We realize we’re completely out of touch with reality by
ignoring such controversies as whether the
Greek debt crisis should make the stock market go up or down (or down or up, or
even sideways), or whether to have fish, or beans and rice for lunch, but we
just thought the following might be of more real interest to people seeking
solutions instead of more problems:
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| A free plug provided by Guy S. |
• The article that appeared two weeks
ago in Homiletic and Pastoral Review,
“Pope
Francis and the Just Third Way”, seems to have
generated more than the usual number of comments, twenty-seven as of this
morning. A quick glance over recent
articles reveals that the average number of comments is two, with a maximum of
seven.
• A group of Catholics
in Australia have been sending links to “Pope Francis and the Just Third Way”
to members of the Australian hierarchy.
• We are currently
investigating the possibilities of having “Pope Francis and the Just Third Way”
translated into Spanish, French, and Portuguese for distribution and
publication in areas speaking those languages.
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| "Guys ... we might want to rethink our monetary and fiscal policy...." |
• Græcum est, non potest legi — which is Latin for “It’s all Greek to
me.” All the negotiators, bargainers,
pleaders, heroes, and villains in the Homeric epic of the
Greek debt crisis, a financial Trojan Horse, are managing to overlook one simple fact: You
can’t consume what hasn’t been produced. The Greek Welfare State, however — every
Welfare State, in fact — is predicated on the assumption that you can consume without producing. All you have to do is redistribute what
others have produced, either by direct taxation or the hidden tax of inflation. Not
surprisingly, this violates Corollary One of the Number One Rule of
Economics. The Rule, as Adam Smith
stated it in The Wealth of Nations,
is that, “Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production.” Corollary One, therefore, is that in order to
consume, you must produce. This is the
principle behind “Say’s Law of Markets”: It is impossible to consume in any
amount greater than what you or others have produced, whether by your labor,
your land, or your capital. (In binary
economics, of course, we combine land and human artifacts under “capital” as
the non-human factors of production.) If
the Greek government or those seeking to (re)impose austerity (that,
astonishingly, didn’t work for some reason. . . .) want the solution to work,
they must first put the Greek economy back on a productive footing — and the
best way to do that is by an aggressive program of expanded capital ownership
along the lines recommended in CESJ’s Capital
Homesteading proposal.
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| Bellarmine: Rights are inherent in the people, not the State. |
• We’re tempted to
qualify this item with “allegedly,” but it appears to be authentic. Jeffrey
Sachs has come out against natural law theory and the inalienable rights
listed in the Declaration of Independence as the foundation of the United States
of America. In “A Call to Virtue,” an
article Sachs published in the Jesuit magazine America, he seems to believe that eliminating the means by which
people acquire and develop virtue — exercise of our natural (inalienable)
rights — is the way to become virtuous, evidently by divine fiat. Sachs seems remarkably ill-informed for a
“Top Vatican adviser.” He appears to be
completely clueless about the fact that the natural rights of life, liberty,
and property specified in the Virginia Declaration of Rights and carried over
(mostly) into the Declaration of Independence are grounded solidly on the
principles of Aristotelian-Thomism, which is also the basis of Catholic social
teaching, and which were articulated by St. Robert Cardinal Bellarmine, S.J., a
Doctor of the Catholic Church, who is noted for his opposition to divine right
theory and advocacy of democracy.
Bellarmine’s theories as corrected by Pope Pius XI are integral to the
pope’s social doctrine, and also guided America’s Founding Fathers, both
directly (thanks to George Mason of Gunston Hall) and indirectly through the
writings of Algernon Sidney. Sach’s
orientation seems to be that the State grants rights to people, not the “Catholic”
theory that “We, the People” make a revocable
grant of rights to the State, as Aquinas made clear in his treatise on
government, De Regimine Principum. Sach’s ostensible position is what gave the
United States such judicial abominations as the notorious Dred Scott decision,
the Slaughterhouse Cases, Roe v. Wade, and a lengthening list of
other examples of “raw judicial power.”
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| Dred Scott: "They did it to me, why not to you?" |
• In another oddity of
interpretation, the United States Supreme Court found that the
Fourteenth Amendment “requires” that states permit same-sex marriage. This, of course, effectively nullifies the
Tenth Amendment, which states, “The powers
not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to
the States, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” Interestingly, William Crosskey, possibly the
greatest constitutional scholar of the twentieth century, claimed that the
Supreme Court’s 1873 decision in the Slaughterhouse
Cases effectively nullified the Fourteenth Amendment, intended in part to overturn Scott v. Sandford (the Dred Scott case) — the end result being
that the Supreme Court just used an amendment it previously nullified to knock
out another amendment. This is
consistent with Crosskey’s analysis. As
he explained, “So, the Court’s
opinion in the Slaughter-House Cases was, undoubtedly,
most craftily written; written so as to enable the Court,
with a good face, in future cases, to jump either way: to observe the intended
meaning of the Privileges and Immunities Clause if that seemed unavoidable, or,
in the alternative, to destroy the clause utterly if this seemed safe. And the fact that this elaborate preparation
was made also means that the majority Justices saw and fully comprehended the
possibility of the intermediate, plain, and sensible meaning of the Privileges
and Immunities Clause here expounded, to which, indeed, Justice Bradley [Joseph
Philo Bradley, 1813-1892] called attention, in his dissenting opinion. So, the majority must, as the minority
charged, already have determined, if
they dared, to destroy this new provision of the Constitution [the Fourteenth
Amendment] completely.” (William
Winslow Crosskey, Politics and the
Constitution in the History of the United States. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago
Press, 1953, 1130.) Not surprisingly, the Slaughterhouse decision was cited in Roe v. Wade.
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 60 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, Canada, the United Kingdom, Kenya, and Australia. The most
popular postings this past week were “Halloween Horror Special XIII: Mean Green
Mother from Outer Space,” “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property,” “Yet More on
Property, II: Hudock’s Alleged Errors,” “Avoiding Monetary Meltdown, II: Salmon
P. Chase and the Greenbacks,” and “Crisis of Reason, III: Symptoms of
Irrationality.”
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#