Today’s newspaper announced that the
U.S. “jobs market” is the best it’s been in years, while the “jobs” data
released today declared that “job growth” has reached a five-year low. Setting aside the obvious contradiction and
the whole idea of a “jobs market” (how, exactly, do you market and distribute
“jobs”?), and the plunge in the stock market (the Dow is down about 100 as of
this writing), the question remains, How do you make a “jobs market” grow?
The answer from a Just Third Way
perspective? Use the right fertilizer:
new money and credit extended solely for financially feasible capital projects
that are broadly owned. And read the following news items:
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| "Excellent . . . now contribute directly!" |
• But before we start, here’s the usual announcement about
the 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.
• CESJ’s latest book, Easter
Witness: From Broken Dream to a New Vision for Ireland, is available from Amazon
and Barnes
and Noble, as well as by special order from many “regular” bookstores. The book can also be ordered in bulk, which
we define as ten copies or more of the same title, at a 20% discount. A full case is twenty-six copies, and
non-institutional/non-vendor purchasers get a 20% discount off the $20 cover
price on wholesale lots ($416/case).
Shipping is extra. Send enquiries
to publications@cesj.org. An additional discount may be available for
institutions such as schools, clubs, and other organizations as well as
retailers. Initial sales are
encouraging, and CESJ (although interfaith) has applied for an “imprimatur”
which will allow the book to be used as a text in Catholic schools. We received word that the books ordered for
the Archbishop of Dublin have been shipped and should arrive today or early
next week.
• A question that just popped up in a “distributist” forum
was, Why is wage income these days inadequate for a single worker to support a
large family at an acceptable standard of living? The answers were, 1) student debt, 2) rising
medical costs, 3) usury, and 4) big business. This is odd, because
“distributism” was intended to get people out of the wage and welfare system,
not think of new ways to lock people into it permanently. That’s why it was
surprising that in a “distributist” forum there was no mention of expanded capital
ownership as a possible solution in the comments section . . . until we put it
in. “Distributism” was supposed to be a social policy that favors small,
family-owned farms and businesses. It
has evolved today into what is, to all intents and purposes, State socialism of
the Fabian (i.e., “New Age”) variety.
In the U.S., the downward trend in ownership started in the 1890s with the
effective end of "free" land under the Homestead Act, as Frederick
Jackson Turner noted. Starting about 1904, Judge Peter Stenger Grosscup of the
U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals (a friend of Theodore Roosevelt who seems
also to have been acquainted with Archbishop John Ireland, who tried to
implement an expanded ownership program in Minnesota) advocated a national
reform of corporate law to make it possible for ordinary people who were being
pushed out of ownership to become shareholders of corporations with the full
rights of ownership. It was not, however, until the breakthrough of Louis O.
Kelso with the invention of the ESOP that this became practical, allowing
workers to purchase shares in the corporations that employ them, and pay for
the shares with future profits without reducing take-home pay or benefits. The
proposed “Capital Homestead Act” would extend the concept to every child,
woman, and man, thereby achieving what Hilaire Belloc advocated in his 1936 Essay on the Restoration of Property. We
have put out an “updated” version of this, The
Restoration of Property, that would use modern methods of finance
without relying on imposing disabilities on the currently wealthy.
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 54 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, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Brazil. The
most popular postings this past week in descending order were “Thomas Hobbes on
Private Property,” “The Purpose of Production,” “Strictly Speaking,” “How Not
to Limit Capital,” and “Lower Forty.”
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#