At least as of this writing, the stock market is soaring to
new heights. Why? According to an article we read yesterday,
credit card companies are reporting record earnings as consumers assume a greater
burden of debt to buy now and pay later.
In today’s hothouse investment environment, this translates into
“greater consumer confidence” on the theory that consumers wouldn’t be going
into debt unless they thought they could pay it off.
Of course, there might be a few rose-colored assumptions
built into that theory. Suppose
consumers are incurring more debt because they need necessities and can’t pay
for them. Consider, after all, the fact
that we can expect sales of consumer durables to start increasing simply
because people have been putting off replacing things since 2008, and they can’t
wait any longer. Or people might be
expecting things to collapse, so they figure to spend now and not pay at all. Or (most likely) people have no income but
are hoping things will turn around, not realizing that paying later for what
you’re buying now decreases your ability to buy in the future and pay in the distant future.
The bottom line?
People are borrowing not to produce themselves, but to purchase what
others produce. This is a virtual
guarantee of institutionalized poverty.
It's also the wrong thing to do. As Maimonides Eighth Order of Charity has it, if you really want to help
the poor, help make them productive so that they no longer need your help.
How to do that? Well,
the Just Third Way suggests itself:
• Sales of CESJ’s
latest “Paradigm Paper,” The Political
Animal: Economic Justice and the Sovereignty of the Human Person, are off
to a good start. The Political Animal, like all CESJ publications, is available in
bulk at substantial savings. With the
20% discount applicable to bulk sales (i.e.,
ten or more copies of a single title), a full case of 50 is $400, plus
shipping. Enquire at “publications [at]
cesj [dot] org” for details and cost of shipping bulk/wholesale orders. Individual copies are available now on Amazon, and on Barnes and Noble. Please
note: CESJ does not sell retail.
• This past Monday,
the CESJ Core Group attended a "Justice University" presentation given by Dr. Norman G. Kurland,
president of CESJ, at the National War College in Washington, DC. A number of key faculty attended the session,
which took place during the lunch break.
While there was not enough time to cover the full relevance of the Just
Third Way to the war on terror, the outline Norm gave was sufficient to provoke
serious commentary and questions, and justify follow-up for future, more
in-depth sessions. Most of the
participants agreed that a course on economics would be useful if integrated
into the curriculum.
• A paper on the
business cycle being prepared by CESJ’s Director of Research for The American Journal of Economics and
Sociology has passed the initial review by the editorial boards of both the
Journal and CESJ. The reaction is that the paper represents a
significant contribution to the understanding of binary economics. Minor adjustments, clarifications, and some
formatting changes are the next step in the process, which should be completed
before the deadline in November.
• A “blockage” in the
revision of CESJ’s bestselling (in small press terms) 1994 compendium Curing World Poverty has been
removed. Recent advances in CESJ’s
understanding of Say’s Law of Markets and money and credit, banking, and
finance are now being incorporated into the existing text, and a new article is
being added to stress the importance of a stable and elastic asset-backed
reserve currency in the elimination of widespread poverty.
• The revision of Capital Homesteading for Every Citizen
is also proceeding apace, with another run-through scheduled as soon as the current
phase of the revision of Curing World
Poverty is completed.
• The Campaign for
Distributive Justice is getting ready for the next phase of preparation with
the completion of an informal survey of high school students. According to the survey, nearly 95% of high
school students are not even aware that something called “distributive justice”
exists. CESJ expects to produce a short
video to launch the project shortly.
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 52 different countries and 44 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, New Zealand, and Australia. The
most popular postings this past week were “Aristotle on Private Property,” “Thomas
Hobbes on Private Property,” “The Purpose of Production,” “Response to
Professor Shakespeare, I: CESJ’s Position,” and “Economics for Ecclesiastics,
I: A Problem.”
Those are the happenings for this week, at least those 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, so we’ll see it before it goes up.
#30#