Panic in the streets. Again.
As this is being written, the stock market is crashing. Again.
Don’t worry, though. Give it
another hour or two and it will be back up.
After all, it doesn’t really measure anything except people’s inability
to recall what happened fifteen minutes ago.
Other things are of more concern, such as the surge in support for “democratic
socialism” . . . which might not be all that worrisome, either, despite the
hysteria from both ends of the spectrum.
Of course, if people would get off the spectrum altogether and on to the
Just Third Way, then a lot of things that take up far too much of their time
could take a back seat to what is really important: actually living life:
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| Don't let democratic socialism "bully" you! |
• Democratic Socialists of America.
In his book Enthusiasm (1950),
Msgr. Ronald Knox noted that people in the middle will often side with
conservative or reactionary groups or individuals when they perceive the extreme
liberal position as antagonistic or a threat, even though they find the
conservative or reactionary position equally opposed to their beliefs. It’s a matter of self-defense, a joining
together in the face of what is perceived as a common enemy. As Knox put it, people with traditional
religious beliefs often find themselves in an uncomfortable alliance with
people who have no religious beliefs to stave off the attacks of people with
radically different religious beliefs.
And if that is true in religious circles, it is even more true in
politics, the aphorism being “politics makes strange bedfellows.” That is why it is possible that the recent
upswing in the cause of democratic socialism with the primary win of Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez could easily result in non-socialist Democrats (democratic or
otherwise) voting Republican in order to keep someone they might consider “radical”
out of office. This, in fact, was how
the Old Guard Republicans kept Theodore Roosevelt from being elected president
on the Progressive Party ticket in 1912 . . . repeating the trick they had
played on TR back in 1886 by instructing Republicans to vote for the Democratic
candidate (Abram Hewitt) to prevent the agrarian socialist Henry George from
being elected mayor of New York City.
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| "Uh, guys, you might want to read what I actually wrote. . ." |
• “Democratic Socialism”? Not So
Fast. . . This past week we received a copy of Cardinal
Ratzinger’s compendium Without Roots
(2006), a revision of the earlier anthology, Europe: Today and Tomorrow (2004).
This is important because for a number of years now socialists,
modernists, and New Agers have strained every fiber of their being in an effort
to prove that Catholic social teaching and democratic socialism are not only
compatible, they are the same. Nor are
such people necessarily Catholic or even Christian. The social doctrine of the Catholic Church is
widely recognized even outside that body as authoritative. If Catholic social teaching is the same as
socialism, then socialism must be legitimate.
That is why a passage from “Europe and Its Discontents,” an essay in Europe: Today and Tomorrow/Without Roots,
has been touted as absolute proof that democratic socialism has been infallibly
declared the same as Catholic doctrine. Not
surprisingly, however, it turns out that quotes from and references to the
essay have very carefully omitted the rest of Ratzinger’s argument in which he
utterly repudiates the essence of all forms of socialism, whether totalitarian,
democratic, or religious. As he said, “[H]uman rights and human dignity should be presented as values that
take precedence over the jurisdiction of any state. Fundamental rights are neither created by the
lawmaker nor granted to the citizen. ‘But
rather they exist in their own right and must always be respected by lawmakers,
to whom they are given beforehand as values belonging to a higher order.’” (pp. 74-75)
Since the fundamental principle of all forms of socialism is that the
welfare of the people as a whole takes precedence over the needs, wants,
desires, and even rights of any individual or group to life, liberty, and
private property, there is only one possible interpretation of Ratzinger’s
analysis. That is, while socialism,
democratic or otherwise, may contain much that is good and true, even to the
extent of a certain similarity to Catholic social doctrine, it is essentially and irrevocably directly contrary to
nature itself. No, democratic socialism
is not compatible with Catholic social doctrine based on the natural law.
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| The data say there is no inequality. That makes it so. |
• Do Data Run the Economy? In
the Wall Street Journal of August 10,
2018, Erica Groshen and Robert Graves asserted that the U.S. economy runs on
data. In explanation, Groshen and Graves
said that the data from three key federal agencies allows the government to
make the right decisions for the economy.
On the contrary — data do not run the economy, consumer demand runs the
economy. Government economic policy
should not, therefore, be based on what is good in the aggregate to bolster
statistical data, but on what will empower ordinary people with the ability to
be productive and therefore have the power to consume..
• American Inequality. Ironically,
on the same page in the Wall Street Journal was another article, “The Myth of
American Inequality” by Phil Gramm and John F. Early. This time the argument was that economic
inequality is not as bad as reported because by redistributing the income
accruing to productive citizens to the less fortunate, economic inequality is
evened out. The problem of economic
inequality, however, is not that people have unequal income, but that have
unequal access to the means to become productive and thereby generate
income. The inequality in productive capacity
remains. The only solution is to promote
true economic equality by removing barriers to ownership of the capital
instruments that today account for the bulk of the production of marketable
goods and services, not to redistribute what some produce for the benefit of
others.
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| "Sure, it's corny. Do it anyway." |
• 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 43 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this
blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, France, Peru,
the United Kingdom, and Canada. The most
popular postings this past week in descending order were, “Democracy
in America,” “‘When
He Enters Into a State of Society’,” “American
Liberalism, Theory and Practice,” “Newman
and Brownson,” and “News
from the Network, Vol. 11, No. 31.”
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#