Confusion over the Affordable Care Act seems to be
increasing. Getting a straight story or
response from anybody seems to be impossible.
This may be because of the imposition of political goals on what should
be medical, ethical, and religious issues, a danger against which Dr. Leo
Alexander warned in 1949 in his landmark article in the New England Journal of Medicine,
“Medical Science Under Dictatorship.”
We believe that the growth of State power into areas in
which it does not belong is due in large measure to the fact that fewer people
than ever before own capital. As
American Statesman Daniel Webster reminded people in 1820, “Power naturally and
necessarily follows property.” When most
people own nothing, they become dependent on those who do own, or those who
control those who own.
To reverse this trend, here is what the Just Third Way
network has been doing over the past week:
• Members of the CESJ core group had a very successful
meeting with Joseph G. in Pennsylvania.
Joseph is a deacon in his church as well as a businessman, and has
expressed a great deal of enthusiasm for the Just Third Way. He has suggested a number of individuals and
organizations with which we should be in contact, and is working to open the
door himself, handling all the details.
He is also exploring some possible business situations in which Just
Third Way principles can be implemented under existing law, e.g., a JBM company that is 100% owned
by the workers through an S-Corp ESOP.
• The University of Notre Dame du Lac has agreed to
implement the provisions of the Affordable Care Act. Essentially, this permits the federal
government to dictate religious practices and beliefs, which some think might
be a violation of First Amendment rights.
It is interesting to speculate on how much leverage the government would
have, had Notre Dame gotten behind the “Pro-Life Economic Agenda” outlined in Supporting Life,
which was inspired by Notre Dame’s grant of an honorary degree to President
Obama over the protests of many students, faculty, and friends of the
University around the world.
• Most people when they think of State interference in
religion are reminded of Sir Thomas More, who was “judicially murdered” by
Henry VIII Tudor of England for refusing to swear that the King of England was
also the supreme head of the church.
They often fail to recall that there was an earlier example of an effort
to establish government supremacy over religion: the murder of Thomas
à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury at the behest of Henry II Plantagenet, which, ironically, was probably not even what Henry II intended. Perhaps not surprisingly, Henry VIII Tudor
put Becket on trial posthumously for high treason and had him convicted. A Just Third Way “take” on the story can be
found in the foreword of the Once-and-Future Books edition of
Robert Hugh Benson’s Saint Thomas à Becket, The Holy Blissful Martyr.
• 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 55 different countries and 50 states and provinces in the United
States and Canada to this blog over the past two months. Most visitors are from
the United States, the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Germany, and Canada. The most
popular postings this past week were “Some Thoughts on Money, Part II,”
“Aristotle on Private Property,” “Voluntary Taxation? Not in a Free Society,” “Thomas
Hobbes on Private Property,” and “A Brief Course in Banking Theory, I: Banks of
Deposit.”
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#
