This has been an interesting week
for the Just Third Way. Work is
progressing on our analysis of the 1916 Easter Rising that took place mostly in
Dublin a century ago. We have found a
number of original sources most people seem to be passing by, and — of course —
are able to put a unique twist on things from the perspective of the principles
of economic and social justice. Now to
the news:
• Amazon Smile
program. To participate in the
Amazon Smile program for CESJ, 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.
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| Dred Scott: Not a person under the Constitution? |
• On Monday the CESJ core group had lunch with Father Jerry Pokorsky,
pastor of St. Michael’s in Annandale, Virginia. We had a most interesting discussion on the Fourteenth
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as well as a number of other subjects. The Fourteenth Amendment is a long-neglected
key to the success of the Pro-Life movement.
It was intended in part to overturn the notorious Dred Scott case, Scott v. Sandford (60 U.S. 393 (1857))
in which the Supreme Court ruled that Dred Scott was not a “person” (i.e., has no rights) as that term is
used in the Constitution, and therefore could not sue for his freedom, even
though he had been kept as a slave in a state in which slavery was illegal. As William Crosskey, possibly the premier
American constitutional scholar of the twentieth century, remarked, “This, to the present-day mind, seems an
unbelievable decision; but to those familiar with the political demands of the
South of the time when the decision was rendered, such a tenor in the Court’s
holding will not be difficult to credit.
For it was exactly what the South, for a long time, had been demanding.” (William Crosskey, Politics and the Constitution in the History of the United States. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago
Press, 1953, 1,089.)
The Fourteenth Amendment “re-secured” every human being’s natural
rights, among which are life, liberty, and access to the means of acquiring and
possessing private property, thereby reaffirming that, under the U.S. Constitution,
all rights originate in the human person and are granted to the State, not the
other way around. This did not sit well
with the U.S. Supreme Court, so in 1873 the Court nullified the Fourteenth
Amendment with its opinion in “the Slaughterhouse Cases.” The Court did this by mis-citing the opinion
in Scott v. Sandford, claiming that
the previous Court had said that Scott could not be a citizen, and by its vague wording of the opinion. This perversion of the clear sense of the
Amendment was used as the basis for Jim Crow laws in the South, and as a
precedent in Roe v. Wade (410 U.S.
113 (1973)). As Crosskey pointed out, “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 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 [i.e.,
the Fourteenth Amendment] completely.”
(Crosskey, Politics and the Constitution,
op. cit., 1,130.) A point we
emphasized with Father Pokorsky was that, given the “legal basis” for Roe v. Wade, the real target is not the
Supreme Court, but Congress — and the effort should be to persuade Congress to
take back its power and correct legislatively the transformation wrought by the
Supreme Court in the interpretation of the Constitution. This, however, can only be effective if
ordinary people have the power to do so, and that power will only come from
widespread direct ownership of capital.
That is why CESJ recommends that the
Pro-Life movement should adopt an “economic agenda” that takes this
fundamental political truth into account.
Does this mean stopping everything they’re doing now? Of course not — this is adding something, not
taking anything away.
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| "That's right. You lend me money and pay me the interest!" |
• The Bank of Japan has announced it is going with “negative
interest rates” in order to stimulate growth.
That is, people who purchase government bonds will have to pay for the
privilege of doing so instead of receiving interest payments. This, presumably, gets the country out of the
Keynesian “liquidity trap” in which, regardless how low the interest rate,
businesses aren’t borrowing. The
problem, of course, is that such a move goes in exactly the wrong
direction. Proper use of the commercial
and central banking system does not entail creating massive amounts of new
money backed by government debt, but in first identifying productive capital
projects, and creating the money to finance the projects, backing the new money
with the present value of the future increase in production of marketable goods
and services.
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| Dan O'Connell, The Liberator |
• As part of our research on the Irish “Easter Rising” of
1916, we discovered that “the Liberator” Daniel O’Connell (who was the “prime
mover” in achieving Catholic Emancipation in Great Britain and Ireland in 1829,
which led to securing civil rights to Jews and other non-Christians) and William
Cobbett, whom G.K. Chesterton called the “Apostle of Distributism” (and thus of expanded capital
ownership), were not only acquainted, but on-again, off-again friends. As O’Connell wrote to Cobbett in November 1834,
“My dear Sir, You may imagine how I am surrounded, but I am most desirous to
see you. It, however, must (for reasons) be HERE. I want to thank you most
heartily for all the good, the unmixed good, you have done for Ireland, and the
still greater good your visit and your knowledge of the state of this country
must produce. I will be at home all the evening and all the morning to-morrow;
and all the time — anglicè — any time
you choose. Accept my warmest thanks in the name and on behalf of Ireland, and
believe me always, with sincere regard, Yours faithfully, DANIEL O'CONNELL.” CESJ has republished a Just Third Way Edition
of Cobbett’s The
Emigrant’s Guide.
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 59 different countries and 50 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 Japan. The most
popular postings this past week in descending order were “The American
Chesterton, XVII: Sheen v. Radical Catholicism,” “Thomas Hobbes on Private
Property,” “The Purpose of Production,” “The American Chesterton, XI: The
Disciple of Common Sense,” and “The American Chesterton, XVI: What is Truth?”
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#
