Amazon workers in Germany and Spain
went on strike today in Amazon distribution centers, possibly the biggest sales
day and busiest of the year. The stock
market is down. And nobody seems to know
how to fix what is going wrong. Maybe it’s
time to look seriously at the Just Third Way . . . .
• Catholic Internet Television.
On Wednesday Norman Kurland, president of CESJ went into rehearsal for a
taping of a segment for the Catholic Internet Television
Network (CITVN). Dr.
Kurland’s segment will focus on a Just Third Way based on a sound money and
credit system that transcends monopoly capitalism and all forms of
collectivism. The goal is to empower the
poorest of the poor without taking accumulations away from the currently wealthy
except for their current virtual monopoly over ownership of future new capital
formation.
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| Henry Thornton, Father of Central Banking, Real Bills Doctrine |
• A New Understanding of Money and Credit Needed. In a recent telephone interview with someone
interested in the Just Third Way, it became evident that even people who are
well-disposed to the goals of the Just Third Way are often burdened with
different ideas about money and credit (and a few other things) that inhibit an
immediate grasp of the general idea: empowerment of every child, woman, and man
through direct capital ownership, with capital acquisition financed by the
expansion of commercial bank credit repaid with the future earnings of the
capital itself. Anyone indoctrinated in
the “Currency Principle” paradigm on which all three mainstream schools of
economics are based (Keynesian, Monetarist, Austrian) assumes as a given that
money is first created, then expended.
The Just Third Way, however, relies on the “Banking Principle,” which in
part relies on the “real bills doctrine,” that is, “money” is created by the
process of making and keeping promises, usually in the form of bills and
notes. “Good money” is created by “real
bills,” that is, promises backed by real assets owned by the maker of the
promise or that the maker of the promise reasonably expects to own when it
comes time for the promise to be kept. “Bad
money” is created by “fictitious bills,” that is, promises backed by nothing,
or by something in which the maker of the promise does not have a property
stake.
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| Socialism, Modernism, and the Occult go together. |
• Socialism, Modernism, and New Age Link? In an article, “American
Exorcism” (to appear in the December print edition as “Why are
Exorcisms on the Rise?”), posted on its website, the Atlantic Monthly examines the increase in the number of requests
for exorcisms, or casting out of demons. While it does not
say yea or nay regarding the actual existence of demons, the article is far
better than most on the subject and avoids overt sensationalism, giving the
subject serious treatment. It calls to
mind Dr. Scott Peck's book, People of the
Lie (1998) which also treats demonic possession as a serious subject (Peck
may have gotten a little carried away with some of his claims in this and later
books, but still has valid observations and insights); Archbishop Chaput cited
Peck’s book as describing symptoms of today's social, religious, and family
malaise. It is of interest to the Just
Third Way not because of any particular belief in demons, but as an example of
how in times of economic, social, political, and religious confusion and chaos
people tend to increase their interest in such “esoteric” subjects as the work
of Dr. Julian Strube of Heidelberg University demonstrates. Dr. Strube has proved a link between early
nineteenth century socialism and modernism, and an increased interest in, even
obsession with the occult and the New Age. It is understandable that the further society
gets from its natural law foundation and rejects a healthy spirituality, the
more it succumbs to unhealthy spiritual ideas in a desperate search for meaning
and order. It is no coincidence that
Nazism often included an interest in the occult, much of its philosophy and
bizarre racial theories coming from “Ariosophy” (“Aryan Theosophy”), derived
from theosophy and other esoteric occult movements of the nineteenth century
that opposed traditional forms of politics, family structure, and religion,
especially Judaism and Christianity.
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| Martin Luther King, Jr. (left) Walter Reuther (right) |
• National Minimum Wage Movement. In pursuit of a short
term expedient that starts to border on the delusional when it becomes viewed
as a permanent solution, the push to implement a $15 minimum wage is gaining
force in response to the new ascendancy of the Democrats in the House of
Representatives. The problem, of course,
is that while paying people more than a free market determined wage rate may be
essential at times as an expedient, it is not, and can never be, a permanent
solution to inadequate income. As the
late labor statesman Walter Reuther of the UAW noted, raising fixed wages and
benefits only increases costs and raises prices for consumers . . . who are the
same people who would get the increased wages.
As a result, workers and consumers are trapped in a perpetual game of
trying to catch up, with each round of cost and price increases leaving them
worse off than before. After all, even
if wages, costs, and prices go up by exactly the same amount, wage earners are
no better off than before, but they pay more in taxes (income, sales, property,
etc.), decreasing their purchasing
power even if everything else stays in
the same ratio! In reality, of
course, it is inevitable that costs and prices increase faster than wages if
only so that companies can maintain their profitability, inflation eats away the
purchasing power of the increase, and transfer payments from workers to non-workers
also decrease purchasing power. What
Reuther pointed out was that if compensation increases came out of the bottom
line, i.e., after costs, instead of
increasing costs, workers’ incomes would rise but prices would fall, especially
if the workers and consumers were owners and receiving dividend income out of
profits instead of increasing costs by taking increases in the form of fixed
wages. What is needed, then, is not a
national minimum wage, but a national
minimum ownership.
 |
| Dodged the ax again? Celebrate with Amazon 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 42 different
countries and 45 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this
blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, Germany,
Australia, the United Kingdom, and Canada.
The most popular postings this past week in descending order were “Christianity
versus the Democratic Religion,” “The
‘Myth’ of Stagnant Incomes,” “News
from the Network, Vol. 11, No. 46,” “Thomas
Hobbes on Private Property,” and “Aristotle
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#