You
mean you’re reading today’s news items instead of protesting,
counter-protesting, or watching the political antics on television? . . . There
might be hope for you yet! Seriously,
the new administration represents a new opportunity to implement the Just Third
Way that would empower ordinary people instead of the State or a private sector
élite. This can be done by making all Americans, not just the abstract America, great again:
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| "Take it from me, Don. Pass Capital Homesteading." |
• Of course, the big news this week
is the Inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump. We can’t be the first in line to give him the
good advice every president needs, so we’ll have to be content with giving the
best advice: have the Congress pass a
Capital Homestead Act. Now. That is, if you truly want to make America
great again. Everything will fall into
place. It almost did after Abraham
Lincoln’s 1862 Homestead Act, but that had three flaws: 1) the land ran out, 2)
the financial system was inadequate, and 3) the tax system was inadequate. Fortunately, today we 1) can open up the
industrial and commercial frontier (to all intents and purposes without
practical limit), 2) have an adequate (if grossly misused) financial system
that has the potential to do what is needed, and 3) have a tax system that,
although junked up with so much garbage that it is virtually unworkable, can
easily be fixed by applying the proper, Just Third Way principles.
• The World Economic Forum ends
today. We were slightly off in our
predictions as to the recommendations that would be made. We thought they would be for job creation and
training. Instead, they were for
government money creation to fund job creation and training. Big surprise.
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| Vicomte Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé |
• We have located a surprising
amount of new information relating to the issuance of Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical on labor and capital that
stresses the importance of widespread ownership of capital and a limited
economic role for the State . . . that “the experts” have “reinterpreted” as
meaning concentrated private ownership of capital or State-ownership, and a
vastly increased role for the State. One
little gem was an article that appeared in the January 1892 issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, “The
Neo-Christian Movement in France,” by “the Vicomte Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé,”
someone of whom we had never heard before, but who turns out to have been a Big
Fromage in France. The Vicomte (which is
easier to type than “Eugène-Melchior”) contended that the socialists,
modernists (whom he called “Neo-Christians”), and New Agers (whom he called
“spiritualists”) had jumped on Leo XIII’s pivotal encyclical and in less than a
year (Rerum Novarum came out in 1891)
had twisted it so far out of shape as to render it nearly incomprehensible. Ironically, before the Vicomte died in 1910,
Msgr. John A. Ryan would utterly destroy the natural law concepts found in Rerum Novarum and use the distortions of
the socialists, modernists, and New Agers to support his reformulation of
Catholic social teaching in his doctoral thesis, A Living Wage (1906).s
• We have also located a number of
articles by Henry George published in The
North American Review and other journals that tend to clarify some of the
material he presented in Progress and
Poverty (1879). The material differs
in some respects substantially from the position of today’s followers of George.
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| The Know-Nothings: "America for Americans!" |
• Somewhat to our surprise, during
our research we discovered that today’s public v private school debate is not
at all a new thing. At least as far back
as the 1860s, religious and other private schools were considered un-, even
anti-American by the powerful nativist movement as exemplified by the
Know-Nothing Party and secret society, that eventually evolved into various
offshoots such as the Ku Klux Klan and the American Protective Association. The arguments against private schools ranged
from the presumably practical demand that all American children needed the same
education in order to be good citizens and government schools are the only way
to ensure this, to the hysterical fear that Catholic and other schools were
hotbeds of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion” that would destroy the United States
as a democratic republic and bring about a totalitarian dictatorship ruled
direct from the Vatican.
• CESJ’s latest book (makes a great
post-Christmas gift), 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.
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| "America for Americans? I'm all for that!" |
• 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.
• We have had
visitors from 53 different countries and 48 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, Nigeria, Australia, and India. The most
popular postings this past week in descending order were “News from the
Network, Vol. 10, No. 01,” “The Anti-Francis Effect, I: Leo & Francis,” “The
Anti-Francis Effect, II: Leo’s Vision,” “The Real Fix for Corporate Tricks,”
and “The American Chesterton, X: The Disciple of Common Sense.”
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#