A great deal of work has been done in advancing the theoretical framework of the Just Third Way. In particular recent investigations into “personalism” and the roots of social justice reveal just how deeply certain assumptions of socialism, modernism, and the New Age have infiltrated virtually all aspects of society, whether Family, Church, or State. It has become evident that the failure of many in Academia and in Politics to understand the act of social justice and the debilitating slavery of past savings has destabilized the social order to an alarming degree:
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| Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard internationally. |
• A Surge in Share Buybacks.
According to an article in the Wall
Street Journal, “Buybacks Surge, Steadying Market” (05/11/18, A1, A4),
companies using “excess cash” to purchase their own shares and retire them are
decreasing the recent volatility experienced in the stock market. This, however, is not as good as it might
seem at first glance. First, of course, the so-called excess
cash belongs not to the company, but to the owners of the company, that is, the
shareholders. In effect, the company is
using money that belongs to the shareholders to purchase shares belonging to
the shareholders. It’s as if a robber
takes $100 from your wallet and buys your watch for $100, paying for it with
the $100 he just stole from you. Because
the money paid to you for the watch already belonged to you, you were in effect
robbed of $100 even though you ended up with $100, coming up short a watch
worth $100. Second, there is the problem of buying and selling shares in a
company as if ownership itself is a commodity to be bought and sold. In a sense that is right, for you can buy or
sell some or all rights to something, and it is legitimate to deal in such
contracts, but to buy and sell contracts in an effort to manipulate the value
of the “underlying” — as the consideration in such contracts is called — is
considered a form of “peculation,” or theft of money entrusted to you. Third
and finally, buying shares back to keep up the price by artificially reducing
the number of shares outstanding is the same sort of thing that forced the
United States off of the gold standard internationally in the 1970s. The U.S. had issued so much debt to fund the
Vietnam War and the War on Poverty that the official conversion rate of $35 per
ounce of gold was impossible to maintain despite massive purchases of U.S. debt
by foreign central banks. By abolishing
the conversion rate and allowing the value of the U.S. dollar to float, the
pressure was off foreign central banks, but so was the de facto cap on
government spending. Not having to worry
about maintaining an official price of gold meant that government debt was now
limited only by what Congress could get away with.
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| Robert Maynard Hutchins |
• The Hijacking of Personalism.
We recently obtained a number of works on “Personalism,” what Emmanuel
Mounier (1905-1950) insisted on calling a “movement” because in his day it was
not a “completed theory” and thus not a philosophy. With Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), Mounier
worked to fit an emphasis on the dignity of the human person into the existing
framework of Aristotelian-Thomism but were inhibited in this task by the intellectual
environment fostered by what Alexis de Tocqueville termed “French” or “European”
type democracy that vests sovereignty into the collective instead of the human
person. To some degree Maritain’s
thought was corrected by exposure to that of Robert Maynard Hutchins
(1899-1977) and Mortimer J. Adler (1902-2001), but still lacked two important elements
that would turn it into a completed theory.
These were, one, the “act of social justice” as a particular act (developed
by Pius XI and analyzed by Fr. William Ferree, S.M., Ph.D.), and two, the
principles of economic justice and freedom from “the slavery of savings”
(articulated by Louis O. Kelso and Mortimer J. Adler). Without these two essential elements,
personalism was interpreted as a form of socialism by the socialists, and a
form of capitalism by the capitalists.
John Paul II made great efforts to correct this problem, and although he
seems to have had an instinctive “feel” for the act of social justice and gave
encourage to the work of CESJ in the area of economic justice, was not able to
break through the social and intellectual barriers in Academia, Church, and
State to begin integrating a completed theory of personalism as applied Thomism
to social and political problems. As a
result, personalism has been relegated to just another form of Christian or
democratic socialism without most people realizing it is the antithesis of any
form of socialism.
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| Antoine-Frédéric Ozanam |
• The Forgotten Social Justice Apostle. In connection with searching out the roots of
social justice, we came across the life and work of Antoine-Frédéric Ozanam
(1813-1853), founder of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul. Although “beatified” (one step away from
canonization) by Benedict XVI, Ozanam remains largely unknown, and is almost
always misunderstood. A strong opponent
of all forms of socialism, those relatively few people who know anything about Ozanam
insist he was a Christian socialist and a Neo-Catholic, a euphemism for
socialism. This is despite the fact that
a pamphlet he wrote at the age of 18 was a refutation of the errors of the New
Christianity (socialism) of Henri comte de Saint-Simon, and he repudiated the
work of de Lamennais when de Lamennais attacked the Catholic Church, although
he had formerly admired de Lamennais as a champion of human liberty and
democracy. Ozanam’s ideal society was a
purified U.S. type of democracy, described by Alexis de Tocqueville (whom
Ozanam greatly desired to meet, but was prevented by his own early death),
because it was established not on the sovereignty of “the people” as French
democracy that leads to socialism, or of an élite
as English democracy that leads to capitalism, but of the human person that
leads to personalism and its application in the Just Third Way. Ozanam of course condemned slavery and the
treatment of native Americans but saw “Democracy in America” corrected of these
errors as the necessary wave of the future, and seems to have understood that widespread
private property in capital is essential for strong families as well as a
stable political order and the growth of religion.
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| A grin without a cat? Or a cat without a book? |
• 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 34 different
countries and 41 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this
blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, Australia,
India, the United Kingdom, and Italy. The
most popular postings this past week in descending order were, “Thomas
Hobbes on Private Property,” “13. The
Bottom Line,” “The
Just Third Way Hour Podcast (Jeanna Casey and Guy Stevenson),” “A
Growing Alienation,” and “The Task
of Sisyphus.”
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#