This week we cover news items from
Japan to the Vatican, and that span nearly a century . . . but that you can
still read quickly. Don’t be worried,
however. The only controversial thing we
cover is expanded capital ownership, which is very upsetting to the increasing
numbers of democratic socialists:
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| Not entirely correct, but not entirely wrong, either. |
• Get to Work, Senators. On
Monday of this week the Wall Street
Journal ran an article, “Get to Work, Senators” by Dave Brat, U.S.
Representative from Virginia’s Seventh Congressional District (07/30/18, A15). Brat’s idea is that welfare recipients should
be required to work in exchange for receipt of benefits. This is one of those ideas that sounds better
in print than in practice. First,
welfare is (in theory) a backup to individual production and private
charity. It’s based on need, not on
exchange. Since the criterion is need,
it would be unfair to impose additional criteria, such as a work
requirement. Second, even under the
current system there are people who otherwise qualify for benefits but who are
denied due to a bureaucratic decision.
Imposing additional criteria simply adds more reasons to deny
benefits. Would all welfare, for
example, be contingent upon working, or would people who are physically or
mentally incapable of working be able to receive benefits? What if there really are no jobs of any kind
available? The real solution to the
increasing cost of welfare is not to figure out ways that fewer people qualify
for welfare, but to make it so that more people qualify for capital ownership
and access to the means of doing so. Being
an owner means that someone gets the income from capital while the capital
works. The more people who own capital,
the fewer people will be on welfare. It’s
as simple as that.
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| Prime Minster Shinzo Abe |
• Japan’s Conglomerates Streamline. In an effort to give a
boost to the economy, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government is calling for
more focus on shareholder returns and greater accountability of management to shareholders
and boards of directors. In an article in the Wall Street Journal (“Japan’s Conglomerates Streamline,” 08/01/18,
B1, B12) the goals are presented, but without any effective means suggested of
attaining them. In particular, a program
of expanded capital ownership financed by full payout of dividends on voting
shares tax deductible at the corporate level would force boards to be
accountable to shareholders and give boards more incentive to hold management
accountable. It would also dramatically
increase the tax base and start paying down the massive government debt
accumulated.
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| Pope Francis |
• Pope Francis and the Death Penalty. Calm down.
This is not a comment for or against capital punishment, but on how
papal teachings manage to get misunderstood or twisted at lightning speed — a
matter of concern to adherents of the Just Third Way when discussing the
distortions and misinterpretations forced on to the natural law social
teachings of the Catholic Church. If
what Pope Francis wrote is read carefully, it becomes obvious that he changed
no doctrine of the Catholic Church. This
is a little complex, but an objective reader will instantly see that the “admissibility” of capital punishment is conditional
on there being alternatives available, as Pope Francis clearly stated. Now, whether you agree or disagree with what
he said, this is not a change in the
teachings of the Catholic Church.
Rather, it is a change in the application
of the teachings of the Catholic Church — something completely different. A “doctrine” cannot be changed, or it ceases
to be a doctrine, a fundamental principle — by definition. If a thing is conditional or contingent, then
it is — by definition — not a
doctrine! That being the case, why would
so many people declare so quickly that there has been a change in Catholic
doctrine, even non-Catholics? Because if
one doctrine can be shown to have changed, all
doctrines are up for grabs . . . such as the condemnation of all forms of
socialism, the right to life, liberty, and so on. The Catholic Church would
change from what G.K. Chesterton called the last bulwark of common sense, into
a farrago of nonsense, a social club in which anything goes.
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| Farmers need markets, not handouts. |
• Hidden Minimum Wage Expense. Another hidden cost of linking compensation
and increases in benefits exclusively to wages.
As the minimum wage rises, increases to older and more experienced
workers slow down or disappear — the shortfall has to be made up somewhere, and
if not in costs passed on to the consumer, then in fewer new workers hired or
reductions in pay increases to long term workers. None of this would apply if, as the late
Walter Reuther pointed out, increases in compensation came from capital ownership,
as profits are the residual after sales, not an increase in costs before sales.
• U.S. Agricultural Commodities Pile Up. With the beginning of the Trump Trade Wars,
U.S. agricultural commodities from dried beans to meat are beginning to pile up. Promised subsidies will only make the problem
worse, much as Thailand got stuck with megatons of overpriced rice from a
subsidy program. The fact remains that
imposing trade barriers in defense of the free market is counterproductive. If President Trump is serious about wanting
to “Make America Great Again,” he should get behind a Capital Homestead Act and
the accompanying tax and monetary reforms.
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| Chesterton: Left the C of E to escape socialism? |
• G.K. Chesterton’s Conversion to Catholicism. This is ostensibly another “so what?” type of
item. Chesterton, however, was an
advocate of expanded capital ownership (although he drove George Bernard Shaw
crazy by not explaining how it could be achieved), and the Just Third Way is in
large measure based on the natural law social justice teachings of the Catholic
Church. We have located material
suggesting that Chesterton may have left the Church of England and converted to
Catholicism because of the Church of England’s drift into socialism and the increasing
subordination of doctrine to popular opinion.
We will know more when we obtain the actual article Chesterton wrote,
but it appears that the “democratic socialist” model of Christian social
teaching — derived from the tenets of “New Christianity” — may have become just
a bit more than Chesterton could stomach when the 1919 “Enabling Act” that
permitted parliament to legislate on matters of religious doctrine was
passed. It also appears that William
Hurrell Mallock may have been considering converting when he died in 1923.
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| Don't be a greedy little pig! SMILE! |
• 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 25 different
countries and 36 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this
blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, France, the
Philippines, the United Kingdom, and India.
The most popular postings this past week in descending order were, “News
from the Network, Vol. 11, No. 30,” “The
Just Third Way Podcast #27,” “Democracy
in America,” “A
Quintessential Individualist,” and “A
Different Kind of Liberalism.”
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#