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| April 24, 1916, Dublin, Éire |
• The CESJ annual
meeting was postponed from April 17 to April 24, and will take place on Monday. By coincidence, it was 101 years ago on April 24, 1916, that the Easter Rising began in Dublin (see the item below).
• A follow-up
letter is being sent regarding the imprimatur for Easter
Witness, CESJ’s proposal to revive the economy (and politics) of
Ireland in a manner consistent with Catholic social teaching.
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| Leo XIII was very concerned with the problem of the Occult and the New Age. |
• A number of
biographies of Hilaire Belloc have been ordered. We’ve discovered from reading biographies of
Pope Leo XIII, Archbishop Fulton Sheen, G.K. Chesterton, Henry George, R.H.
Tawney, Msgr. John A. Ryan, Father Edward McGlynn, and others, that the
standard Party Line “ain’t necessarily so.”
Important facts are often omitted, things that might prove embarrassing
to modern followers are downplayed or ignored, words and events twisted, and
some things turn out to be complete inventions.
Correlating biographies by different people and comparing them with
contemporary newspaper accounts and other verifiable sources sometimes results
in a completely different picture than the one with which most people are
familiar. Did you know, for example,
that Leo XIII was very worried about the Occult and the deleterious effect it
was having on the understanding of Catholic doctrine, especially when combined
with socialism, as it almost inevitably was?
The so-called New Age and modernism (“the synthesis of all heresies”)
turn out to be very closely related, while much of today’s understanding of, e.g., “social justice” is rooted in
Occult theories. As Archbishop-Bishop of
Perugia (explaining this unusual title would take too long) prior to his
election to the papacy, Leo issued a pastoral on the Occult, while Pius IX
issued a special encyclical on its dangers (we have a Vatican archivist trying
to locate copies of both documents in English for us). The Second Plenary Council of Baltimore also
made special mention of the problem. In
1989 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and again in
2003 the Pontifical Council for Culture with the Pontifical Council for
Interreligious Dialogue, issued warnings about the “New Age,” of which most
people seem completely unaware.
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| Our new Wall Street Executive? |
• Given the image
of the typical Wall Street Executive as greedy, heartless, and cruel, we find
the controversy over the “Fearless Girl” statue facing the “Charging Bull”
statue on Wall Street being taken as a protest that there are not enough female
executives on Wall Street to be a trifle ironic. Aren’t there already enough opportunities for
women to be greedy, heartless, and cruel elsewhere?
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| "Job Creation" |
• Not to fixate on
Wall Street, but today’s Wall Street
Journal had an interesting op-ed piece about the monthly jobs report of the
Bureau of Labor Statistics. The author,
a former head of the BLS, was concerned that the agency was not getting
sufficient funding to ensure an accurate report. We believe he missed the point. With the declining market value of labor as
advancing technology and cheaper labor in other countries gives producers more
cost effective alternatives, it seems that a “Capital Ownership Report”
combined with a “Consumer Demand Report” and “Capital Needs Report” would be
much more useful, especially in an economy characterized by widespread capital
ownership. To focus on “jobs” is
misleading, especially since the demand for new capital that “creates jobs”
(sometimes) is derived from consumer demand, as Dr. Harold Moulton demonstrated
in his 1935 counter to the Keynesian New Deal, The
Formation of Capital.
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| The "Big Three": From left to right, wheat, corn, and soybeans. |
• Another
interesting item in today’s Wall Street
Journal (when it rains, it pours, evidently) noted the decline in the global
market share for three key U.S. agricultural commodities, corn, wheat, and
soybeans, the percentage of which has declined drastically since 1985. What the article did not mention directly is
that exports of all three have increased
in objective terms since 1985, despite lower acreage in the U.S. devoted to
agriculture: exports of soybeans went from 20 million metric tons in 1985 to 54
million in 2016, corn increased from 31 million metric tons in 1985 to 57
million in 2016, while wheat (which displaced cotton in the nineteenth century
just as the boll weevil came in) showed the lowest increase, from 25 million
metric tons in 1985 to 27 million in 2016.
We have three observations to make.
One, this is actually a good
thing, isn’t it? Other countries are
producing enough that the U.S. is no longer the world’s primary source for
food. Two, to make this advantageous to the U.S. — and U.S. farmers — all
that need be done is to stabilize the dollar by fixing it to an objective
standard and back it with actual assets instead of government debt, and have
farmers participate as owners in integrated agri-businesses so that they share
in the profits of processing, marketing, and distribution instead of only as
suppliers of raw materials. As U.S.
goods become cheaper in terms of other currencies as U.S. prices start to
decline as the dollar becomes more valuable (don’t confuse deflation with
currency appreciation; this analysis is outside the current Keynesian framework
of debt-backing and currency manipulation), other exports will take the place
of agricultural products, less will be imported, and there will be a positive
balance of trade to start paying down decades of deficits. Three,
with food production booming throughout the world, why is hunger a problem? In four words, Say’s Law of Markets. People who are hungry can’t buy even the
cheapest and most plentiful food if they don’t produce anything themselves. As Jean-Baptiste Say put it, the reason some
goods are not sold is because other goods are not produced. Some redistribution will always be necessary,
of course, but the basic problem can be solved by turning unproductive people
into productive people, and that can be done through an aggressive program of
expanded capital ownership.
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| Corporations pay taxes. Should they vote? |
• And yet one more
comment about something in the Wall
Street Journal: “Need Revenue? Slash Capital Gains Tax.” No, get rid of all corporate taxes by making
dividends tax deductible at the corporate level and taxed as regular income at
the personal level, pegging capital gains to the rate of inflation, then
rebuild the tax base by allowing a tax deferral at the individual level for any
income used to purchase capital.
• 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 35 different countries and 41 states and provinces in the United
States and Canada to this blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the
United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Spain. The most
popular postings this past week in descending order were “Socialism v. Social
Justice,” “Three Acres and a Cow,” “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property,” “Own or
Be Owned,” and “News from the Network, Vol. 10, No. 15.”
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#