As the world
continues to warm up (at least here in the northern half of the globe), things
are also picking up in the Just Third Way movement. At the top of the list of stories this week
is the upcoming CESJ Planning Symposium next week, which will bring attendees
from across the country. There are also
a number of what appear to be problems that would be greatly reduced or even
disappear entirely if the Just Third Way were to be implemented:
• CESJ Planning Symposium. The
interfaith Center for Economic and Social Justice (CESJ) will be holding a
three-day symposium next week, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday to discuss
possible projects and initiatives for the coming year. The event, which is drawing people from
across the United States, is expected to be very fruitful, and will focus on
possible applications of the Citizens Land Cooperative, which could be used in
places like Detroit, Michigan, Cleveland, Ohio, and Hartford, Connecticut to
revitalize America’s decaying cities and fund infrastructure.
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| Pope John Paul II, Thomist. |
• The Hijacking of Personalism, Part II. Lat week we reported that we had obtained a number
of works on the “personalism” of Emmanuel Mounier (1905-1950). Since then we have obtained materials on the
personalism of Pope John Paul II, which has resulted in a reassessment of
Mounier’s work on our part. It turns out
that a number of sources cite Mounier as John Paul II’s starting point, but on
investigation it does not appear that John Paul II ever actually referred to
Mounier’s work in any substantive way, or at all that we have been able to
determine. Instead, the sources given
for John Paul II’s “Thomistic personalism” — which he had no problem describing
as a philosophy, albeit within the parameters of classic Aristotelian-Thomism,
are Martin Buber, Edith Stein, and others of a more traditional bent. John Paul II did confuse some people by
applying phenomenological techniques within the Thomist framework, giving some
people the impression that he had abandoned Thomism, but he seems to have been
extraordinarily adamant that he was adding to Thomism, not turning away from it. We have therefore changed our opinion that
Mounier’s personalism was hijacked then corrected by John Paul II, to Mounier’s
personalism was a blind alley that John Paul II simply bypassed.
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| Pope Leo XIII, worker ownership advocate. |
• New Vatican Document on Finance.
The Vatican has released a new document, Oeconomicae et
pecuniariae quaestiones (“Economic and Financial Questions”): Considerations for Ethical
Discernment about Some Aspects of the Current Financial-Economic System. It contains the by-now standard moral
criticisms of the modern financial system, ironically framed within the
assumptions that led to the problems in the first place. This is not to say that the criticisms aren’t
valid — they most certainly are, and we could add a number that aren’t even
addressed or even thought of — but there is no acknowledgement that it is the
system itself that is flawed as the direct result of taking some very bad
assumptions for granted, viz., the
legitimacy of backing any part of the money supply with government debt, the
necessity of existing accumulations of savings to finance new capital
formation, the wage system as the only legitimate way for most people to gain
income, the tacit acceptance of the labor theory of value and production, the
Servile State as an acceptable political-economic arrangement, and so on, and
on, and on. All of these are, frankly,
rooted in an inadequate understanding of natural law, particularly the right to
own embedded in human nature itself.
This leads to an inadequate (in some cases completely erroneous)
understanding of money and credit, and the necessity of linking all money and
credit directly to production by only
creating money backed by actual current or reasonably expected future production,
and by ensuring that every consumer can be a producer, and every producer a
consumer by implementing a program of expanded capital ownership. As Pope Leo XIII said over a century ago, “We
have seen that this great labor question cannot be solved save by assuming as a
principle that private ownership must be held sacred and inviolable. The law,
therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many
as possible of the people to become owners.” (Rerum Novarum, § 46.)
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| Dr. Harold G. Moulton |
• Robotic Kroger. The Kroger
supermarket chain will be experimenting with robot workers in its
warehouses. No word on how the displaced
workers will be earning an income. Of
course, as Louis Kelso pointed out well over half a century ago, if the workers
owned the robots that were taking their jobs, it wouldn’t matter.
• Walmart in India. Walmart is
moving into India in anticipation that there will be increased demand for
consumer goods. According to the
analysis of Dr. Harold G. Moulton in his classic refutation of Keynesian
economics, The Formation of Capital
(1935), this is exactly backwards. The
demand for new capital, whether industrial, commercial (such as Walmart), or
agricultural, derives from consumer demand, not the other way around. The only way to ensure that there is
sufficient consumer demand to take up what new capital can produce is to build
consumer demand into people as you form new capital, and that can best be done
by making as many people as possible owners of the new capital.
• 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 45 different countries
and 39 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, the
United Kingdom, and South Africa. The
most popular postings this past week in descending order were, “15.
A Completed Theory of Personalism,” “Reserve
Currency, III: Money Manipulation,” “Thomas
Hobbes on Private Property,” “14. The
Task of Sisyphus,” and “The
Just Third Way Hour Podcast with Guy Stevenson and Jeanna Casey.”
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#
