Friday, February 20, 2015

News from the Network, Vol. 8, No. 8


Despite the extremely tense world situation, the stock market is booming; up nearly 150 points just today to yet another record high.  At the same time, analysts are advising ordinary people not to buy hard assets like houses that they can actually use, but to put their chips on the stock market.

One wonders, exactly, how people are going to make money buying high and selling low.  Of course, the alternative is to buy at a fair price and make money by receiving dividends, a.k.a., a share of the profits.  That’s what a Capital Homestead Act would do:

A piece of the action.  It just needed industry and commerce.
• Thanks to Guy “the Fulton Sheen Guy” Stevenson for this news item.  According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, the U.S. faces a $4 trillion retirement savings shortfall.  Given that CESJ’s Capital Homesteading proposal is based on a very conservative $2 trillion worth of new capital investment each year (and keep in mind that “savings = investment”), the presumed shortfall in retirement savings could be made up in two years — less, if new capital is formed at a faster rate.  Even better, the proposal is that everyone qualifies for a capital credit allotment from birth to death, so “retirement” is not relevant.  Thus, the sooner a Capital Homestead Act is adopted, the sooner everyone’s income (not just “retirement”)  will be secure.

Archbishop John Ireland
• The CESJ Executive Committee meeting was on Monday of this week.  Although it was the third day of a three-day weekend, the meeting was very well attended.  Although the main purpose of the meeting (aside from ordinary business) was to plan for the upcoming annual celebration and rally at the Federal Reserve, the dire world situation diverted much of the discussion into other channels.

Cardinal Gibbons and Theodore Roosevelt
• The manuscript of Prophet of Modernism is nearly ready for review, and a publisher has been tentatively selected for submission.  We are waiting on the arrival of two biographies of James Cardinal Gibbons, whose efforts were key in staving off the effects of bad philosophy in religion in the late nineteenth century, and who played a key role in the saga, although not, perhaps, as great a role as Archbishop John Ireland.

Robert Hugh Benson
• Reception of the series tying the fiction of Msgr. Robert Hugh Benson, particularly Lord of the World, to the Just Third Way has been positive . . . if you define “positive” as three times the normal visits to the blog.  Readers are reminded that much of Benson’s fiction is available with forewords that do the same thing, as does the “appreciation,” So Much Generosity.

• As of this morning, we have had visitors from 49 different countries and 48 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 Australia. The most popular postings this past week were “Lord of the World, I: The Papal Reading List,” “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property,” “The Purpose of Production,” “Lord of the World, II: Introducing Robert Hugh Benson,” and “CESJ Core Group Meets ‘Pope’s Rabbi’.”

Sources for Benson’s novels and related material:







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.

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