Things
are still a little quiet around CESJ, but there have been a number of events
and situations in the world that highlight the need for Just Third Way-type
solutions. We are, of course, fully away
that the Just Third Way is not a panacea for all the world’s ills, but it is
based on natural law assumptions that do apply to every human situation. We will never have a perfect system, but we
can have one that is perfectible and consistent with the basic principles
governing human behavior:
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| Hjalmar Schacht, "The Old Wizard." |
• Infrastructure in
the United States has been given a “grade” of D+. The price tag for bringing things up to par
is (according to the experts) trillions and trillions of dollars. Naturally, nobody knows where to get the
money, but that’s only because they’re not looking at making actual people
owners of the infrastructure and putting things on a for-profit basis. With modern technology, it should be
relatively easy for regular users of roads, bridges, airports, and so on, to be
billed regularly for their actual use, while others pay at the point of use, as
is the case with many toll roads today.
Commercial banks could extend financing and rediscount the loans at the
Federal Reserve, creating new money backed by the infrastructure itself. Hjalmar Schacht halted the hyperinflation in
Germany in the 1920s by doing something similar, but without the direct citizen
ownership, and still managed to create the strongest currency in Europe for the
next twenty years.
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| "So, if I'm doing all productive work, humans need to own me?" |
• Bill Gates’s idea about taxing
robots has been getting a lot of play recently.
The problem is that it would create more problems that it solves. The solid foundation of any economy is
whether it can produce what people consume, and whether every producer is a
consumer, and vice versa. To put it more simply, if you want a sound
economy, you have to produce what you consume, and consume what you produce,
one way or another. Thus, if only labor
is productive, then everybody needs to own his or her own labor — which, unless
you’re a slave, is always the case. If only
land is productive, then everybody needs to own land. If only technology (“robots”) is productive,
then everybody needs to own technology. Obviously,
claiming that only one factor is productive is wrong; in a perfect world,
everyone needs to own each factor of production, whether labor or capital, in
the same proportion as it is used in production. This is not usually feasible, especially when
people take advantage of their social nature and specialize, but it gives a
good rule of thumb to follow. For
example, if technology is ten times more productive than human labor, someone
has to own technology that will produce ten times what his or her labor would
produce just to have a decent income (absent distortions such as minimum wage
laws and redistribution, of course). The
bottom line is that only by owning — not taxing — robots will ordinary people
gain enough income and restore Say’s Law of Markets so that all production is
for consumption, and people have enough production to be able to consume.
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| Money, Power, and Justice |
• Plans have been proceeding for a
Justice University conference at the end of April on the Just Third Way and leadership, focusing
on the role of money, power, and justice (which just happens to be the
tentative title of the event).
• 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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| If you'd rather see this cat without a grin, sign up for Smile. |
• 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 39 different countries and 42 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, Nigeria, and Australia. The most popular postings this past
week in descending order were “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property,” “Good as
Gold, I: What’s Good About Gold?” “Leading With Excellence in a Changing
World,” “Philosophies at War, XII: Vatican Letters, Part One,” and “The Purpose
of Production.”
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#