Here is the second half of our
annual news roundup.
The second half
(July through December) always ends up being longer than the first half because
the evets seem more timely and less outdated than what happened during the
first half of the year.
To cut to the
chase, however::
 |
| One up on Wall Street? |
• (07/06/18) Worker Ownership Pays.
According to a recent report from the National Center for Employee
Ownership in Oakland, California, the first year of the “Employee Ownership
Index” shows a return of 30.3%, compared to the Standard and Poors 500 with a
return of 15.5%. The NCEO created the
Index with 28 publicly traded companies (30 as of this June) that have both
broad-based employee ownership and have won one of three major national
employer rating awards, each of which puts a high emphasis on worker
participation. Although the orientation
of an index that relies on the performance of shares in what amounts to a
gambling casino is somewhat equivocal, the fact remains that worker ownership
and a participatory culture are of measurable economic benefit.
 |
| William Cobbett |
• (07/06/18) Independent British Panel Urges Government Support for
Worker Ownership. Back in “the day”
(meaning the nineteenth century), Cadbury Chocolate had a worker ownership
program. Before that, William Cobbett,
the “radical” politician, stressed the importance of widespread capital
ownership — which incidentally went directly contrary to the European-style
liberal and radical demands for socialism; Cobbett was an American-style
liberal and radical, with a concern for natural law and the dignity of the
human person instead of the collective.
Now, according to the NCEO, a new report from an independent panel of
leading business leaders in the UK urges the government to take steps to
promote worker ownership, which the panel sees as crucial to improving the UK’s
economy and creating a more equitable society.
Nothing was said about non-workers, however, or people who work in the
public sector.
 |
| Orestes A. Brownson |
• (07/06/18) Socialism and “Free Love”.
We recently uncovered an article from 1855,
“The Free Love System” (
Littell’s Living
Age, Vol. 46, No. 592, September 29, 1855, 815-821, reprinted from the
New York Times) in which the anonymous
author analyzed the destructive effect of socialism of all kinds on
society.
In response to criticisms of
various socialist programs, especially “free love” or the abolition of marriage
and family, socialists began disguising their principles by concentrating on
emotional causes that socialism would presumably ameliorate or eliminate, and
downplaying or ignoring such things as the abolition of marriage and family, of
private property, and of traditional morality.
In this way, so the anonymous author argued (most of the articles from
this period against socialism are anonymous, as the socialists had proven to be
past masters at invective and calumny; only people such as Orestes Brownson who
loved controversy, even thrived on it, typically signed their critiques of
socialism), honest people would be persuaded of the benefits of socialism and
permit it to be adopted,
e.g., the
founders of Brook Farm commune, whom no one would ever accuse of immoral
behavior.
Once socialism was adopted, of
course (even if not by that name, but some euphemism, such as “New
Christianity,” “Christian Socialism,” “Democratic Socialism,” or even in our
day “Catholic Social Teaching”), then private property, morality, marriage and
family, and so on, could all be abolished or redefined to conform to the new
principles.
In this way European or
French style liberalism that vests sovereignty in the collective could be
instituted without anyone realizing the significant difference between that and
American style liberalism that vests sovereignty in the human person under God,
not the State.
Unfortunately, the truly
American style liberal causes, such as the abolition of chattel slavery, got
tarred with the same brush as the European style liberal causes, such as
socialism, as we saw in another article we discovered last week from the same
time period, “Whig Principles: What’s Left of Them,”
The United States Review, Vol. 34, No. 12, December 1854, 465-477,
and which we covered in “
Woodrow
Wilson’s Political Philosophy.”
• (07/13/18) CESJ Internship.
Sasha M., a student from the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta
(Canada), has completed her work for the CESJ Spring 2018 internship. Sasha, a political science major, chose as
her main project a comparison of the various Universal Basic Income schemes,
the position of the Austrian School of economics, and CESJ’s Just Third Way
Capital Homesteading proposal. During
the course of her internship, Sasha made a number of insightful comments
regarding the Canadian social welfare system and some of the flaws that result
from shifting the primary responsibility for individual welfare from the human
person to the State. The overall
conclusion was that while such things as making the State directly responsible
for every individual’s material, mental, and spiritual wellbeing may be
well-intentioned, it ends up as an egregious misuse of the specialized tool of
the State, and almost inevitably ends up instituting and maintaining the very
conditions it seeks to ameliorate.
 |
| Fulton J. Sheen |
• (07/13/18) Fulton Sheen Surprises.
