The Federal Reserve just announced that Americans are wealthier than ever before!
We’re so relieved. We thought the fact
that our income keeps buying less and less, and our liquid assets seem to be
evaporating like we wish the snow outside would (must be selective global
warming that affects only assets, and not ice sets) meant that people as a whole
are getting poorer, not richer.
According to an amusingly snarky news report from Aaron Task
of The Daily Ticker and
Editor-in-Chief of Yahoo! Finance, there are one or two misleading partial
facts that suggest that, while there is certainly more wealth (at least as
measured in inflated Keynesian Kurrency), it’s not spread out very well. . . .
- The Dow is at its highest point in history. The S&P is ’way up. What’s not up? The percentage of Americans who directly own equity in a corporation. Less than 10% of Americans own 80% of publicly traded shares.
- Per capita household wealth is at an all-time high. So is the number of Americans on food stamps. Isn’t it amazing what you can do with averages? Take one dead person, and one live person, and you average out to two half-dead people.
- Nearly one-third of Americans think we’re in a recession. (The rest probably call it by its right name: “depression.”) Thirty-nine percent think the economy can only get worse.
- As of October 2013, real household income has declined 6.3% from December of 2007. Thank you, inflationary stimulus packages that do nothing except raise prices by shoveling money to the rich and drive up speculative values on the stock exchanges so fewer people can afford shares even if they had the money.
- The housing market has rebounded! Yay! Houses are usually the biggest single factor in most people’s calculation of wealth. More Americans are renting (35%) than in 2004 (31%). Boooooo.
- Non-mortgage debt is at an all-time high. And you know what a big factor is? People who were hoodwinked into going back to school to qualify for jobs that don’t exist. They were working two jobs to stay in debt, then lost the job to go to school and assumed another $250,000 in new debt. Oh, sorry. The average student loan debt is only $29,000. We’re saved. Just like with the Affordable Care Act, those who are not in debt will pay down the debt that others incurred. Won’t they?
Okay, let’s get to the real
news items that tell us what’s being done to fix the problem of being so rich
we don’t have any money:
• A number of important connections have been made this past
week. We are in the process of making
arrangements to meet with union leaders, religious leaders, and even possible
funding sources for CESJ. Obviously, we
can’t tell you any more until the actual meetings come off, but things are
looking very good on the networking front.
This shows what just a little door-opening whenever you see an
opportunity can accomplish.
• We may have located “the smoking gun,” so to speak, that
led to the issuance of what is reputedly the first “social encyclical,” Rerum Novarum, by Pope Leo XIII. We located an unpublished manuscript that has
been lying around for more than a century in a university archive without
anyone realizing its significance. It is
a first-hand account by one of the principals involved in a situation that
pitted socialists and capitalists against the Catholic Church in the late 19th
century. Rerum Novarum is important to the Just Third Way because it was the
first encyclical to give a specific remedy to the growing wealth gap and other
social problems: “We have seen that this great labor question cannot be solved
save by assuming as a principle that private ownership must be held sacred and
inviolable. The law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should
be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners.” (Rerum Novarum, § 46.)
• Father Matthew Habiger, O.S.B., Ph.D., a member of the
CESJ Board of Counselors, and a strong supporter of CESJ’s “Pro-Life economic
agenda,” has kicked off an initiative called “50 Million Names.”
CESJ does not take either a Pro-Life or a Pro-Choice position as an
organization, but we do maintain that solving the income problem and addressing
the wealth gap will take away the economic pressures that may induce people to
consider abortion as an expedient.
Something like Capital Homesteading would make choice truly free, at
least in an economic sense, so that people can go with what they truly believe,
rather than what they feel themselves forced into.
• The big news is still that Freedom Under God is available after nearly three-quarters of a
century. CESJ is now taking bulk/wholesale orders (please, no individual
sales). The per unit price for ten or
more copies is $16.00 (20% discount). Shipping
is extra. Send an e-mail to “publications [at] cesj [dot] org”
stating how many copies you want and the street address (no P. O. Boxes) where
you want them delivered. We will get back
to you with the total cost, how to pay, and estimated delivery time. All payments must be made in advance, and
orders are placed only after payment clears.
Individual copies are available from Amazon
and Barnes and Noble,
as well as by special order from many bookstores.
• CESJ offers a 10%
commission on the retail cover price on bulk sales of publications. If you broker a deal with, for example, a
school or civic organization that buys a publication in bulk (i.e., ten copies or more of a single
title), you receive a commission once a transaction has been completed to the
satisfaction of the customer. Thus, if
you get your club or school to purchase, say, ten cases of Freedom Under God (280 copies) or any other CESJ or UVM
publication, the organization would pay CESJ $3,920.00 (280 copies x $20 per
copy, less a 30% discount), plus shipping (the commission is calculated on the
retail cost only, not the shipping). You would receive $560.00. Send an e-mail to “publications [at] cesj [dot] org” for copies of flyers of CESJ and
UVM publications. (CESJ project
participants and UVM shareholders are not
eligible for commissions.)
• So Much Generosity,
the collection of essays about the fiction of Nicholas Cardinal Wiseman, John
Henry Cardinal Newman, and Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson by Michael D. Greaney,
CESJ’s Director of Research. The book is
now available on Amazon
and Barnes and Noble,
and is also available on Kindle.
Many of the essays incorporate elements of the Just Third Way. The book is priced at $20.00, and there is a
20% discount on bulk orders (i.e.,
ten or more), which can be ordered by sending an e-mail to publications [at]
cesj [dot] org.
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 60 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, India, and the Philippines. The
most popular postings this past week were “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property,” “Aristotle
on Private Property,” “Distributive Justice”?, XIX: Henry George and the
Catholic Church,” News from the Network, Vol. 6, No. 48, and “Distributive
Justice”?, XVI: Solemn Nonsense.”
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#
