedom Under God will be
officially published as of Labor Day, September 2, 2013. The book itself is in the public domain and
can be republished by anyone, having lost its copyright protection on January 1,
1968 due to the failure of the copyright holder, the Bruce Publishing Company
of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to renew the copyright registration as required. The “value added” material in CESJ’s Just
Third Way Edition — the Foreword, Bibliography, Index, and additional notes and
annotation — however, are copyrighted by CESJ.
• If you like the cover to Freedom Under God, you can thank Photographer Louis Fabian
Bachrach, who gave his gracious permission for the use of the photograph he
took of Fulton Sheen in 1965.
• If you would like a free .pdf of the text of Freedom Under God for review or
endorsement, please send a request to “publications [at] cesj [dot] org.” If you are a reviewer, tell us a little bit
about the publication where the review will appear. If you are endorsing, give us a line or two
about yourself.
• CESJ cannot
take retail orders for books, only bulk/wholesale orders for drop shipment from
our distributor. Please do not attempt to order individual copies or small quantities
from CESJ. We will post a notice
when the book is available in retail outlets.
At this time we are accepting bulk/wholesale orders only, which we
expect to be shipped within three to four weeks.
• The bulk/wholesale price of Freedom Under God is $16.00 per copy for 10-99 copies, plus
shipping. At this time we can only ship
to street addresses in the U.S. and Canada.
The minimum order is ten (10) copies.
Send an e-mail to “publications [at] cesj [dot] org” for a price quote
and payment information, including a full street address so that we can
calculate the shipping cost accurately. Advance
payment is required. Please do not
telephone. CESJ is all-volunteer and
cannot guarantee 24-hour or weekend/holiday phone coverage.
• As a historical note tying in to the March on Washington, it’s significant that “The Conspiracy” only gained
credibility in the United States after the “free land” available under the
Homestead Act effectively ran out in the 1890s, and the lack of consumption
power combined with too-rapid expansion of industrial and commercial capacity
triggered the Panic of 1893 and the Great Depression of 1893-1895. Talk of “The Conspiracy” went into remission
in the U.S. following the end of the Great Depression due to bumper crops of
wheat in 1897 and 1898 and crop failures in Europe. At the same time, “The Conspiracy” gained a
great deal of traction in Europe where capital ownership was becoming much more
concentrated than in the U.S. and economic hardship was spreading. The Sixteenth Amendment and the Federal
Reserve Act instituted critically needed monetary and fiscal reforms, but were
diverted by the need to finance U.S. entry into World War I, and hijacked
completely to finance and implement the New Deal and then finance World War II. The New Deal turned the proletarian
(propertyless) condition in America from an unfortunate side-effect of
advancing technology and lack of financing for widespread capital ownership
into a presumably essential condition for society to advance. The “American Dream” was transformed from
small capital ownership to high wages, benefits, and government welfare.
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 73 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, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and India. The most
popular postings this past week were “Shakespeare Speaks! (Again),” “If You
Have a Free Moment,” “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property,” “News from the
Network, Vol. 6, No. 34,” and “Was Pope John Paul II a Socialist?”
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#