As
spring approaches and temperatures rise, so does the level of activity in the
Just Third Way movement. That’s a poetic
way of saying things are starting to happen:
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| Louisville, Kentucky, by moonlight. |
• A CESJ/Justice University team is
traveling to Louisville, Kentucky, today to participate in panel discussions on
“Money, Power, and Justice.” Key to the
Just Third Way presentations will, of course, be an understanding of money
(most simply, “anything that can be accepted in settlement of a debt”) and not
merely justice, but social and economic justice, which are not (it is important
to note) euphemisms for charity or State welfare.
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| Belloc: mandating full employment is the Servile State. |
• It is becoming
increasingly evident that the people making decisions for the Federal Reserve
System have no idea what they are doing.
The institution established by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 was
intended to serve the needs of the private sector. The idea was to ensure an adequate supply of
money and credit for industry, commerce, and agriculture, establish and
maintain an elastic, private sector asset-backed reserve currency, retire the
previous government debt-backed reserve currencies, oversee clearinghouse
operations, “and other purposes.”
Unfortunately, those “other purposes” turned out to mean whatever
someone with enough political or financial leverage wanted, such as “full employment”
(what Hilaire Belloc called “the Servile State”), funding government
operations, social engineering, providing money for speculation on Wall Street,
manipulating the value of the reserve currency, bailing out failed companies
too big to fail, and cutting off the flow of credit to the productive sector,
the primary market, in favor of the secondary market.
• The first draft of Ten Battles is completed, and the first
round of editing is nearly complete. It
needs a bibliography, indexing, and illustrations, all of which are currently
in process.
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| Fabians oppose the Catholic Church. |
• Work on another project,
tentatively titled Red Star Over
Bethlehem, is progressing well. A
number of omissions in and misinterpretations of standard accounts of the
spread of socialism throughout organized religion have been corrected after tracking
down original sources. Particularly
fascinating are the biographies of the Anglican Fabian socialist, R.H. Tawney,
and the uncovering of the “official” Fabian stance toward traditional organized
religion, particularly Christianity, with a special emphasis on the danger to
socialism of all kinds represented by the Catholic Church. Ironically, much of this comes out of
researching the relations between G.K. Chesterton and the Fabians. Almost without exception, Fabians and former
Fabians (such as H.G. Wells) expressed great admiration for Chesterton, and
intense hatred, even loathing for the Catholic Church that Chesterton joined in
1922 — often in the same breath.
Chesterton returned the favor by loving the sinners, but rejecting their
sin: socialism. And why is this
ironic? Because today’s Chestertonians
and distributists base much of their understanding of economics, politics, and
Catholic doctrine on Fabian writers such as Tawney and E.F. Schumacher, instead
of verified truth. As Chesterton himself
said, soon after he joined the Catholic Church, “As for the fundamental reasons
for [joining the Catholic Church], there are only two that are really
fundamental. One is that he believes it
to be the solid objective truth, which is true whether he likes it or not; and
the other that he seeks liberation from his sins. If there be any man for whom these are not
the main motives, it is idle to inquire what were his philosophical or
historical or emotional reasons for joining the old religion; for he has not
joined it at all.” (G.K. Chesterton, Where
All Roads Lead, 1922.) Thus
(paradoxically), someone who joined the Catholic Church because Chesterton
joined it would not (in Chesterton’s opinion) have joined it.
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| "Come in from the cold. Donate to CESJ." |
• 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 37 different countries and 45 states and provinces in the United
States and Canada to this blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the
United States, the United Kingdom,” Canada, Australia, and Spain. The most
popular postings this past week in descending order were “Why Is Socialism
Condemned?” “Some Basic Thoughts on Income,” “Thomas Hobbes on Private
Property,” “Good as Gold, IX: Debt or
Taxes,” and “Good as Gold, X: Hijacking the Federal Reserve.”
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#