This
has been a pretty busy week for the Just Third Way. A number of projects have made significant
advances, news ones have come in over the transom as it were, and a few
“non-producers” were given up. In
addition there have been some interesting meetings taking place, some of them rather
surprising — after all, how often does Mark Zuckerberg drop in for dinner
unexpectedly?
• Dr. Norman G.
Kurland gave a talk on the Just Third Way to graduate students at Fort Belvoir,
Virginia, enrolled in INTL 5400, a graduate course in international political
economy, on Monday of this week. Dr. Thomas
Kleiner of Webster University arranged for Norm to speak. The talk went exceptionally well.
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| "Say, Mark, while you're here, I'm having a problem with FB..." |
• Daniel Moore, a
member of the CESJ network in Newton Falls, Ohio, had a surprise guest for dinner late last week: Mark Zuckerberg, FaceBook founder and billionaire. Dan reported that
the evening went very well, and he managed to mention toward the end that he
(Dan) knew about a new economic initiative (the Just Third Way) that might be
consistent with Zuckerberg’s interest in education as a way of bringing out the
best in everyone. There may be some
follow-up, as Dan says he plans to stay in touch with his unexpected visitor.
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| Pius XI: Addressed the decline in reason. |
• Related to an
interest in education is the continuing decline in religious practice in many
parts of the world (See Matthew Hennessey, “A Catholic World Fades Over a Lifetime,” The Wall Street Journal, May 5, 2017, A13). A fundamental
principle of the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas (Christian), Moses Maimonides
(Jewish), and Ibn Khaldûn (Muslim) — along with most other people through
history who follow the philosophy of Aristotle (Pagan), including Mortimer
Adler, co-author with Louis Kelso of The Capitalist Manifesto
(1958) and The New Capitalists
(1961) — is that religious faith (and thus practice) should be solidly based on
the natural law discerned by reason; that reason is the foundation of faith. Unfortunately, the “new things” of the modern
world, i.e., the new ways of
believing based on opinion derived from faith (“the Will”) instead of knowledge
derived from reason (“the Intellect”) — a concern of every modern pope — have
convinced many people that religion is not relevant to a world that has largely
jettisoned absolutes, especially moral absolutes. This is why, for example, Pope Pius XI
declared at the start of his pontificate, “There is a
species of moral, legal, and social modernism which We condemn, no less
decidedly than We condemn theological modernism.” (Ubi
Arcano Dei Consilio, § 61.) Restoring
Academia to teach principles of justice could, therefore, go a long way toward
restoring religious practice. This is
why CESJ would like to see an
encyclical on the principles of economic justice as well as implement the
“Justice University” concept.
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| Mexican Piece of Eight with Chinese Merchant "Chops." |
• How art the
mighty fallen. The Mexican Piece of
Eight and, later, the Peso was one of the most widespread currencies in the
world during the nineteenth century, with vast amounts exported to the
Orient. It was recognized as a standard
of value over almost half the world. When
the Japanese government instituted a Western-style coinage during Meiji, it was
based on the Mexican Peso. This
continued well into the twentieth century, especially in China, where older,
full value Pesos continued to circulate long after the official Mexican coinage
was depreciated — films during the 1930s set in China sometimes show vendors
hawking their products by shouting out the price to Western tourists and
businessmen, e.g., “Five dollar
Mex!” Recently the Mexican Peso has been
falling rapidly against the U.S. dollar (which wouldn’t happen if the
currencies of the two countries were backed with private sector assets instead
of government debt and had an actual standard applied), increasing the trade
deficit as U.S. goods become correspondingly more expensive in Mexico.
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| Only a matter of time? |
• In another
example of modern monetary (and economic) madness, the Chinese stock market has
been falling — 5% over the past several weeks — which is draining past savings
out of the economy as speculative assets purchased with newly created money decline
in value and debts are written off.
Companies in both the productive and the speculative sector are
scrambling to lock in financing before the well runs dry . . . which would be
completely unnecessary if new money was created only for new capital formation
and to finance production, and expenditures for government, consumption, and
speculation coming only out of existing savings.
• Speaking of the productive sector
over the speculative sector, the Hudson Institute reports that, despite
positive economic growth, the rate of productivity has been falling drastically
for at least ten years. (Marie-Josée
Kravis, “The Great Productivity Slowdown,” The
Wall Street Journal, May 5, 2017, A15.)
This is baffling until we realize that most of the “economic growth”
over the past decade has resulted from considering the incredible rise in stock
market prices as “growth,” whereas such speculative gains produce no marketable
goods or services.
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| Belloc: animus against Jews no coincidence? |
• Bizarre historical anecdote: During World War I Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953), whose financial troubles were the stuff of legend, made “big money” for the only time in his life, enough to invest to generate an income to support himself and his children. Despite his widely publicized views on government debt, public usury, and non-productive money lending, he considered where best to invest such a large sum. Although he was warned by friends (such as banking family scion Maurice Baring) not to go against his own principles, and despite the disruption in Russia, Belloc decided in mid-1917 that Czarist government bonds were the safest investment he could make. Why? He figured that “the Jews” would never let the bonds become worthless and would bail out bondholders since most people involved in international finance were presumed to be Jewish. It may be no coincidence that Belloc's animus against Jews seemed to increase greatly after the war (he published his book, The Jews, in 1922), as did his anger against bankers, banks, and finance in general. Ironically, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, the new Russian government redeemed the Czarist bonds . . . at a tiny fraction of their original value, given nearly a century of inflation and money manipulation.
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| "You didn't sign up for 'Smile' yet." |
• 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 26 different countries and 42 states and provinces in the United
States and Canada to this blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the
United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and India. The most
popular postings this past week in descending order were “Thomas Hobbes on
Private Property,” “A Just, Third Way: Capital Homesteading, Part IV,” “News
from the Network, Vol. 10, No. 17,” “A Better Argument for a New
Glass-Steagall,” and “Glass-Steagall and Internal Control.”
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#