This week’s news
notes give a graphic illustration of the universal applicability of the Just
Third Way principles and even specific vehicles for expanding ownership in ways
that avoid putting the burden on current taxpayers by raising taxes, or future
taxpayers by incurring a burden of (more) debt.
Of course, we refer primarily to Puerto Rico, but there is also the
Virgin Islands, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Florida, and even the
city of Detroit, Michigan:
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| His Holiness Pope John Paul II and Norman G. Kurland |
• Presidential Task Force on Project Economic Justice. While not entirely surprising, the blog
postings on the Presidential Task Force on Project Economic Justice have proven
very popular. We even got a note of
congratulations from Dr. Norman A. Bailey, former Chief Economist for International Economic Affairs for the National
Security Council under President Ronald Reagan, at whose suggestion the
original strategy paper was written.
The Task Force is notable not only for having been a bipartisan effort,
it was carried out entirely with private sector contributions, without one cent
of taxpayer money. The work of the Task
Force received kudos
from President Reagan in the speech he gave, while His Holiness Pope John
Paul II gave his personal encouragement to the work of CESJ when he was
presented with a copy of the Task Force Report in a meeting with CESJ and Polish
Solidarity at the Vatican. Readers are
encouraged to send links to the extract of the strategy paper as well as
President Reagan’s speech to their Representatives and Senators in Congress, as
well as to any media figures they feel might be interested in a positive
program for rebuilding the region in a way that benefits everyone.
• Hurricane Katrina Proposal. It has also recently been noted that the plan
developed to rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina has the same basic
principles as the Presidential Task Force on Project Economic Justice that
should be considered for Puerto Rico and the rest of the Caribbean, but has
been somewhat refined and fleshed out in more detail, e.g., the idea of
using the
“Citizens Land Bank” concept. We
will post links to the Katrina proposal as they become available.
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| The fortress of El Morro Castle, San Juan, Puerto Rico |
• New York Federal Reserve Aids Puerto Rico. The New York Federal Reserve has worked to
ensure that there is plenty of cash on hand in Puerto Rico for consumption
purposes. This is laudable, but the fact
is that the commercial banks and the Federal Reserve should also be concerned
with making new money available to rebuild the Commonwealth in ways that
benefit everyone instead of a political and economic élite. The issue of where
the money is to come from for the massive rebuilding effort will become
increasingly important as the immediate needs of people are met in a
sustainable (at least in the short term) manner. It can be done, and in a way that does not
put the burden on the people of Puerto Rico or any other U.S. citizen, but
realizes direct tangible benefits for every child, woman, and man affected by
the disaster, as well as indirect tangible benefits for all other Americans,
especially as a model on how to make the rest of the country and even the whole
region “great again.” Puerto Rico is in
a key position in the trade routes connecting four — yes, four — continents (North and South America, Europe, and Africa),
and can once again become the premier trading hub and transshipping point it
was in the glory days of the Spanish “Seaborne Empire.” The Spanish built those fortresses in Puerto
Rico for a reason . . . as the name of the island itself — “Rich Port” — tells
you. There is no reason why it should be
“Puerto Pobre.”
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| "If I had ever heard of it, I would have approved." |
• Dr. Norman G. Kurland, president
of CESJ, has been invited to speak by the City Council of Lincoln Park, in
Wayne County, Michigan (a suburb of Detroit), at an event in January 2018 to
explore ways of saving the Motor City by using the Citizens Land Cooperative,
Homeowners Equity Corporation, and other expanded ownership vehicles that might
be possible under current state law. Key
to the effort, of course, would be gaining access to the discount window of the
Chicago Federal Reserve, in which district Detroit and its environs fall. By creating money for projects through
private sector initiatives that pay for themselves out of future development
profits, the taxpayer is off the hook, and the state and federal governments
avoid incurring more unsustainable debt.
Best of all, the citizens and other residents of Detroit — or anywhere
else a similar program is implemented — become owners of “their” city . . .
removing the quotes, establishing what the late, great G.K. Chesterton might
have called “the Distributist State” in microcosm. People from around the country are planning
on attending, and a number of institutions are being invited to send representatives.
• The Just Third Way Hour. With
two shows “in the can,” the new edition of the Just Third Way Hour podcast is on
the verge of being launched. There are
some technical issues that need to be resolved before we can provide the links,
but we expect to have everything in place by the end of next week. On the plus side, once the shows are up,
anyone can listen to them any time, which will make it much easier for people
in North America and Europe to take advantage of this unique resource.
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| "No, really, guys. I only get it for the articles. And my letters." |
• Louis Kelso and . . . Playboy
Magazine? The death earlier this
week of Hugh Hefner reminded us that the Just Third Way applies to everything. For ye of little faith, here is the text of
Louis Kelso’s letter to Playboy
magazine in the January 1972 issue (Vol. 19, No. 1 . . . that we read only for
the letters to the editor, of course), in response to an article by Craig
Karpel in the October 1971 issue (Vol. 18, No. 10 . . . that proves Kelso only got it for the
article), “Immortality is Fully Deductible.”
As Kelso responded, “To me, Karpel’s work raises a fundamental
philosophical question: Are we committing an affront to our humanity when we
try to assign human life an economic value?
A society that understood realistic economics and the nature and destiny
of man would unhesitatingly reply in the affirmative. Man’s ultimate objective in the economic
order is not production but consumption.
His destiny is not to toil for subsistence but to produce through
technology so he can be free to devote his mental and physical energies to the
work of leisure. Society, however, has
never understood that man’s economic struggle is temporary. It conceived of toil as a permanent necessity
and elevated it to an extent that it has become the object of life rather than
its means. Among these toil totems are
such familiar assertions as the following: Human labor is the only real factor of production; everyone must
serve in the work force, for only economic toil is meaningful; consumption is
immoral unless legitimated through the consumer’s personal toil (the Puritan
work ethic); people are human resources and human capital; full employment of
labor should be the foremost goal of an advanced industrial economy (even if
capital instruments, not people, produce the overwhelming preponderance of
goods and services); ad infinitum. The
habit of thinking of people in economic terms is an anachronism from the
pre-industrial past, when man’s chief functions were war and work. A free society implies more than political
liberty. Citizens who are bound involuntarily
to the production process are not free.
They are industrial serfs. The
ideal economic goal, in my view, is vicarious production through private
ownership of the capital instruments that are replacing labor in
production. Only when a human being has
no economic value whatsoever will we have achieved the human ideal of freedom.”
— Louis O. Kelso, Attorney at Law, San Francisco, California.
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| Henry C. Warmoth, Carpetbag governor of Louisiana |
• CESJ Annual Event. All
things considered, the CESJ annual celebration this past Saturday was
well-attended, with a great deal of lively discussion, especially on the
subject of Justice-Based
Management. Of particular interest
was the discussion that led to tying in the Slaughterhouse
Cases of 1873 to Dodge v. Ford Motor
Company in 1919, both of which assumed as the basis of the decision that
human beings derive rights from an abstraction such as the collective, the
State, a business corporation, a labor union, or anything else, instead of
rights being inherent in each human person, as the Just Third Way assumes as a
matter of course.
• 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 34 different countries and 44 states and provinces in the United States
and Canada to this blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the United
States, Ireland, Canada, the United Kingdom, and India. The most popular postings this past week in
descending order were “What, Exactly, Is ‘Infallibility’?” “Project Economic
Justice: Origins,” “News from the Network, Vol. 10, No. 38,” “Project Economic
Justice: Ideological Framework,” and “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property.”
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#