A while back CESJ published the Just Third
Way Edition of Fulton J. Sheen’s “long lost” classic from 1940,
Freedom
Under God.
A few — very
few — commentators tried to make the case that CESJ’s understanding of Sheen’s
position on, say, private property in capital is completely wrong, and that
Sheen (despite a large number of clear and unequivocal statements to the
contrary) was actually in favor of “democratic” or “religious” socialism,
i.e., a variety of socialism allegedly
consistent with Catholic social teaching and the precepts of the natural law.
It turns out that there is a large body of
evidence completely refuting this view, something we discovered completely by
chance while doing some research into the career of John Henry Cardinal
Newman.
It turns out that Monsignor
Ronald Knox, who was one of Sheen’s teachers and who introduced him to G.K.
Chesterton (to such good effect that Sheen became known in some circles as “the
American Chesterton”) greatly admired the work of one William Hurrell Mallock,
of which Newman also approved.
Mallock,
who wrote a book titled
Property and
Progress in 1884 to refute the theories of the agrarian socialist Henry
George as presented in George’s popular book,
Progress and Poverty (1879), also wrote a book refuting positivism,
“the religion of humanity” (which is consistent with the subject of Sheen’s
first two books and his doctoral thesis), which Mallock titled,
Is Life Worth Living? (1881). Fulton
Sheen was sufficiently impressed with Mallock’s work that in 1954 he wrote his
own book on the same theme,
Life Is Worth
Living, and also used it for his television show that ran from 1952 to 1957.
George Bernard Shaw loathed Mallock,
insisting that Mallock was stupid for not being a socialist and for daring to
say things about socialism that the socialists could not refute, even writing a
book about it in 1909,
Socialism and
Superior Brains: A Reply to Mr. Mallock.
From a Just Third Way point of view, Mallock’s economics are grossly
inadequate, but since the socialists were operating within the same general
framework, it evidently did the trick.
 |
| Dave Hamill |
• (07/20/18) Dave Hamill Appointed to CESJ Board of Directors. During the CESJ monthly board meeting on Monday, July 16, 2018,
the CESJ Executive Committee’s appointment of Dave Hamill to the CESJ board of
directors was moved and seconded, with the motion passing unanimously. During the discussion, CESJ Treasurer Dawn
Brohawn noted that the board nominated Dave for his many years of contributions
and his positive spirit.
• (07/20/18) Outreach to the COOP Movement. Consistent with CESJ’s emphasis on working
for economic justice through capital ownership for every child, woman, and man,
we are continuing outreach to the National Cooperative Business Association,
which represents approximately half the coops in the United States and many
outside of the country as well. Two CESJ members
may get in on the effort to connect with the coop movement, having met with a
key ESOP lawyer in Chicago. CESJ’s
“selling point” to today’s business community is that we can put them in the
way of a new source of financing through the Federal Reserve or any other
country’s central bank.
 |
| William Hurrell Mallock, the Missing Link? |
• (07/20/18) Missing Link Found.
The “missing link” — or common denominator — joining together John Henry
Newman, Robert Hugh Benson, Ronald Arbuthnott Knox, Gilbert Keith Chesterton,
and Fulton John Sheen has been discovered.
There was an individual who interacted with or influenced all five, but
who is almost never mentioned by any biographer, historian, devotee, or fan . .
. yet this particular individual ties them all together and explains a number
of otherwise puzzling things. It’s
rather astonishing that this person has been ignored, yet there are also ties
to Charles Kingsley (whose attack on Newman led to his writing his Apologia Pro Vita Sua), the agrarian
socialist Henry George, and even George Bernard Shaw. This discovery casts light on some things
that many people today try to cover up or brush aside, especially advocates of
socialism of all forms.
• (07/27/18) Democratic
Socialism on the Rise.
Most
“democratic socialists” seem to have a rather vague idea of what it’s all
about, but acceptance of the concept has been spreading rapidly, and not just
among actual socialists who took a page out of the handbook of the Fabian
Society, which broke with H.G. Wells over the best way to implement
socialism.
