As
the election comes ever-nearer in the United States and people agonize over
whether to vote for the great or the greater evil (the Elder Party candidate Cthulhu,
by the way, is ’way ahead in the polls), we continue plugging away to persuade
one or more of the saner variety of politicians to adopt Capital Homesteading
as a major plank in his or her platform:
• Yesterday the
CESJ core group had a meeting with John Sullivan, the past editor of the Irish Rover, an independent student
publication at the University of Notre Dame.
Although the meeting was geared toward getting acquainted and giving a
general presentation of the Just Third Way, John took a number of CESJ
publications (notably, of course, Easter
Witness: From Broken Dream to a New Vision for Ireland) and handouts, such
as the ones distributed last year at the World Meeting of Families. John said that he had become interested in
CESJ by coming across a mention of the Just Third Way in a Notre Dame alumni
internet group. For years he had been
interested in “distributism,” the expanded ownership proposal developed by G.K.
Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, but had decided that it was a little “pie in the
sky” as there did not seem to be any practical means to implement it. He had also been interested in the ESOP and in
applications of Catholic social teaching.
In the Just Third Way he thought he saw a practical program of
implementing the vision of Chesterton and Belloc — to say nothing of that of
Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI.
• The Perth
Herald-Tribune has been running columns on CESJ and the Just Third Way
written by CESJ’s Director of Research, with a new one appearing every
week. Be sure to visit their website and
send the link around your networks.
 |
| Lepanto, October 7, 1571 |
• Today is the 445th
anniversary of the Battle of Lepanto, which the Catholic Church celebrates as
the “Feast of the Most Holy Rosary.”
That doesn’t have anything to do with the Just Third Way (at least
directly), but it did spark a brief thought about how, if the Ottoman Empire
had been oriented toward wealth production financed with future savings instead
of wealth collection financed with past savings (a peculiar way of describing
the program of world conquest financed with war loot and slave trading), there
might never have been a Battle of Lepanto (and Miguel de Cervantes might never
have written Don Quixote), and the
current problems in the Middle East would have an obvious solution: the Just
Third Way. By the way, although
Chesterton’s epic poem Lepanto may be
a literary masterpiece, it’s bad history.
Jack Beeching’s The
Galleys at Lepanto (1983), which we bought when it first came out,
gives a balanced history of what led up to the battle and its aftermath. Used copies are extremely affordable.
• The Small-Is-Beautiful lobby
might not want to cheer just yet, but according to today’s Wall Street Journal,
globalization is “on the skids.” This
creates a problem for businesses that rely on infusions of foreign capital to
finance domestic operations, as well as those businesses exporting jobs
overseas. Both problems, of course,
would be solved by “thinking globally, financing locally” through the proper
use of the domestic commercial and central banking system. This would equalize the power between
different countries and regions by making them independent of foreign financing
or labor, and thus able to employ true comparative advantage instead of
manipulating currencies or shifting jobs and capital.
• 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.
 |
| The eye has it! |
• 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 47 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, New
Zealand, and Australia. The most popular postings this past week in descending
order were “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property,” “Aristotle on Private Property,” “Distributism,
Socialism, and Syndicalism,” “Where’s the Recovery?” and “News from the
Network, Vol. 9, No. 35/Religion and the Rise of Capitalism . . . and
Socialism” (tie).
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#
