As of this writing (10 am), the stock market is
plunging. The world is coming to an
end. Again. According to the Washington Post and the Wall
Street Journal, this is due to the rapid decline in the price of oil. The fall in oil stocks is having a ripple
effect throughout the market, with the perceived increase in consumer spending
due to the illusion of increased disposable income not enough to offset the
perceived decrease in future revenue from oil.
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| The Tulip Mania of 1636; Everybody got taken for a ride. |
You, of course, see the problem. As with everything else on Wall Street, the
issue is not grounded in reality, but in what people think is going to happen
if something they think might happen has a potential effect. Facts?
Who needs facts? The secondary
market in debt and equity runs on the triumph of opinion over knowledge, not on
how well or ill the primary market that produces and distributes marketable
goods and services does its thing.
That may be why this has been such a “thin” news week, but
here goes:
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| Agrarian Socialist Henry George (1839-1897) |
• The discussion with
the georgists was unilaterally terminated.
This was due to some of the georgists making assertions about the
Catholic Church that any reasonable person would construe as an attack. This blog has not posted attacks on Judaism,
Islam, or any other organized religion, nor will an exception be made for the
Catholic Church. A call to flood the
blog with spam was handled by Google when the georgist robot triggered an
automatic filter that requires anyone commenting (including the owner of the
blog!) to verify that he or she is not a robot.
We apologize for any inconvenience this causes anyone trying to comment,
but we had no control over it.
• Filming of the video
to launch the Campaign for Distributive Justice has been postponed due to
unforeseen circumstances. We will work
to launch on or before the nineteenth using still photos, replacing them in the
future with a video when it is filmed.
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| Proto-Populist Adam Smith? |
• We came across an interesting fact this week about Adam
Smith. Prior to the publication of The Wealth of Nations in 1776, the focus
of the relatively new science of political economy was how to accumulate as
much gold and silver in your country to enrich the sovereign and make the
nation powerful — in short, mercantilism.
In the introduction to Book IV of The
Wealth of Nations, however, Smith claimed that the purpose of economic
activity is to enrich both the sovereign and
the people — a radical idea at the time (and he wrote it before the Declaration
of Independence). The Just Third Way
takes Smith’s anti-mercantilist orientation one more step, and claims that the
purpose of economic activity is to enrich the people . . . to whom the State
must come for a grant of taxes in order to defray the legitimate costs of
government.
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| Twenty-first Century Lincoln Rick Santorum? |
• Rick Santorum is
exploring another run for the presidency in 2016. CESJ president Norman Kurland and CESJ
counselor, the late Father Cassian Yuhaus, met with Santorum some time back
when he was a senator. Santorum was
positive about the Just Third Way, and opened the door for Norm to present CESJ’s
Iraq Oil Proposal at the Pentagon. If
someone could open the door again to Santorum, he might see how a presidential
candidate who espouses Capital Homesteading and its potential to restore not
merely the American economy, but the American Dream for everyone, could
virtually walk into the White House in 2016.
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 59 different countries and 55 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, India, and Australia. The most
popular postings this past week were “Two Key Questions for the Georgists,” “Aristotle
on Private Property,” “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property,” “In Your Face,” and “The
Purpose of Production.”
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#