For the record, Wells thought
the best way was to be straightforward, convince enough people that socialism
is right, and socialism will be established.
In contrast, the Fabian Society’s way (which Wells seemed
As George Bernard Shaw noted over a century
ago, the greatest strength of the Fabian Society is that people outside the
Society have no idea what they are promoting, other than a loose adherence to
the principles devised by the agrarian socialist Henry George . . . which is
also the Society’s greatest weakness.
(“The
Fading Fabians,”
The Boston Evening Transcript, November 27, 1908, 10.)
Evidently, many people now believe that it is
“too late” to turn back the clock and avoid socialism.
Consequently “democratic socialism” is the
wave of the future and is the new form of Church and State.
The irony, of course, is that early
nineteenth century socialism was first propounded as “the democratic religion”
directed toward establishing and maintaining a new form of Church and
State.
The rise of democratic socialism
is therefore not really looking toward the future but turning back the clock
two hundred years for another go at a system that could never be made to work
in the first place. to think
underhanded or dishonest, un-British, in fact) is to be as vague as possible,
infiltrate established organizations in Church and State, and burrow from
within, never saying anything definite, converting institutions to socialism
without anyone realizing what was going on until it was too late.
 |
| Walter Reuther |
• (07/27/18) Tariffs and
Farm Aid.
As a result of the “Trump
Tariffs,” U.S. farmers have been put in a precarious position, so the government
is proposing that they be helped financially . . . out of a fund established
during the (third) Great Depression.
Of
course, the easiest way to help farmers would be not to have tariffs in the first
place, and to implement an aggressive program of expanded capital ownership and
monetary reform to institute an “elastic” and asset-backed reserve currency for
the U.S., with the assets private sector hard assets that are broadly
owned.
A shift in the structuring of
compensation from wages alone to wages and ownership income would, as the late
Walter Reuther pointed out so many years ago, lower prices and allow workers
and consumers to share equitably in productivity gains.
The balance of trade would equalize as U.S. goods
became less expensive in other countries without harming the American consumers
or their counterparts in other countries
.
 |
| A bit over the top, but, yeah. |
• (08/03/18) 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.
 |
| Shinzo Abe |
• (08/03/18) 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.
 |
| Cardinal Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) |
•
(08/10/18) “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.
• (08/10/18) 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..
•
(08/10/18) 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
.
• (08/17/18) The Fall of Crypto Currencies? Not likely, given how many people are
obsessed with the thought of getting control over the money supply out of the
hands of central banks and governments, even though the crypto currency
phenomenon is going from the frying pan into the fire if sound monetary theory
along the lines of the Banking Principle is considered.
Still, people may be catching on to the fact
that crypto currencies are even more insecure than those issued by central
banks and backed by government debt.
After all, you can hold a government accountable to some degree, but not
the issuer of a crypto currency.
As
noted in the
Wall Street Journal,
“Digital Currencies Tumble” (08/15/18, A-1, A-2), “[T]here is still virtually
nothing holders of [crypto currencies] can do besides trade it.
They have no practical utility in traditional
markets and in daily commerce.”
• (08/17/18) “Chinese Growth Engine Sputters.” Having slipped back into third place after
artificially boosting its GDP with gigantic infrastructure projects financed
with government debt, China is now urging its banks to lend for even more
infrastructure projects and possibly institute some tax cuts and increase
government spending to “shore up” their economy in anticipation of a long trade
war with the United States.
(
Wall Street Journal, 08/15/18, A-18.)
. At the same time,
Chinese debt seems to be slipping: “Missed Payment Renews Fears Over Chinese
Debt” (WSJ, 08/15/18, B-12.) What China is planning is not a strengthening
of its economy, but a serious weakening.
China, Japan, and the U.S. would do better to work on people’s capacity
to produce through capital as well as labor and thus bolster consumer demand
that really drives economic growth.
 |
| Fix the system, don't break the people. |
• (08/24/18) Food Stamps and the Work Requirement.
While it is more than easy to sympathize with
people who are outraged at other people who receive food stamps and appear to
eat better than those who work and pay full price for everything, to demand
that people “work” in order to qualify for assistance because they have
inadequate or zero wage income sort of misses the point.
