We
rather like the way actor Tom Hanks put it.
We hope President Trump does so well that we’d vote for him for a second
term. That being said, however, it is
painfully obvious that if Trump wants to do well, he desperately needs the Just
Third Way, both to “Make America Great Again,” and to repair past efforts that,
regardless how well-intentioned, didn’t quite make the grade. So here’s our take on this week’s news items:
• Today is the annual March for
Life, so naturally a number of critics are pointing out that far too many
people in the pro-life movement (whom they refer to as “all”) are so focused on
ending abortion that they neglect what happens after someone is born. This is true — up to a point. To be effective in anything, you must
concentrate on the goal you hope to achieve.
To be successful, however, you must also never neglect what comes after
you reach your goal. The American
Revolution was successful in large measure because the Founding Fathers had a
clear and practical vision of how to structure the new country. The French Revolution dissolved in chaos and
injustice because the only common vision was to get rid of the old regime. In the Just Third Way, we believe that the best
way for the pro-life movement to be successful is to make the pro-choice people
an offer they can’t refuse: a pro-life economic agenda that benefits everybody,
such as is outlined in Supporting
Life: The Case for a Pro-Life Economic Agenda (2010).
• Just a comment on the tactics of
the pro-life movement. The U.S. Supreme
Court is the right target . . . but they’re going after the wrong case. What made the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision possible was the 1873 Slaughterhouse Cases opinion that effectively nullified the
Fourteenth Amendment and reaffirmed the Dred Scott decision that shifted the
source of rights from actual human beings, to the State. Overturn Roe
v. Wade, and it wouldn’t be long before someone came up with another
situation to test the situation, whereupon the Court would tacitly reaffirm Roe v. Wade on some specious grounds
derived from the opinion in Slaughterhouse,
which constitutional scholar William Winslow Crosskey noted gave the Supreme
Court power to make the Fourteenth Amendment mean anything they wanted.
• Next week is National Catholic
Schools Week. While CESJ is not a
religious organization, we’d like to take this opportunity to support choice in
education on two grounds. One, parents
have both the right and the duty to educate their children as they see fit,
within some very broad parameters.
Education is a domestic right, not a civil right. The State may set minimum standards, and
provide schools as an expedient or backup to parental efforts, but never usurp
parental authority. Two, all monopolies
are bad, but two are particularly insidious: a State monopoly over money
creation, and a State monopoly over education.
By the former, the State controls the life’s blood of the economy. By the latter, the State controls the life’s
blood of society.
• Members of the CESJ network have
been doing yeoman service in reaching out to gatekeepers and door-openers. In just the last month, a number of letters,
phone calls, and emails have gone to some highly placed Catholic officials in
Europe regarding promotion of Just Third Way. There has been some
correspondence with a cardinal in Latin America as well, and material was
placed with journalists at the World Economic Forum that just took place in
Davos, Switzerland (and on which we commented on this blog). There have been discussions about arranging
for Norm Kurland to have a talk with former president Obama, and efforts to get
Norm together with President Trump.
There has, of course, been continuing outreach to the media, including
the editor of a popular news magazine (obviously we can’t name him or her
because that would kill any chance of coverage or PR). One particularly effective outreach effort is
the Perth (Australia) Herald-Tribune, which has been publishing a significant number
of Just Third Way articles.
• CESJ’s latest book (makes a great
pre-Easter gift . . . obviously), 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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| P-A-R-T . . . Why Not? |
• 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 57 different countries and 50 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, Australia, Nigeria, and Canada. 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 Problem of Wealth, II: The
Capitalist Solution,” and “The Problem of
Wealth, IV: The Just Third Way Solution.”
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#