Rollercoaster fans should really be loving the stock
market. Just this morning it was down a
couple hundred, then up, and then down again. . . . Workers in an ESOP that
have independent appraisals of the shares in their accounts are probably
feeling pretty smug right about now — they are insulated to some degree from
the antics of the speculators on Wall Street; an offer that differs materially
from the appraised market value of the company is very carefully vetted, and the share valuation is not quite as
subject to manipulation; can you say “DOL Investigation”?
Of course, it would be best if most ESOPs integrated
features of Justice-Based
Management and Justice-Based
Leadership into the plan. That’s
actually relatively easy to do under existing law, especially if an ESOP Trust
owns 100% of the outstanding shares of the company, the company takes the
S-Corp election, finances growth out of new share issuances, and pays out all
earnings as tax-deductible dividends.
(Check out Equity Expansion International,
Inc., for more on this.)
It would, in fact, be relatively easy to implement something
similar throughout the economy by enacting a Capital Homestead Act. Not right away, of course. Next week will be fine. In the meantime:
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| God the Meanie v. God the Nice Guy |
• CESJ recently received
a copy of Joseph C. Atkinson’s Biblical
& Theological Foundations of the Family: The Domestic Church (2014) as
a gift from Deacon Joseph Gorini.
Atkinson’s book (at least as much as we’ve read so far) appears to be an
extraordinarily in-depth analysis of the Judeo-Christian concept of marriage
and family. Admittedly, much of this is
over our heads, especially those of us who don’t happen to be fluent in Hebrew
(there are a large number of quotes in Hebrew), but we have gleaned a few
insights so far, especially the insistence that, from the orthodox Christian
point of view, the Old Testament (the Old Covenant) oversimplified as being
based on justice, and the New Testament (the New Covenant) oversimplified as
being based on charity, form an integrated whole. The New Covenant does not replace the Old
Covenant, but fulfills it. Similarly,
charity does not replace justice, faith does not replace reason, opinion does
not replace knowledge, and so on, ad
infinitum. Or ad nauseum — today’s modernists (liberals, new things in a new way)
and traditionalists (conservatives, old things in the old way) have a seemingly
endless supply of arguments explaining to orthodox progressives (a term to be
understood in its 19th century sense of old things in a new way) why
everything they know is wrong and truth is no longer true.
• We recently came
across a book by Thomas and Rosita Rourke, A
Theory of Personalism (2005) that has a very good presentation on the
Just Third Way and CESJ. We plan on
reviewing it as soon as we finish reading it and get around to it, but you
might want to check it out yourself before then.
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| Donnelly advocating a new Populist Party purged of W.J. Bryan |
• If Jay Leno were still on the air and doing his
“headlines” routine, we’d have one for him.
During our research on the Populist politician Ignatius Loyola Donnelly (1831-1901), “the
Sage of Nininger,” the economic guru of Msgr. John A. Ryan, author of A Living Wage (1906) and Distributive Justice (1916), we came
across this startling declaration: “‘Sage of Nininger’ Ignatius Donnelly to Wed
His Typewriter.” It was from The Meriden Daily Republican of
Thursday, January 27, 1898, on page 2.
Reading the article, we discovered that “typewriter” is an outdated term
for “typist,” and Donnelly, 66, was marrying his 20-year old secretary, but
still . . .
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| When government promises are trash. |
• A letter to the
editor in today’s Wall Street Journal
stated that the Federal Reserve’s current policies have the same effect as
revenue to the U.S. Treasury, and equated government borrowing with government
revenue. This is where a little
knowledge of basic accounting would go a long way. Revenue is income to the recipient, while
borrowing is a loan that has to be repaid out of future revenue. Thus, for every dollar the government borrows
to avoid raising taxes now means that
expenditures will have to be reduced in the future
by an equal amount, and taxes raised to cover both current and past
expenditures, or the outstanding debt will have to be increased, slowly at
first, but growing exponentially as politicians continue to try and mortgage
future tax collections to pay for current expenditures.
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 46 different countries and 52 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, Indonesia, and India. The most
popular postings this past week were “The Purpose of Production,” “Why Did Nixon
Take the Dollar Off the Gold Standard?” “What’s Wrong with the Pro-Life
Movement?” “Where Men are Men,” and “CESJ Core Group Meets ‘Pope’s Rabbi’.”
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#