While it will always be possible to find
people who know how to work the system — they’ve been around from the dawn of
time; free riders are nothing new — most people would prefer to gain income
legitimately, through labor, ownership, or both than be dependent on the
dole.
Instead of trying to figure out
ways for people to “earn” charity, then, it would be far better to have a
program where they can earn ownership of self-liquidating capital, become
productive, support themselves, and contribute to the support of those less
fortunate without worrying whether or not they “deserve” it.
A program like
Capital Homesteading
would go a long way to reducing redistribution through the tax system almost to
the vanishing point, which is a better response than either demanding that
people “earn” charity or condemning people whose sense of justice is outraged
by what looks like some people taking advantage of others.
• (08/24/18) End of the Greek Bailout.
Alexis Tsipras, the Prime Minister of Greece,
has declared the end of the bailout, proclaiming a “day of liberation.”
In a sense it is, but the problems underlying
the need for the string of bailouts continue and bode well (or ill) to cause
more bailouts in the future unless corrected.
And the chief problem is the fact that consumption for the average Greek
far exceeds production for the average Greek, and the slack has to be made up
somewhere . . . and that “somewhere” has been government debt, just as it has
for almost every country on earth.
In a
collective sense, this doesn’t make any difference; Keynesian economics is
built solidly on the assumption that there is no difference between the
individual human person and the collective.
As far as actual human beings are concerned, however, it makes a great
deal of difference.
If A produces twice
what he consumes, and B doesn’t produce anything, collectively there is enough
to go around.
In the real world where
actual people live, A can have all he wants and set aside something for
tomorrow A produced it, so A owns it and can do with it what he likes) and B
can go take a hike . . . unless A feels charitable or the government steps in
and takes A’s presumed surplus and gives it to B.
Of course, if the government does that, then
A might decide not to produce that surplus for B’s benefit instead of his own,
unless the government figures out a way to take from A to give to B without A
catching on, at least too quickly.
Unfortunately, the As in the Greek economy caught on, and stopped
producing, leaving the Bs hanging out to dry.
Of course, the real solution is to make B as well as A productive so
that each produces for himself.
Given
the power of the ordinary person to be productive, it’s astonishing how
productive they can be.
For example, in
France following the Franco-Prussian War the country produced its head off and
paid off an indemnity specifically intended to destroy France economically
forever in less than three years.
Of
course, ownership of the means of production in France was broadly owned so
that ordinary people could be productive.
If Greece instituted something along the lines of
a
Capital Homestead Act and put forth a comprehensive national effort
to retire the debt — an all-out “war on debt” — it is entirely possible that
the economy would be on a sound footing within three to seven years, and the
debt be repaid without austerity in less than a century (with a great deal of
pain, give it a generation, say less than a quarter of a century).
• (08/31/18) Puerto Rico Rebuilding.
Yes, we’re tempted to ask, What rebuilding?
but according to the
Wall Street Journal
of August 30, 2018 (“Puerto Rico Creditor Group Starts Talks,” B-10) the
possibility of one of the major groups of creditors rescheduling the debt has
raised the price from less than 25¢ on the dollar in January, to more than 50¢
on the dollar.
Of course, a program of
Capital Homestead would get the creditors $1 on the dollar, plus interest, as
well as put the Commonwealth on a sound financial footing for the future.
This would improve on a proposal Governor
Luis Ferré made back in January 1972 which required people to put up cash to
purchase special growth shares.
Capital
Homesteading would require that the assets pay for themselves out of future
profits, thereafter providing consumption income
and a restored tax base that would enable the government to pay off
Puerto Rico’s debt in full.
• (08/31/18) Plummeting Currencies.
The currencies of Argentina, Turkey, Brazil, and India continue to fall
against the dollar. This underscores the
problem of having currencies without any objective standard of value, such as
cattle (common standard in the ancient world for thousands of years), silver
(virtually the worldwide standard from 750 B.C. until the end of the eighteenth
century), or gold (“king” of the nineteenth century . . . notice how they keep
getting shorter and shorter for each standard as government takes over more and
more control over money and credit?).
Today’s “standard” of government debt depends solely on the ability of a
government to make good on its debt to justify the value it puts on its
currency. Maybe it’s time to look into
R. Buckminster Fuller’s idea of the kilowatt hour . . . as soon as the world’s
monetary and tax systems can be put into rational shape.
