As we may have
mentioned one or a dozen times, we like getting questions . . . that we can
answer. So far we’ve been lucky, and
haven’t gotten too many of the kind we can’t answer, e.g., “Are you guys just crazy, or what?” (Actually, we can answer that question,
too. We just prefer not to.) Anyway,
Who
are the key thinkers/ideas that have influenced your mission and understanding
of economics?
 |
| Louis O. Kelso |
Heading the list,
of course, are (in chronological order) Leo XIII, Pius XI, and Louis O. Kelso
and Mortimer J. Adler. To oversimplify
somewhat, Leo XIII had a vision of everyone empowered economically through
capital ownership. Pius XI’s completed
social doctrine with its “act of social justice” showed how to bring about the
necessary restructuring of the social order, while Kelso and Adler identified
the key institutions for reform and developed specific technologies to democratize
access to and use of those institutions, specifically money, credit, banking,
and finance, as well as tax and ownership systems. Thus, in response to a growing need on the
part of the people of the world, Leo XIII provided the idea, Pius XI showed us
how, and Kelso and Adler showed us what.
 |
| Henry Thornton |
Other key
thinkers (also in more or less chronological order) are George Mason for
listing private property as a natural right in his draft of the Virginia
Declaration of Rights, Adam Smith for the first principle of economics (“Consumption
is the sole end and purpose of all production”), Henry Thornton for working out
the principles of mercantile/commercial and central banking and the real bills
doctrine, Jean-Baptiste Say for the best statement of “Say’s Law of Markets”
(briefly and inaccurately summarized as “production equals income, therefore, market-based
demand generates its own, competitive market-based supply, and supply, its own
demand” — which doesn’t work unless everybody can earn incomes from both labor
and capital, and financing of new capital formation comes out of future savings
instead of past savings), William Cobbett, Charles Morrison, William Thomas
Thornton (no relation to Henry), Peter Stenger Grosscup, Hilaire Belloc, G.K.
Chesterton, and Fulton Sheen for their advocacy of expanded capital ownership,
and Harold Moulton for explaining the principles of corporate finance as they
operate in a modern advanced economy.
On the “negative”
side, the economic thought of John Maynard Keynes has been extremely important
. . . for what it got wrong. As
Keynesian economics is the single most influential body of thought in political
economy today — even Milton Friedman acknowledged this when he declared “we are
all Keynesians now” — the damage done by adhering to his theories or even simply
reacting against them has been incalculable.
Due to its
incorporating binary economics, the Just Third Way is the only system in the
world today that is neither Keynesian, nor a reaction against Keynes; the assumptions
underlying the Just Third Way are fundamentally different from those underlying
Keynesian, Chicago/Monetarist, and Austrian economics, as well as capitalism
and socialism in general, viz., the
understanding of money, credit, banking, and finance, the role of private
property, and concepts of justice in all its forms.
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