Stock market soar like eagle . . . by suckering in
turkeys. Frankly, the wild swings in the
stock market really ought to make people a lot more nervous than it does. The same sort of thing was happening about
this time in 1929.
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| Samuel Butler |
What is really needed is to reorient activity along
productive, rather than gambling, lines — or perhaps just print up special
money that can only be used for speculation and gambling on Wall Street, backed
by government debt — sort of like the "Musical Banks" in Samuel Butler's Erewhon. The real money
supply could be restricted to private sector asset-backed currency and all “real
bills,” whether mortgages or bills of exchange; no government bills of credit,
which would be used only in the non-productive sector, i.e., the Wall Street casino.
To pay down the debt, the government would issue money backed only by
debt, and sell it to people who want to gamble in stocks. Profits from the sale of “Wall Street Money”
could be used either to run government or pay down debt, with a preference for
the latter.
Since we don’t have that, however, here’s what we’ve been
doing to advance a more rational economy:
• CESJ had its monthly executive committee meeting on
Monday, May 19, 2014. Most of the
meeting was concerned with reviewing the recent 30th anniversary
celebration and the 10th annual rally at the Federal Reserve. Reactions were all very positive.
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| "The Spirit of '76" |
• The “Unite America Party” (formerly the “American
Revolutionary Party”) is working very hard to finalize its platform. Being based on universal principles, it is,
of course, adoptable by any other political party that wants to embed common
sense into its platform.
• The Justice University concept is getting positive
comments from academics in the United States and other countries. Members of the CESJ core group will be having
a meeting with a well-placed academic next week to discuss how to advance the
concept, as well as other, related objectives.
• Norman Kurland, president of CESJ, is scheduled to be
interviewed by a Polish journalist, Kris Nedzynski, sometime next week, as soon
as they come to a mutually convenient time.
• We received a call from a politician in Nigeria, who says he is ready to launch the Just
Third Way as a way of dealing with many of the troubles afflicting the country. For Nigeria, a uniting factor could be to
take the oil away from the government and vest it in all the people. The politician was also mentioning the idea
of a common market and currency for Africa.
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| Thomas Hobbes, Totalitarian Philosopher |
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 66 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, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and India. The most
popular postings this past week were “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property,” “‘Inequality
Is the Root of All Social Evil’,” “Aristotle on Private Property,” “Why Did
Nixon take the Dollar off the Gold Standard?” and “Statism v. Catholic Social
Teaching, II: Rerum Novarum.”
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#