Fluctuations in the stock market
have become so common that it’s almost not worth commenting on. If you have publicly traded shares, you’re
probably watching it like a hawk, anyway.
If you don’t, you probably don’t really care. One thing you should care about, however, is
getting the Capital Homestead Act passed as soon as possible and get things
back to a more rational system:
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| Kelso: "Okay, guys, one more time: savings good, slavery to savings bad." |
• Federal Reserve and the Interest Rate. Although the myth that the Federal Reserve
has no control over public sector interest rates continues to wear a little
thin — as if a commercial bank would charge a prime rate to its customers lower
than its own Fed-controlled cost of money! — the rhetoric continues, except
when it is useful to promote the other view . . . such as the Federal Reserve
can control the rate of inflation by manipulating interest rates (a theory that
has some rather King Kong-sized holes in it, e.g., exactly how do you lower the price level by raising prices?). The latest word from the Federal Reserve is
that their mandate to ensure a stable price level requires that the price level
be destabilized at the rate of 2% per annum.
Don’t try to figure that out; it’s just standard backwards Keynesian
thinking, and is perfectly consistent with their belief that the quantity of
money determines the velocity of money (the average number of times a unit of
currency is spent in a year), the price level, and the number of transactions .
. . which, mathematically speaking, is utter nonsense, since you can’t have
three dependent variables and only one equation. Rationally (although no Keynesian thinks this
way), the velocity of money, the price level, and the number of transactions
determines the quantity of money . . . but grasping that simple mathematical
relationship (one dependent variable in the equation instead of three) is
something no Keynesian, Monetarist, or Austrian economist is equipped to figure
out.
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| Volcker: "It's perfectly simple. I want less government and more government." |
• Paul Volcker and the Federal Reserve. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker
has come out with a new book, Keeping at
It: The Quest for Sound Money and Good Government, which just came out
earlier this month. Volcker, who has written or had a hand in a
couple of dozen books, seems to be stuck permanently in the modern phenomenon
of wanting to have his cake and eat it, too.
On the one hand he decries government interference in the money and
credit system, and in the same breath calls for more government control. Even though material regarding the monetary
and credit reforms of the Just Third Way were given to him during his tenure at
the Federal Reserve, he is still stuck in the “currency principle” which is
based on the mathematically untenable theory that the quantity of money
determines everything (see above).
Nothing better illustrates the problems associated with what Louis Kelso
called “the slavery of savings” in which people depend on existing savings for
life itself, turning money into the master, instead of making people the
masters of money. Prosperity doesn’t
result from money, as Volcker and others keep insisting. Money results from prosperity.
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| Alberto Martén de Chavarría, fundador Solidarismo Costariccense, |
• Grants and Funding. CESJ
has contracted with a consulting firm to help raise funding for various
projects through grants from private foundations. One immediate priority is the production of a
series of educational videos and other materials to explain the elements of the
Just Third Way in easily accessible terms and images. Another is exploring obtaining funding for
the establishment of “Justice University” fellowships and research
professorships. CESJ should also be
sending participants to conferences as well as holding its own events, either
individually or (preferably) in concert with other think tanks and educational
institutions from high schools on up. If
you have a contact or two at a grant-making foundation, be sure to let CESJ
know — one of the keys to successful grant applications is to have a personal
connection.
• Solidarismo and the Just Third Way.
Joe Recinos, currently in Guatemala, has promised to use his contacts
with the Solidarity movement and the family of Alberto Martén, founder of Solidarismo Costariccense, to help
gather materials for a prospective book on Martén, Solidarity, and the Just
Third Way. Martén corresponded at length
with Louis Kelso, and was a friend of Norman Kurland, president of CESJ. Martén may have been a student of Father
Heinrich Pesch, S.J., who reoriented the solidarism of the atheist-fascist-socialist
David Émile Durkheim to conform to natural law and the principles of
Aristotelian-Thomism.
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| Pius XI, "Reign of Christ the King" not what you think. |
• CESJ Publications/Publications by CESJ Members. Editing of What
Happened to Social Justice is proceeding apace, as is the revision of Capital Homesteading for Every Citizen. The revision of Curing World Poverty has been put on hold temporarily, pending some
anticipated meetings with members of the Catholic hierarchy in the United
States and abroad. Books by CESJ members
also appear to be getting some traction, although acceptance is also
pending. A short book on Capital
Homesteading and its congruency with Catholic social teaching as well as an
analysis of the problem of resolving certain aspects of Keynesian economics
with Catholic social thought have been submitted to a major Catholic publisher
for consideration. Others are currently
in the works or in the planning stage, including one on the social doctrine of
Pope Pius XI that explains his concept of “the Reign of Christ the King” . . .
which may differ significantly from the understanding that people have who are unfamiliar
with the situation with which Pius XI and previous popes were dealing with —
and there may be another one about Pius XI’s “theory of groups” and the role of
“what has been called the corporation” — no, he was not endorsing fascism!
• Reducing Mailing List. If
you were receiving the daily blog posting by email and did not receive a copy
of this one, it’s because we trimmed the list due to what appeared to be lack
of interest. If you want to continue
receiving the daily blog posting, go the blog and enter your email into the “gadget”
over to the right that looks like this:
• 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 38 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, Kenya, India,
Canada, and the United Kingdom. The most
popular postings this past week in descending order were “Thomas
Hobbes on Private Property,” “A
Good Way to Go Bad,” “Counterattacking
in the Culture Wars,” “News
from the Network, Vol. 11, No. 42,” and “Social
Justice, IV: The Characteristics of Social Justice.”
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#