As
of this writing, the Dow is down over two-hundred points, probably due to the
various noises about the possibility of the Federal Reserve raising rates,
making it more expensive to create money to pour into the stock market. The possibility of eliminating “interest”
altogether for any money that creates new owners of capital instead of to make
the rich richer doesn’t seem to have occurred to any of the powers-that-be.
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| Fr. William Ferree |
And
yet Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler’s The New Capitalists: A
Proposal to Free Economic Growth from the Slavery of Savings has been
around for more than half a century.
Despite the continued “Dialog of the Deaf,” as Father William Ferree
called it, we have been making a great deal of progress:
• Today, Norman Kurland, president
of the Center for Economic and Social Justice, is giving a series of lectures
via skype to Dr. Ralph Hall’s students at Virginia Tech. With Dr. Nicholas Ashford of MIT, Dr. Hall is
the author of Technology,
Globalization, and Sustainable Development: Transforming the Industrial State
(2011), which contains a chapter on binary economics, the first on the subject
to appear in a college text. Norm, of
course, will be talking about applications of the Just Third Way within the
current legal environment as well as the direction that economic (and
political) development must take to reestablish justice and ensure as far as
humanly possible, and restore the proper social environment within which each
human person — every child, woman, and man — has the opportunity and means to
“pursue happiness,” i.e., acquire and
develop virtue in the Aristotelian sense (hat tip to Louis Kelso’s co-author,
Mortimer Adler).
• On Wednesday, the CESJ core group
had a meeting with Dr. Anne Khademian of Virginia Tech. The purpose was to discuss how binary
economics fits into the Just Third Way, and how the Just Third Way fits into
Dr. Khademian’s field of Public and International Affairs. The author of numerous articles and books,
Dr. Khademian’s research focuses on leadership and organizational culture,
inclusive management, policy networks, and the work of organizations involved
in homeland security and financial regulation. The meeting went very well,
going over the time allotted, with follow-up meetings anticipated.
 |
| Leo XIII: "New Things" |
• On Thursday, members of the CESJ core group had an introductory meeting
with a Notre Dame alumnus who had come across a mention of the Just Third Way
and saw a compatibility with his understanding of Catholic social
teaching. This is not a surprising
development, as Catholic social teaching (as any social teaching should be) is
based on the Aristotelian-Thomist interpretation of the natural law, refined by
Kelso and Adler in the area of economic justice, and by Pope Pius XI into a
completed social doctrine, and analyzed by CESJ co-founder Father William J.
Ferree, S.M., Ph.D., president of Chaminade College, rector of the Catholic
University of Puerto Rico, and Chairman of Dayton University. Recent research is revealing to what extent a
sound interpretation of natural law has been distorted by the “new things” of
which Pope Leo XIII spoke, resulting in numerous efforts since the early
nineteenth century to “take shortcuts,” by redefining basic terms, shifting
from reason illuminated and guided by faith to reason or faith alone, and
turning over to the social tool of the State far more power than is necessary
for it to carry out its proper function.
Socialism, modernism, New Age thought, and many other detours around
common sense (such as Keynesian economics and its reliance on government
control of money and credit, and a complicated tax system) all try to do by
force what the Just Third Way does by nature.
 |
| Norman Kurland |
• Late Thursday evening we received a request for an interview about Father
Ferree from a sister at Dayton University who is putting together a short
biography of Father Ferree, drawn from personal reminiscences of the people who
knew him. Many members of the CESJ core
group were friends of Father Ferree, and during the last year of his life he
made what he called his “monthly pilgrimage” from Dayton to Arlington to meet
and discuss the Just Third Way. Many
people don’t know that Father Ferree and Norman Kurland testified before the
Lay Commission on the Economy on September 11, 1985 during the preparation of
what became the U.S. bishops’ 1986 pastoral on the economy, Economic Justice for All. Sadly, the pastoral only made a single —
incorrect — reference to the work of Father Ferree, possibly the world’s
leading expert in the social doctrine of Pius XI, and made no reference at all
to Norman Kurland, a leading pioneer in the expanded ownership movement who
worked with ESOP inventor Louis Kelso.
• CESJ received a request to review a book, Exchanging Autonomy: Inner Motivations as Resources for Tackling the
Crises of Our Times, by Marco Senatore, an Italian economist formerly with
the World Bank. Assuming the book is in
English, we will consider if we have the time to give the book adequate
consideration.
• CESJ has also been asked to
contribute a chapter to a book to be published in India by Laj Utreyja, Director of the Institute of Global
Harmony in New Delhi. CESJ will be
adapting a paper on sustainable growth for the project, and expects to submit
the final draft to Dr. Utreyja before the end of September.
 |
| Msgr. Ronald Knox |
• We have been receiving many
questions and requests for information from distributists who appear to be
dissatisfied with the answers they are getting from “establishment” Chestertonians. The general feeling of people asking the
questions seems to be that there has been something of a drift away from the
natural law based on the Intellect, and into Fabian socialism and an
understanding of the natural law based on the Will, ironically the very things
distributism was intended to counter, and that Hilaire Belloc and G.K.
Chesterton protested in such books as The
Servile State (1912) Saint Francis of
Assisi (1923), and Saint Thomas
Aquinas: The “Dumb Ox” (1933). Not surprisingly, these are also the things
that both Msgr. Ronald Knox and Abp. Fulton Sheen struggled against in,
respectively, Enthusiasm (1950), and God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy
(1925) and Religion Without God
(1928).
• 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.
 |
| Frog? Dinosaur? Lizard? At least it's smiling. . . . |
• Here’s the usual announcement
about the Amazon Smile program,
albeit moved to the bottom of the page so you don’t get tired of seeing
it. 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.
• As of this
morning, we have had visitors from 46 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, the United Kingdom, Canada, India,
and Germany. The most popular postings this past week in descending order were “News
from the Network, Vol. 9, No. 33,” “A Look at the Future, II: Labor
Productivity?” “Let’s Talk About . . . Job Creation,” “Thomas Hobbes on Private
Property,” and “Is the United States the Enemy of Freedom and Democracy?”
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#