As the summer days
get longer (depending on when your summer begins), so do some of the news items
affecting the Just Third Way and the philosophy (so to speak) of economic
personalism. This would seem to be
appropriate as the world situation becomes more critical:
 |
| If the robots want our jobs, why not buy the robots? |
• Universal Basic Income. This week we received a letter from CESJ Stalwart
Barbara O., who told us of a book by Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America’s Disappearing Jobs
and Why Universal Basic Income is Our Future (2018). The premise is that technological
displacement is the cause of all social ills, from unemployment (obviously), to
drug abuse, crime, etc., so on, so
forth. As the book blurb explains, “In
The War on Normal People, Yang imagines a different future — one in
which having a job is distinct from the capacity to prosper and seek
fulfillment. At this vision's core is Universal Basic Income, the concept of
providing all citizens with a guaranteed income-and one that is rapidly gaining
popularity among forward-thinking politicians and economists. Yang proposes
that UBI is an essential step toward a new, more durable kind of economy, one
he calls ‘human capitalism.’” It appears
that — according to Yang — the way for people to lead productive and virtuous
lives is to stop being productive and seek self-fulfillment. We, of course, advocate that people become
productive by owning capital, not by retreating from the duty of becoming a
productive member of society.
• Social Security Trust Fund Bankruptcy? According to Charles Blahous in today’s Wall Street Journal, the Social Security
and related trust funds are on the verge of bankruptcy. (“The Social Security
Trust Fund Goes Bust,” The Wall Street
Journal, 06/08/2018, A17.) The fact
is, however, that — technically — the trust fund has always been bankrupt, in
the sense that obligations exceed assets.
By law, the trust fund can only own U.S. government bonds . . . except
that the U.S. government “owns” the system, which means that it borrowed all
the money in the trust fund and replaced it with its own IOUs. In order to pay anything out of the trust
fund, the government must redeem bonds, which means paying back the money it
borrowed from itself.
• Analysis of Mondragon. A
recent analysis of the Mondragon Cooperatives in the Basque Region of Spain
made some interesting points. Far from
being a New Age Utopia or quasi-socialist Workers Paradise, Mondragon has some
often-overlooked strengths and weaknesses that could raise a few eyebrows or
even cause a few shocked looks among Fabians ’n friends. For example, while frequently touted as a
model of a local economy within the “small is beautiful” paradigm, Mondragon is
inextricably tied in to the global economy.
Most of what it produces in its large factories — not small cottage
industries or artisan workshops — is for export to the rest of the European
Union. There is also something of a
casual disregard of the environment and the rights of foreign workers and women,
who are usually denied ownership rights or treated as second class citizens. Being based on the past savings model,
profits are retained to finance new capital formation instead of being
distributed to the workers, with the result that most workers do not receive
much if anything in addition to their wages, requiring two-wage-income families
instead of a single wage paycheck, but multiple ownership dividend checks. In addition to a number of other weaknesses,
the program only covers workers, giving them inadequate wage incomes instead of
supplementing it with ownership incomes for everyone. Given those easily corrected flaws, however,
Mondragon remains a good model that, however, could use improvement.
• 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 41 different
countries and 42 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this
blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, United
Kingdom, Peru, Canada, and Kenya. The
most popular postings this past week in descending order were, “The
First Problem Principle of MMT,” “Why Not
Ownership?” “Thomas
Hobbes on Private Property,” News
from the Network, Vol. 11, No. 22” and “Theodore
Roosevelt and the Crisis.”
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#