The New Year is
starting off with a lot of areas of news and interest to the Just Third
Way. Not all of them are pleasant
reading, but all are important, one way or another. Of course, virtually everything fits into the
Just Third Way somehow or other. These
are what have popped up as immediately relevant this past week:
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| "I'm rich, rich! . . . on paper, anyway. Can I eat paper?" |
• The 25,000 Dow. Yes,
yesterday the Dow Jones Industrial Average went over 25,000 for the first time
in history. Where most people are still
chanting that a rise in share values necessarily means economic growth, job
creation, and the rest of the mantra, increasing numbers of people are
beginning to feel very nervous about what is going on. The fact is that an increase in share values
during periods of falling productivity is no more an indication of economic
growth than a rise in food prices during a famine is a sign of abundance. Where the latter is caused by a scarcity of
food, the former is caused by non-productive speculation pushing out productive
investment for what is believed to be a limited savings pool to finance growth. Even though the latter is a fallacy, the fact
remains that “investors” are choosing to speculate instead of financing new
capital, which dries up financing for new capital.
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| Fisher: Stock speculation creates wealth. |
• Speculation and Investment.
Some investors (gamblers, really) have gotten so nervous about the astonishing
rise in share values that they have put their money into other speculations and
gambles. Some are now keeping their
holdings in cash (the ultimate speculation under Keynesian MMT), while others
are getting into cryptocurrencies . . . which are virtual commodities that don’t
even have government debt behind them.
At least they’re not making the same mistake as the economist Irving
Fisher, who claimed even after the Crash of 1929 that the fall in share values
was an illusion, and that the government only needed to start pouring money
backed only with its own debt into the economy to “reflate” prices and bring
back prosperity.
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| Hjalmar Schacht saved the German economy. |
• Return to Barter. As
reported in today’s Wall Street Journal
(“In Difficulty, Venezuela Turns to Barter,” A16, 01/05/18) the Venezuelan
currency is in such bad shape that many people have simply stopped using it,
and are bartering instead. The problem
is that prices are so high and production so low that the government can’t
afford to print enough currency to meet the transactions demand for cash . . .
or so the Journal reports: “the
government is too broke to print enough currency.” This is, of course, one of the problems
associated with trying to meet expenses or “stimulate growth” by increasing the
amount of debt-backed money in the economy.
It’s essentially pouring gasoline on a fire in an attempt to douse the
flames, with the one doing so shocked, shocked to find he has only made the
problem worse. A great deal could be
done immediately by extending back credit for productive purposes (if there are
any left), and rediscounting the asset-backed loans at the central bank,
thereby beginning a shift to an asset-backed currency and providing sufficient
circulating media for daily transactions.
Hjalmar Schacht managed to save the post-World War I German economy that
was in much worse shape by restoring asset backing to the Reichsmark in 1924.
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| Auguste Comte: Father of Positivism |
• Authentic Pseudo Truth. For years
we have described the Just Third Way as consistent with “authentic Catholic
social teaching,” even though CESJ is an interfaith group. What we did not know was that over the past
century, “authentic” has changed meaning from “not
false or copied; genuine; real; having an origin supported by unquestionable evidence; authenticated;
verified; representing
one’s true nature or beliefs; true to oneself or to the person identified; entitled
to acceptance
or belief because of agreement with known facts or experience; reliable; trustworthy;
executed with
all due formalities (in law)” or even the obsolete “authoritative.” After the socialist, modernist, and New Age “re-editing”
of the dictionary that’s been going on since the advent of New
Christianity/Neo-Catholicism/Positivism, “authentic” now means that people have been able
to force a bad argument on others, or found a source that appears to have
enough power or authority (or simply tells others what they want to hear loudly
enough) to be able to get what they wanted all along, usually some version of
socialism, modernism, or the New Age. “Authenticity”
is therefore just another version of “fideism,” or doing whatever you like and
thinking it is good if you believe it strongly enough.
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| "Dear Dr. Grisez, you completely missed the boat." s/Aristotle |
• Reinventing Aristotle and Aquinas.
This past week Deacon Joseph G., a member of CESJ’s Board of Counselors,
sent us a link to an article from the 1960s by Germain
Grisez. “The
First Principle of Practical Reason: A Commentary on the Summa Theologiae, 1-2,
Question 94, Article 2,” originally published in the Natural Law Forum 10, no. 1
(1965): 168–201. The point of the
extremely lengthy article seemed to be that Aquinas has been grossly
misinterpreted for 800 years by people who didn’t understand that the idea of “good”
is not based on reason alone, and does not necessarily relate to any absolute
standard, but to people’s “experiences” without reference to anything
objective. Thus, “good” is not something
discernible by reason, but only by faith in one’s own opinion about what is
good. There is thus no absolute standard
for good, which turns out to be whatever we want it to be. Now, we are not trained philosophers here, so
we passed it on to one for comment. It
does seem to us, however, that Dr. Grisez’s argument comes into contradiction
with what Aristotle said in his Ethics
about all things pursuing the good; if some people do evil, it’s because they
have a wrong idea about good. Dr. Grisez
seemed to be saying that there can be no wrong idea about good, and that if
someone thinks something is good, it becomes good . . . which sounds like pure
moral relativism, which is what Heinrich Rommen said results whenever you get
away from a reason-based understanding of natural law and go with something “authentic”
instead.
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| Aquinas gotcher back, Jack . . . er, Aristotle. |
• Interest in the Just Third Way.
Inquiries about the Just Third Way and Justice University have been increasing over the last
couple of weeks. A particular area of
interest is finance, that is, the subjects of money and credit, banking, and
how new capital formation is funded. We
even had the trained philosopher noted above comment on how he would like to
know more about “past savings and future savings” and how it fits into the Just
Third Way and thus into the Aristotelian-Thomist philosophical framework. By the way, the philosopher, who teaches at a
college, has agreed to do a foreword for Red
Star Over Bethlehem, which we hope to publish soon.
• Ferree Compendium. A great
deal of progress has been made in formatting the compendium of some of the key
short writings of CESJ co-founder Father William Ferree. Work is expected to be completed soon on the
section introductions.
• 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 37 different countries
and 50 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this blog over
the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, the United Kingdom,
Canada, India, and Brazil. The most
popular postings this past week in descending order were, “The American
Chesterton, VII: Socialism and the New Religion,” “Islamic Banking,” “News from
the Network, Vol. 10, No. 52,” “What Pope Francis Didn’t Say,” and “The Fine
Art of Missing the Point.”
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#