The fluctuations in
the stock market have for some time been completely divorced from the real
economy in which actual people produce through their labor and their capital marketable
goods and services for themselves and to trade with others so they can consume
what those others have produced. Unfortunately,
academics and politicians are obsessed with the idea that “the stock market”
actually means something, and manage to ignore something like Capital
Homesteading that would return prices on the secondary market to realistic
levels, and start to implement counterproductive trade policies instead of
essential tax and monetary reforms:
• Wayne County, Michigan.
Members of the CESJ “core group” have been working with people in
Lincoln Park, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, to explore the possibility of
using applications of Just Third Way financial and ownership technologies to
provide a foundation for rebuilding America’s cities and infrastructure in ways
that pay for themselves instead of putting the burden on the backs of current
and future taxpayers. The challenges facing Wayne County — that can be
solved by reforming tax and monetary laws and institutions — reflect the same
challenges facing the rest of the state and the nation as a whole. Poverty, mounting
public sector debt, crumbling infrastructure, widespread home foreclosures, a
struggling educational system are symptoms of an economy that has stopped
growing in a sustainable way, where prosperity flows to every citizen. Ultimately, Wayne County could become the
first place in the world to provide universal access to economic power and the
rights of a citizen-owner. It would fulfill the promise of Article 17 of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1776 Virginia Declaration of
Rights — the equal right of every human person to own productive property
individually as well as in free association with others, in order to enjoy life
and liberty and acquire and develop virtue, thereby achieving true and
sustainable happiness.
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| The Right Reverend New Dealer |
• Cardinal Dolan and the Democrats.
According to a piece he contributed to the Wall Street Journal today, the Democratic Party has officially cut
all ties with its traditional Catholic constituency (“The Democrats Abandon
Catholics,” March 23, 2018, A15). The
only thing surprising about this is that His Eminence reports it as if it were
news. The slide has been going on since
at least the early 1930s and FDR’s semi-public courting of the Catholic and
Jewish vote that he desperately needed to get elected, all the while despising
both groups. Roosevelt was able to
capitalize on the three-way split in Catholics over the Church’s social
teachings. This began in the early
nineteenth century following the French Revolution with the rise of “social
Catholicism” as a form of the “democratic religion” of socialism. It really took hold in the United States with
the rise of the agrarian socialist Henry George and his clerical advocate, the
renegade Catholic priest Father Edward McGlynn.
It became accepted as the “right” view on Catholic social teaching after
Monsignor John A. Ryan of the Catholic University of America, an admirer of
George, McGlynn, and the New Age politician Ignatius Loyola Donnelly,
successfully perverted Thomist natural law theory and reinterpreted the social
encyclicals as socialist tracts. Ryan,
a.k.a. “Monsignor New Deal” and “the Right Reverend New Dealer” was, after the
Rev. Charles Coughlin “the Radio Priest” before the latter’s break with FDR, instrumental
in convincing Catholics that the New Deal was compatible with Catholic
teaching. Ryan is perhaps most
notorious, however, for his attacks on Ven. Fulton Sheen, which resulted in the
destruction of Sheen’s academic career and eventually forced Sheen out of
Catholic U. One quibble about Dolan’s
piece: His Eminence seems fixated on tax credits for non-public schools,
whereas a better arrangement that would help ensure choice would be school
vouchers. Interestingly, Fr. McGlynn,
one of Ryan’s heroes, was violently opposed to Catholic schools, considering
them “un-American.”
 |
| Panic on Wall Street |
• Drop in the Dow. Yesterday
the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 700 points, which sent a number of
people into a panic. This is
unwarranted. True, some people think the
stock market is a leading economic indicator, but it’s not that, nor even a
lagging or coincident economic indicator.
It’s a gambling casino that reacts to the mob mentality about anything
that affects people’s moods. Yesterday
it was fears of a trade war. We
addressed this earlier by pointing out that the real solution to trade
imbalances and monkeying around with subsidies and tariffs is not to increase
the market manipulation, but take steps to eliminate it at the source, that is,
by making everybody productive through capital ownership, freeing them from the
wage and welfare system.
• Ten Battles Every Catholic Should Know. We should mention that Saint Benedict Press,
of which TAN Books is an imprint, is running a 40% off (almost) everything on
their website until 11:59:59 pm EDST tonight, March 23, 2018, use the code
STBEN18. It’s your chance to get two
copies of Ten Battles Every Catholic
Should Know almost for the price of one, as well as books by obviously
lesser authors but that are still worth reading, even if you’re not Catholic or
even Christian. Here is the link: https://www.tanbooks.com/. Be sure to leave a review after you’ve read
the book.
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| "You used Amazon Smile for CESJ? . . . Excellent!" |
• 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.
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| Around the world . . . maybe not that world. . . |
• Blog Readership. We have had visitors from 36 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, Canada, Peru, India, and
the Philippines. The most popular
postings this past week in descending order were, “Thomas
Hobbes on Private Property,” “News
from the Network, Vol. 11, No. 11,” “Social
Justice Takes Time,” “What
is a Central Bank Supposed to Do?” and “A
More Just Tax, I: Monetary and Credit Reform.”
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#