At this time of year, today especially, it is customary to
rack (not “wrack,” evidently) one’s brains to try and figure out something for
which to be thankful. This is especially
the case if you’ve been invited somewhere for dinner and the tradition of
making a short speech covering what you have to be thankful for is suddenly
sprung on you.
If you go first, you sound trite, being limited to
generalities that you hope won’t offend anyone or sound (too) boastful. If you go last, you sound like an echo. If you go somewhere in-between, you just know
that somebody is going to top you in gratitude for something.
It should be manifestly true that being thankful generally
requires something for which one can be thankful.
That being the case, we’re giving you something everybody can be
thankful for without sounding trite, boastful, an echo, or running the risk of
being topped by someone.
You can be thankful we’re still working to advance the Just
Third Way. And just what is “the Just
Third Way”? Perhaps you can think of it
as a sort of “unified field theory” for the social sciences.
In general, the Just Third Way is a set of fundamental
principles built on the foundation of the natural law that can be adapted to
any principle-based institution or group of institutions in the world. We believe these are best stated in CESJ’s Core
Values and Code
of Ethics.
In particular, the Just Third Way is a free market system
that economically empowers all individuals and families through the
democratization of money and credit for new production, with universal access
to direct ownership of income-producing capital. This socio-economic paradigm as applied in the Capital Homesteading
proposal offers the logical “third alternative” to the two predominant
socio-economic paradigms today — capitalism and socialism/communism.
In capitalism, economic power and private ownership of
capital are concentrated in a small percentage of the population (i.e., a few own). In socialism/communism, the state owns and/or
controls productive capital (i.e.,
nobody owns).
In the “Just Third Way,” widespread dispersion of capital
ownership functions as the economic check against the potential for corruption
and abuse, including by the government. Restoration
of the full rights of property and extension of private property to every
individual, serves as the basis for economic democracy, the necessary
foundation for effective political democracy.
The “Just Third Way” differs markedly from other versions of
the “Third Way,” such as the version espoused by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair,
which attempts to give moral legitimacy to the Wall Street capitalist approach
to economic globalization and blends political democracy with economic
plutocracy.
The new paradigm views as a virtue healthy self-interest (i.e., where individual good is directed
toward, or in harmony with, the common good). It views greed and envy, on the other hand, as
vices, both destructive of a moral and just society. In contrast to capitalism that
institutionalizes greed, or socialism that institutionalizes envy, the “Just
Third Way” institutionalizes justice — especially economic justice.
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