The stock market has been up and
down this week like a rubber ball. This
is bad, because people think that the fluctuations actually mean something, and
are taking the stock market as a leading economic indicator. News flash, folks, it’s not. It’s not a real economic indicator at all.
 |
| Can you say "economic indicator"? |
Neither is “new jobs ‘created’,” for
that matter. Companies only hire new
workers for the same reason they invest in new machinery: there is existing
demand to be filled. Even then, you only
hire new workers after you’ve gotten all the overtime you can out of your
existing workers. If anything, “new jobs
‘created’” is a lagging economic
indicator. Plus, in an economy in which
human labor is being replaced by machinery at an increasing rate, “new jobs”
doesn’t necessarily mean what “they” think it means. What does mean something? Try this:
 |
| C'mon. Make our day. |
• Amazon Smile
program. Here are the instructions
for using the Amazon Smile program. It’s
pretty easy, but you have to follow the directions exactly, or CESJ won’t get
the 0.5% of your net purchase(s) as your donation (it adds up). First, go to https://smile.amazon.com/. Next, sign in to your account. (If you don’t have an account with Amazon,
you can create one by clicking on the tiny little link below the “Sign in using
our secure server” button.) Once you
have signed into your account, you need to select CESJ as your charity — and
you have to be careful to do it exactly this way: in the
space provided for “Or select your own charitable organization” type “Center for Economic and Social Justice
Arlington.” If you type anything
else, you will either get no results or more than you want to sift
through. Once you’ve typed (or copied
and pasted) “Center for Economic and
Social Justice Arlington” into the space provided, hit “Select” — and you
will be taken to the Amazon shopping site, all ready to go. That’s it.
Oh, and be sure to share this information with your friends and
neighbors.
• The CESJ core group had a very productive meeting this
morning with the representative of a state agency that could be very
important. The agency is starting to
look at the potential of JBM S-Corp ESOPs as a way of enhancing the bottom line
for small and minority business start-ups.
A company that is organized as an S-Corp and is 100% owned by the
workers through an ESOP trust pays no state or federal corporate income tax
under current U.S. law. That means that
cash flow could be enhanced by as much as 50%, depending on the level of
taxation — and it gets pretty steep in some states. CESJ, of course, is a non-profit and does not
do any professional consulting, but Equity
Expansion International, Inc., a for-profit company, has agreed to use
CESJ’s principles and the Just Third Way when doing deals.
• We received our copy of Dr. Anthony Esolen’s book, Reclaiming
Catholic Social Teaching (2014) in the mail yesterday. We’ve only had a chance to get about twenty
or so pages in to it, but so far he has stressed almost to redundancy (which,
considering the state of things today, is a really good idea in order to break
through the fog of ignorance and bad ideas) Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s dictum
that a small error in the beginning leads to great errors in the end. He doesn’t put it that way, of course — this
is a much easier book to read than anything Aristotle or Aquinas wrote. He just makes the same case as Mortimer Adler
that you can’t fix a system when the underlying assumptions are bad, e.g., an economic system based on the
slavery of past savings can’t be fixed simply because past savings are not the
sole source of investment financing.
It’s a bad assumption on which to base your economic, monetary, and
fiscal policy for the simple fact that it isn’t true, as Dr. Harold G. Moulton
explained in 1935 in The
Formation of Capital.
• We sent another batch of outreach material this week to
some potential door openers and movers and shakers. This is useful even if you only get a
response one out of fifty or a hundred times.
That hundredth individual may be just the one who has been looking for
us and the Just Third Way. In any event,
it’s ahead of the odds. Kipling said it
was only one in a thousand (to stretch his meaning a little).
 |
| Yeah. We found the free meme generator. |
• Our blog series on common sense has been eliciting quite a
bit of positive commentary. There have,
in fact, been only two negative comments, one of which being that it is “too
religious.” We assume the critic thought
that because two of the three thinkers we’re profiling were Catholic priests,
thereby making it automatically “religious.”
True, there is a lot of mention about God, religion, ’n stuff, but it’s
kind of hard to discuss common sense within the Aristotelian-Thomist
philosophical framework without
mentioning these things. Read carefully,
however, and you’ll see what most people are seeing: the universal principles
of common sense applied to a discussion of where things went wrong with Church,
State, and Family, mostly through the effect that bad ideas about God,
religion, ’n stuff had in Academia, from whence it spread to the rest of
society. If you’re not allowed to talk
about these things, it’s awfully hard to discuss what went wrong because people
refused to talk about them.
• Interestingly, some individuals and groups whose positions
are refuted in the blog series seem to be lying low and hoping that nobody will
read it. If so, they are out of
luck. Our readership has tripled since
the series started. We must be saying
something right to somebody.
• As of this morning, we have had visitors
from 57 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, Russia, Canada, and India. The most popular
postings this past week in descending order were “Thomas Hobbes on Private
Property,” “Halloween Horror Special XIII: Mean Green Mother from Outer Space,”
“Aristotle on Private Property,” “The
American Chesterton, I: The Triumph of the Will,” and “Book Review: A Field
Guide for the Hero’s Journey.”
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#