• (08/31/18) National Debt Slavery?
Do unto others before they do unto you?
China is turning Sri Lanka into a modern day “semi-colony,” the same way
Great Britain and Portugal turned parts of China into semi-colonies in the nineteenth century. By getting into debt to China, Sri Lanka was
forced to hand over economic control of its deep sea Hambantota port
to “China Merchants Port Holdings” (CM Port). We recall that back in 1898 in his book, Public Debt: An Essay in the Science of
Finance, Henry C. Adams warned that non-productive government debt (and ALL
government debt is by definition non-productive) is the single greatest danger
to national sovereignty.
• (09/07/18) 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 C. 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.
• (09/07/18) 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).
• (09/07/18) 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.
• (09/07/18) 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.
• (09/07/18) 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.
 |
| All an illusion? |
• (09/14/18) The Illusion of “Economic Recovery”.
In this past Tuesday’s
Wall Street Journal, an article by Peter J. Ferrara, who teaches
economics at the King’s College, opined on why the “Obama Recovery” took so
long.
(“Why the “Obama Recovery” Took So
Long,”
WSJ, 09/11/18, A-15.)
Citing Milton Friedman’s observation that
“[t]he deeper the recession, the stronger the recovery,” Ferrara gave what
appeared to be damaging statistics about Obama’s policies versus those pursued
by Trump.
Ferrara’s reason was that the
Democrats simply couldn’t figure out an economic policy that creates jobs,
fosters economic growth, and raises wages . . . which doesn’t actually say why.
The plain and simple fact is that the
so-called recovery the economy is presumably enjoying right now is a
bubble.
Massive issuances of government
debt by all recent administrations have only fueled stock market speculation
(which is NOT “growth”).
At the same
time, consumer demand is being sustained by the highest levels of consumer debt
in recent memory, again hardly something that can be considered “growth.”
The fact is, whether Democans and
Republicrats, both parties have missed the obvious point that “job creation”
and rising wages are in economic terms red herrings, false trails that lead you
away from finding a real and sustainable plan for recovery.
To attain real economic growth and
natural “job creation,” it is necessary
to build sustainable consumer demand, and not by providing more ways for
consumers to get into debt.
The
historical fact is that only consumers who are productive can sustain consumption.
As human labor decreases in value relative to
technology in the production process, consumers must supplement their
production by means of labor with production by means of capital, and that can
only be done legitimately by building ownership into every child, woman, and
man.
And
that can only be done by opening up access to the means of becoming
owners so they can purchase capital on credit that pays for itself out of its
own future earnings.
• (09/14/18) Out of the Fire, Into the Frying Pan? In an article somewhat related to the one
noted above (everything is kind of related, but we thought we’d point it out),
Mary Anastasia O’Grady (who is usually more sensible) had a column in Monday’s
Wall Street Journal suggesting that
Argentina switch to using the U.S. Dollar.
(“Argentina Needs to Dollarize,”
WSJ,
09/10/18, A-15.)
No, what Argentina —
and the U.S. — need to do is switch from using a debt-backed currency to using
an asset-backed currency, which is what central banks were in part invented to
do.
The fact that governments can back
the currency with their own debt is the problem, not how much they issue.
Eventually the politicians will give in to
the temptation to start bankrolling everything with debt instead of taxes,
which means the sky is the limit for how much debt will be issued.
After all, when was the last time you heard
of a politician who wanted
less money
to spend?
If new money is only created
in a way that it is backed by private sector assets, there is a natural limit
imposed on the amount of money that can be created, and avoids both inflation
and deflation.
At the same time, if all
new money is created in ways that turn people into owners of capital (
i.e., that finance a program of
widespread ownership), the consumer demand needed to sustain economic growth
will be created naturally without having to force consumers to assume more and
more debt.
• (09/14/18) “You Must Be Crazy” Department. For a
three-n-a-row roll, on Wednesday the Washington
Post gave us the remarkable news that “U.S. Budget Deficit Swells as Economy
is Humming” (09/12/18, A-1, A-15).
