A number of CESJ
initiatives have made a great deal of progress this week. We have been talking with people from across
the globe and even in the United States, as can be seen from this week’s news
items. Our electronic outreach seems to
be having some effect, and the social media, podcasting, and now even
television are starting to pick up on the Just Third Way:
• Catholic Internet Television. Norman Kurland has been invited to tape a
video presentation for “Catholic
Internet Television,” a network with a global outreach affiliated with the
Catholic Worker movement. Many of
the goals of the Just Third Way are compatible with those expressed by CITV and
the Catholic Worker movement, so the program, consisting of a lecture by Norman
Kurland followed by a question and answer period, should be informative and
lively.
• Citizens Land Cooperative. The
CESJ core group had a skype meeting on Tuesday with three concerned citizens in
Poland and Ukraine to discuss applying the “Citizens
Land Cooperative” (also called “the Citizens Land Bank”) concept in Ukraine,
where people are worried that the “economic warlords” will end up owning all
the land and control economic growth. On
top of everything else, the government is burdened by debt and cannot create
more debt-backed money to finance economic growth, so we recommend that the
banking system be reformed to phase out the current government debt-backed
money, and substitute a money supply backed by private sector hard assets. By allowing the private sector to finance
growth out of existing productive potential instead of the government’s swiftly
disappearing ability to tax in the distant future, the economy could be put on
a much sounder basis, and a foundation laid to protect the sovereignty of every
child, woman, and man. To prevent people
with money right now from buying up all the land, a Citizens Land Development
Corporation or Cooperative could be the owner of all the land (with existing
owners selling at a fair price to the Cooperative, and leasing it back with a
non-transferable, 99-year lease with renewal option), and every citizen owning
the land by owning the Cooperative.
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| Pope Pius XI |
• A Question of Human Dignity (?). We have pretty much decided
to retitle the book about the development of the concept of social justice and
what happened to derail it. Words and
concepts we’re tossing around are human dignity, social justice, and so
on. The book is essentially a history of
the development of the concept of social justice up to the breakthrough of Pope
Pius XI in the 1930s, and how something intended to enhance and protect the
dignity of every person has been used instead to expand and glorify the State
and the collective.
• Principles of Economic Justice. If the book on social justice (above) is well
received, another volume on the principles of economic justice, and the
development of that concept, focusing on money, credit, and banking (for
reasons that will become evident in the book) would be in order. The idea is to take the concept of economic
justice from its early stages up to the 1930s, when Louis Kelso had his breakthrough. A potential third volume would show how the
social justice ideas of Pius XI, and the economic justice ideas of Kelso came
together in the Just Third Way, relating events and concepts from the 1930s to
date.
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| Emperor/Basileus Heraclius |
• Ten Battles Every Catholic Should Know.
While it’s a little out of CESJ’s direct
focus, and (from a certain perspective) limited by its title, we recently
received the final copy of the cover for the upcoming Ten Battles Every Catholic Should Know — and, in our opinion, every
Protestant, Jew, Muslim, Atheist, or anyone else who wants a good read. . .
. Anyway, the reaction has been “positive”
. . . if by “positive” you mean “wildly enthusiastic.” For a number of reasons we won’t put up an
image of the cover yet, but be prepared for something good. You’re not supposed to judge a book by its
cover, but that’s not a bad idea in this instance. We have run the text past an Islamic scholar
who (purely by chance, of course) is Muslim, and he has stated that no Muslim
should be offended in any way by the book’s “Cross versus Crescent” theme: the
book relates facts without (too much) editorializing. From a Just Third Way perspective, there is
even a subchapter on the last emperor/first basileus of Byzantium, Heraclius,
who reigned from 610 to 641, and who strengthened the Empire (some authorities
claim he saved it) in part by sponsoring what amounted to a medieval “homestead
act.”
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| Nibelungenlied: a few changes sneaked in over the centuries. |
• Sequels to Ten Battles. We hope it’s not premature, but we’re looking
into possible follow-ups to Ten Battles,
assuming it does as well as we think it will.
We’d like to look more into the achievements of Heraclius in promoting
individual sovereignty and widespread capital ownership, and also the slow
(some might even say agonizingly so) development of the natural law ideas
behind Catholic social teaching. That
sounds dull until you realize we’re talking about the transformation of the
Roman Empire and its institutions as a result of the barbarian non-invasions in
late antiquity, and the development of key political and religious ideas (that
lacked only sound economic ideas) that culminated in the philosophy of
Aquinas. A key incident, the fall of the
Burgundian kingdom in the fifth century, was the seed from which the medieval
epic, the Nibelungenlied (“The Song
of the Nibelungs”), and Wagner’s “Ring Cycle” grew — a fascinating story in
itself. (One oddity: in the Nibelungenlied,
Attila the Hun turns from “the Scourge of God” into a kindly and generous king
who has the name “Etzel,” a corruption of the name of Flavius Aëtius, the Roman
general who opposed Attila!)
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| A powerful tool being misused. |
• Taxation as Financing? A bad idea that is getting worse is the
insistence of lowering taxes on the rich to enable them to finance (and own)
new capital formation to create jobs for others. This is expected to de-fund social
programs. A better idea would be to
limit the tax system to raising the money to run government, and use the
Federal Reserve to create money for private sector development that can be
widely owned instead of financing government.
That will not only provide sufficient money for all sound economic
growth and finance expanded ownership, it will lessen the demand on government
for social programs and — eventually — lower taxes naturally instead of as a
political ploy.
• Frightening Fed Fiasco. So
distant has the Federal Reserve become from its original mission of providing
adequate liquidity for private sector economic growth that some banks are
simply opting out of the system. The
regulatory burden is too much, and there are few benefits. Shifting back to the original mission of the
Federal Reserve would go a long way to solving this problem, but if it
continues, there are going to be other, more serious problems developing.
• Just Third Way Hour. Michael
D. Greaney, CESJ’s Director of Research, taped an
episode of CESJ’s podcast the Just Third Way Hour this week with host Bryan
Vosper. It’s not up yet, but the first
three podcasts can be heard by going to the CESJ “Podcast Page.”
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| Relax. We want your money, not your blood. |
• Shop online and support CESJ’s work! Did you know that by making
your purchases through the Amazon Smile
program, Amazon will make a contribution to CESJ? Here’s how: First, go to https://smile.amazon.com/. Next, sign in to your Amazon 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.
• Blog Readership. We have had visitors from 39 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, Switzerland,
India, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The
most popular postings this past week in descending order were “Reinventing
Religion,” “The First Step,” “‘Doing’ Social Justice,” “Foundation of
Confusion,” 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#