Yet another week filled with some
important news items:
• Mark Your Calendar:
Gather with students, grassroots leaders and
concerned citizens on Friday, April 22, 2016 in
Washington, DC, for the 12th annual demonstration at the Federal Reserve in
Washington, D.C. Co-hosted by the Coalition for Capital
Homesteading and the Center for Economic and Social
Justice, the rally will run from 11:00 AM to 1:30 PM,
starting on the mall side across the street from the Constitution
Ave. entrance of the Federal Reserve Building (between 20th and
21st Streets, NW).
• 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.
• The first draft of the Just Third Way book on the Easter
Rising in Dublin in 1916 is finished and is currently in editing. With any luck, we can soon have it submitted
to the printer by the end of next week, with copies available on the official
publication date, April 24, 2016, exactly one hundred years from the Rising on
Easter Monday, 1916. The title has been
tentatively changed to Easter Witness: A
Just Third Way Vision for Ireland.
We’ve assigned an ISBN, and should be in a position to start taking
wholesale orders by the end of April.
• CESJ has purchased a portable projector, projector screen, and laser
remote controller with which to make presentations for Justice University and other purposes. The “maiden voyage” of the equipment at Virginia
Union University (below) was very successful, with none of the usual glitches that tend
to crop up when dealing with new equipment.
• Joyce Hart, producer of Sisters of Selma (2007) has expressed interest in the story of the
Just Third Way, and will be attending this year’s Rally at the Fed in
Washington, DC (above). She will
interview Dr. Norman G. Kurland and talk with others in the CESJ core group.
• Norman Kurland gave a JU talk at Virginia Union University on
the Just Third Way that was very well received.
A number of students indicated interest in exploring the possibility of
forming a campus CESJ chapter, while at least one faculty member requested
information on becoming a CESJ/JU Fellow.
• Father Columba, who arranged for Norm to speak at Virginia
Union, has also put him in touch with a number of Biafran leaders in the United
States who are interested in promoting just social change. Norm ended by saying they should focus on
monetary reform, and they should develop a preliminary proposal for a West African
Development Bank, a regional central bank that would operate in accordance with
sound commercial and central banking theory, while adding expanded capital
ownership as an essential prerequisite for the extension of credit for
productive purposes. Credit for
non-productive purposes would be strictly prohibited, as money for consumption
and gambling should come only out of existing accumulations.
 |
| Fr. Oswald von Nell-Breuning, S.J. |
• On learning that
the existing translation of Fr. Oswald von Nell-Breuning’s Die Soziale Enzyklika (1932), Reorganization of Social Economy, had been done by a socialist and
does not reflect Nell-Bruening’s thought accurately, CESJ stalwart Jeanna C. immediately
obtained two copies of the original German . . . “much to [her] husband’s
bewilderment,” as neither of them speak or read German. We hope to surface a competent (i.e., accurate and pro bono) translator
to do a first run-through, as our German is not quite up to that, although good
enough to check and supervise a more accurate version than the 1938
translation for Justice University Press.
 |
| Jean-Baptiste Say |
• We had another question about what’s wrong with socialism
— of any kind. We think Say’s Law of Markets explains it pretty well. It’s based
on Adam Smith’s core principle of economics: “Consumption is the sole end and
purpose of all production.” All things being equal, the only way to consume something
is to produce it first. (You can’t usually consume what hasn’t been produced.) Thus, if you want
to consume something, you must produce something, either for your own
consumption, or to trade to others for what they have produced. In this way, as
Say’s Law is usually summarized, Production = Income, therefore, Supply
(Production) generates its own Demand (Income), and Demand, its own Supply. That’s IF
you produce something by means of your labor, land, or other capital. If,
however, machinery is taking over the burden of production, and you don’t own
the machinery, you can’t produce. Socialism says, fine. Take from the machine
owner some of what he or she produces, and give it to non-producers, thereby
removing the incentive of producers to produce, and increasing the incentive of
others to consume without producing. Everybody becomes worse off. Nobody seems to
consider helping people who don’t own productive capital to purchase it on
credit, pay for it out of future profits, and become productive that way.
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 52 different countries and 51 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, India, and Sudan. The most
popular postings this past week in descending order were “Thomas Hobbes on
Private Property,” “The Crisis That Need Not Be, I: A System Designed to Fail,”
“Aristotle on Private Property,” “The Purpose of Production,” and “The Crisis
That Need Not Be, IV: Rally at the Fed.”
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.