As
the level of anxiety about the world situation continues to increase, so does
the studied avoidance of the Just Third Way, which alone holds any promise of
rectifying the situation. This is made
pretty clear from this week’s news items:
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| Fulton Sheen, Radio Preacher |
• Much to our surprise, the current
blog series on “Philosophies at War” (triggered by obtaining a rare copy of
Fulton Sheen’s book, Philosophies at War from
1943), a (very) informal Justice University course . . . that probably covers more philosophy better than most other college courses (and no test!!) seems to have touched on something visceral. Evidently a lot of people were unaware of the
extent to which “the Triumph of the Will” has infiltrated the modern age. In constitutional law we see it in the shift
from “original intent” to the idea of the “living constitution” and the
transformation of inalienable rights into expedients or “prudential matter.” In political economy we see it in the shift
away from a society characterized by widespread capital ownership to capitalism
and socialism. In religion we see it in
the abandonment of the idea of the natural law discernible by reason, and to
one based on faith, that is, the Will.
Unfortunately, the best books to read on this subject are either rare,
or are generally misunderstood. For
example, in the field of constitutional law, William Winslow Crosskey’s Politics and the Constitution in the History
of the United States (1953) is virtually unobtainable. In political economy, most people think that
Mortimer Adler’s and Louis Kelso’s The Capitalist Manifesto
(1958) and The New Capitalists
(1961) are about “capitalism” instead of true economic democracy. Nobody reads Heinrich Rommen’s The Natural Law (1945) with any degree
of comprehension, while most readers think that G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy
(1908), Saint Francis of
Assisi (1923) and Saint Thomas
Aquinas: The “Dumb Ox” (1933), Fulton J. Sheen’s God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy in Light of the Philosophy of
Saint Thomas (1925), and Msgr. Ronald Knox’s Enthusiasm (1950) are about other things entirely! And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. There do seem to be some glimmerings that
people are starting to wake up to the fact that something is terribly wrong,
however: the dead silence coming from “the experts” is one sign that they are
desperately hoping all the fuss will die away and people get back to accepting
what they say without questioning it.
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| "Big deal. I drop the ball a couple of dozen times. So sue me." |
• Yesterday, George Will’s column
in The Washington Post, “Time is
Running Out on Pensions,” (02/23/17, A17), made some good points . . . but
completely missed the obvious solution sent to him a few weeks ago by Dr.
Norman G. Kurland, president of CESJ.
OBVIOUSLY public sector pensions cannot meet all the promises they
continue to make with so lavish a hand.
Is the answer to stop making lavish promises and let public sector
workers fend for themselves on smaller pensions or no pensions? That’s half the answer, but it’s not a
solution just to tell people to stop doing what they shouldn’t be doing in the
first place. What is the real solution
to the growing pension problem? The Capital Homestead Act. Although you knew we were going to say that,
it’s still the right answer. By enabling
public sector workers to acquire self-liquidating, income-generating assets on
credit that provide consumption income once the acquisition debt is repaid, the
problem is self-solving, and would disappear within a generation, and be of
manageable proportions immediately.
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| DON'T WORRY REMAIN CALM ALL THIS DEBT IS GOOD FOR YOU WE MEAN US WE MEAN NOBODY! |
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| "Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production." |
• Earlier this week The Wall Street Journal had an editorial
claiming how President Trump’s plan to try and build up a trade surplus is
wrong-headed. They were right . . . up
to a very small point. They then tried
to make the case (by assertion) that trade deficits are not only good, but
necessary! They were wrong — on all
points. First, yes, ordinarily speaking,
trade surpluses are not completely good.
Neither are deficits. The ideal,
in conformity with Say’s Law of Markets, is to have a true balance of trade,
neither importing more than is exported, nor exporting more than is imported. Trying to stack the deck one way or another
inevitably leads to currency manipulation, trade barriers, and wars. Even if a country does not directly produce
all that it consumes, it must produce the value
of all that it consumes to trade to others for what it consumes. And, because (as Adam Smith put it)
“Consumption is the sole end and purpose of production,” a country should
produce the value of what it consumes, no more, no less. That being said, the United States has been
running tremendous trade deficits — and not only in goods and services. It has exported incredible amounts of
debt. In order to redeem that debt, the
U.S. must now export a surplus of goods large enough to “buy back” the debt and
cancel it. So, is President Trump doing
the right thing? Well . . . no. He has the right idea: get out of debt. He’s just doing it the wrong way. The only way to have honest trade surpluses
is to become more productive to redeem all the consumption that took place over
the past century or so. And that is only
going to happen with a Capital
Homestead Act.
• Federal Reserve officials are
starting to tinker with money manipulation again. They haven’t figured out that a central bank
is not a government money machine, but a means of providing adequate liquidity
for the private sector and maintaining a stable, elastic, and asset-backed
currency . . . all of which can be done by passing a (you guessed it) Capital Homestead Act.
• 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.
• 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 38 different countries and 45 states and provinces in the United
States and Canada to this blog over the past week (Google “improved” their
analytics, making it impossible to see trends longer than a week instead of the
previous two months). Most visitors are from the United States, Canada, the
United Kingdom, Australia, and Nigeria. The most popular postings this past
week in descending order were “Philosophies at War, VI: Chesterton Versus the
New Christianity,” “Philosophies at War,
VIII: The Apostle of Common Sense,” “News from the Network, Vol. 10, No. 7,” “Activism
vs. Leadership,” and “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property.”
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#