It may sound like the “same old
same old,” but it’s really . . . okay, it’s the same old same old. The difference is that every day we seem to
be reaching a larger number of people about the Just Third Way and Capital
Homesteading, and a number of people are still coming up with the same old
excuses that they have for decades, evidently not realizing that they’ve worn a
little thin over time. Be that as it
may, here are a few highpoints on what’s been happening in the movement:
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| Henry C. Adams: debt a danger to sovereignty |
• Another Global Debt Crisis. Or, more accurately, a continuation of the
same debt crisis that has had the world in its grip since the near worldwide
adoption of Keynesian economics and the fixed belief that governments can back
currency with their own debt and somehow stay financially stable. According to an article in this past
Tuesday’s Washington Post (“Global
Debt Raises Red Flags,” Washington Post,
09/04/18, A-1, A-11) current government debt behind much of the global money
supply stands at $169 trillion. On the
eve of the so-called “Great Recession” (a euphemism that fooled no one at the
time, and now sounds just plain silly. So, of course, the media continue to use
it) total debt stood at $97 trillion.
Some authorities believe the current troubles in Argentina, Turkey, and
other “emerging markets” (another euphemism that means countries trying to grow
their economies by consuming far more than they produce) are simply the
harbinger of a global meltdown waiting to happen. Others, more Keynesian, continue to insist in
the face of all experience for the past century or so that the size of a
government’s outstanding debt is irrelevant because it just means existing
wealth in the economy is being divided into smaller and smaller pieces. The only problem is that the government
except in a socialist economy does not own that wealth. Currency backed by government debt is really
backed by the government’s power to tax and collect that wealth — and that
depends in turn on the citizens’ willingness and ability to pay the taxes
needed to redeem the debt backing the currency.
And the size of the public debt (as Greece and countries indebted to
China have discovered) is the single greatest danger to the independence and
sovereignty of a country, as Henry Carter Adams pointed out exactly 120 years ago
in his book, Public Debts: An Essay in
the Science of Finance (1898). The
situation is similar to that of the early nineteenth century when governments
began issuing debt on a massive scale after discovering that a central bank
could be turned away from the private sector and into a government money
machine by monetizing debt instead of private sector productive assets. The new republics of Central and South
America tried to spend their way into prosperity and only ended by kicking off
the Panic of 1825, which financial historians consider the first of the “Boom
and Bust” busts. What is needed is an
intensive program to be implemented throughout the world that will at one and
the same time restore an asset backing to the currency and the rest of the
money supply, and build purchasing power into consumers, thereby restoring
Say’s Law of Markets. One possibility is
Capital Homesteading.
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| The downside of a state-controlled free market (yes, we know). |
• The Collapse of China’s P2P Lending Industry. In a related story (“From Get Rich Quick to
Wiped Out,” Washington Post,
09/04/18, A-6), although this one applies to private sector investment instead
of public finance, China’s innovative — and unregulated — “Peer-to-Peer”
investment loan houses have crashed, leaving investors, many of them low income
workers and retirees lured by the chance to “get rich quick” speculating in the
stock market, high, dry, and bankrupt. It
turns out that many of the P2P loan houses were pyramid schemes or invested in
startups that went under very quickly. Nor
can the police or the government do anything, for there are no securities laws
covering the industry, which sounds much worse than the wildest days of the
wildcat stock jobbing on Wall Street just before the Crash of 1929. In fact, the closest thing we can see to what
is happening right now in China was the Mississippi Scheme and the South Sea
Bubble. During the latter, shares were
floated for hundreds of new companies, virtually all of them ways to separate
people from their money as easily as possible, described in Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the
Madness of Crowds (1844).
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| Not a thing of the past, but there are alternatives. |
• Prison Jobs. Prison strikes are spreading (“Prison Jobs
Shouldn’t Be Slave Labor,” Washington
Post, 09/04/18, A-15). This isn’t
the prison movie type of strike that leads to a riot after banging on the
tables with tin cups. This is about
genuine “slave wages” for work. Yes,
technically convicts are slaves. They
are bound absolutely to the will of others and cannot come and go as they
please — the legal definition of slavery.
Prior to American independence, British convicts were a prime source of
labor for the American colonies and a profitable source of revenue for the
Crown. One of the reasons they had the
death penalty for so many crimes was so that sentences could be commuted to
penal servitude for life and the convicts sold to people who needed cheap labor
and didn’t mind the added danger. Today
there is generally a rehabilitation aspect added to the punishment for a crime,
but often ignored. It is, after all,
quite expensive just to lock someone up without the added cost of
rehabilitation. As for prison
industries, the unions made certain that whatever was available to convicts
were the dregs that no one else wanted, especially union members. Restitution to victims? Forget it.
Of course, it might be time to look at something like the New Birth
Project proposed some years ago, that would address many, if not all, the grievances
of the convicts. Perhaps it is time to
give it another look.
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| Misleading stereotypes aren't always bad. . . . |
• Mainstreet Employee Ownership Act. The “Main Street Employee
Ownership Act,” which became law on August 13, has been getting quite a bit of
coverage in the national media. The
Washington Post, CNN, and even the Philadelphia Enquirer have all run major
stories on the bill.
• Canny Scots Stereotype? Or
just being humanly intelligent? Nicola
Sturgeon, First Minister of Scotland, has announced the creation of “Scotland
for EO” (“Employee Ownership”), a government-supported organization that will
support the continued development of employee ownership in Scotland. As Sturgeon commented, “All the evidence
tells us that employee ownership delivers benefits to business performance, the
people who work in them, and the places in which they are located.” Now we just need the rest of the United
Kingdom as well as the rest of the world to follow suit.
• NCEO Initiative. The
National Center for Employee Ownership in Oakland, California, reports that the
Cook County, Illinois, Commission on Social Innovation is working on a variety
of initiatives to support more employee ownership as a result of research by
the NCEO. Research shows that the median
household income for worker owners is 92% higher than that of non-worker
owners.
• 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 33 different
countries and 44 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this
blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, India, France,
the United Kingdom, and Canada. The most
popular postings this past week in descending order were “The
Accident of an Urgent Necessity,” “News
from the Network, Vol. 11, No. 35,” “A
Primer on English Liberalism,” “The
Crisis of Democracy?” and “Thomas
Hobbes on Private Property.”
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#
