What with the surge
in natural disasters, news on the Just Third Way front has slowed
somewhat. Still, there are a number of
things that have been happening that suggest things may eventually be turning
from the wrong way, to the Just Third Way:
• The Just Third Way Hour. This
past Monday Dr. Norman G. Kurland made his tenth appearance on “The Just Third
Way Hour” to people throughout Asia, the Pacific Rim, the Middle East, and Africa. Statistics on the audience were not available
today (we’ll include them in next week’s report), but we do know that there
were more in the Philippines than last week, and during the show nearly twenty
messages were received commenting positively on the broadcast. This show emphasized the problems associated
with the State taking over more of people’s lives instead of empowering people
to take care of themselves. The natural
way for people to take care of themselves, of course, is through direct capital
ownership; as Daniel Webster noted, “Power naturally and necessarily follows
property.”
• Thomas “TK” Kleiner of Webster
University has put in an application for CESJ Research Fellow. Tom’s area is Justice-Based Management. TK hopes to co-author some papers expanding
understanding of this essential adjunct of the Just Third Way.
 |
| Dr. Harold G. Moulton |
• The Lancaster (Pennsylvania)
Newspapers (“LNP”) report that four start-ups are in the final competition for
$100,000 in financing. While this sounds
good, it suggests that the U.S. economy may be in much more trouble than the
vaunted “recovery” from “the Great Recession” [sic] that has benefitted fewer people than is generally believed
would suggest. Entrepreneurship should
not be the object of a contest. A truly
just and living economy would make it possible for every financially feasible
business to obtain all the credit it needs, as described by Dr. Harold G.
Moulton in The Formation of Capital
(1935), an alternative to the Keynesian New Deal, extended in ways that create
more owners of capital as proposed by Louis O. Kelso.
• Red Star Over Bethlehem. The
first draft of Red Star Over Bethlehem
(and there may be a contest to see if there is a better title out there,
somewhere) is complete, and has been sent to a few selected readers for
proofing and comment. As we hope to put
this book on the fast track, we are, of course, hoping that there aren’t too
many corrections or suggested changes. . . .
• The Philosophy of Common Sense. If it escaped the attention of
readers of this blog, CESJ operates from an Aristotelian-Thomist
orientation. That means we accept as a
given that “man is by nature a political animal” . . . and, yes, that includes children and women,
too. Some commentators, however, shut
off what they hear from CESJ on the grounds that government is an unnecessary
parasite on society, and that the only just tax is no tax. Others don’t go quite that far and, thinking
that you can pay taxes with something other than income, assert that the income
tax is inherently unjust . . . which doesn’t make sense, since all taxes are,
ultimately, income taxes . . . what else are you going to pay them with? In any event, we few the State as a necessary,
if very dangerous tool, and misusing it by loading it with unnecessary
functions or abolishing it leads to things much worse than an income tax.
• Double Taxation of Corporate Profits. An article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, “Cut Business Taxes
for the 99.9%” by Juanita D. Duggan, president of the National Federation of Independent Business,
make some excellent points . . . except that it stopped short of a way to eliminate taxes for 99.9% (if not 100%)
of businesses, not just reduce them. Even
after all these years, most people are still unaware of the fact that
businesses that are owned 100% by the workers pay no corporate income tax if
they are organized as a Subchapter S corporation and owned through an ESOP
trust.
• Amazon Smile Program. 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 24 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, Canada, India and the United Kingdom. The most popular postings this past week in
descending order were “Social Justice and the American Red Cross,” “A Taxing
Problem: Own or Be Owned,” “News from the Network, Vol. 10, No. 36,” “Stimulus
and the Global Financial Crisis,” and “A Taxing Problem: It’s Still
Regressive.”
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#