Noting that “typically, the deficit shrinks during strong economic
times” . . . which to anyone except a Keynesian or a politician would suggest
that what we are experiencing are not “strong economic times,” but a bubble
economy fueled by (guess what) U.S. budget deficits! Even worse, “there are signs the borrowing
binge has only begun.” Is it possible
that no one in authority can see what is happening? That unless drastic measures are implemented
as soon as possible, the United States — and thus the world — is looking at an
economic meltdown of epic proportions?
And what should be done? First,
reform the monetary system so that the banks and the Federal Reserve finance
private sector development in ways that spread out capital ownership. This will restore the tax base and have the
potential to fund government operations.
Don’t use debt to finance government as the usual thing. Ever. Second, reform the tax system to restrict it
to raising money to run government in the most efficient manner possible and
favor widespread capital ownership.
Don’t use the tax system to finance economic growth. Ever. Third, restrict government borrowing to
emergencies and never, never, ever issue bills of credit to monetize government
deficits. Ever. And if you’re
wondering how to go about it, take a look at Capital Homesteading.
 |
| "Do you want fries with that?" |
• (09/28/18) The Rise of the Machines? According to an article in today’s
Washington Post, “Several Thousand
Service Industry Workers Will Strike to Demand Unions” (09/28/18, A-16)
“several thousand” employees of
fast food companies in seven states are planning on going on strike for the
right to join a union. The effort is
being organized by the “Fight for $15” that has popularized the movement to
raise the hourly minimum wage to $15.
Now, the Just Third Way supports the right of people to organize for any
legitimate purpose. If the labor
movement in the United States had not gotten organized, largely through the
efforts of Terrence Powderly (1849-1924) for all his faults, who knows where
we’d be today? But people should
organize for the right reasons and have the right goals. As it is, organizing for higher wages and
benefits in the fast food industry is an open invitation to automate. If they want to unionize, they should form
ownership unions and strike for a piece of the capital pie, not increased
wages. This is what labor statesman
Walter Reuther advocated before his untimely death.
 |
| Fr. Ferree: social justice is not what you think. |
• (10/05/18) Understanding
Social Justice. Promoting social justice is difficult when
people fail to grasp (or even notice) the underlying principle: that social
justice is not a substitute for individual justice or charity, but a way of
making individual justice and charity possible.
Nor is social justice a way of saying that charity can now be coerced
because it is now justice. No, those
ideas of social justice are not social justice because, one, they are not
social, and two, they are not justice.
They are ways people have devised to try and get around not merely
natural rights, but the whole of the natural law itself by asserting that
actual human beings only have such rights as the collective permits them to
have. Worse (because many people feel in
their hearts that the collective cannot be greater than actual human beings),
there is a fixed belief that no one can change the institutions of the common
good through acts of social justice so that individual virtue once again
becomes possible. That seems to be the
premise behind a lot of the gloom and doom good people are enmeshed in these
days, and why they are tempted to elect or submit to leaders who, however
terrible or disgusting they may be as people, come across as strong enough to
impose their vision of the ideal society on a country or institution, and
reject leaders who are perceived as incapable or weak. People think they are faced with the choice
of submitting to tyranny, electing a tyrant more to their liking, or separating
from society, going off into the wilderness to found their “city on the hill.”
 |
| Kelso: economic justice is not what you think. |
• (10/05/18) Understanding
Economic Justice. The only thing worse than the widespread
misunderstanding of social justice is the widespread misunderstanding of
economic justice. Far too many people
combine these misunderstandings and assume that economic justice means everyone
gets what he or she needs as an entitlement.
If other people refuse to be “socially just” according to the will of
the strongest, the State forces them by redistributing their wealth and
mandating certain behavior.
• (10/19/18) Chinese Robber
Barons. Unverified rumor has it that
the Chinese Nomenklatura are making fortunes by picking up shares at bargain
prices from ruined middle class investors who sank their savings and all they
could borrow into speculative shares on the Shanghai Exchange, while the
Chinese market is taking a hammering today.
The government encouraged the middle class to invest, and then financed
growth with increased government debt, creating a speculative bubble as cash
flowed into the economy, and those with access to ready money are picking up
the pieces.
• (11/02/18) Myth of the Independent Indian Central Bank.
The Reserve Bank of India claims to be an independent central bank and
is working at the present time to reassert its independence . . . which argues
that they are not as independent as they claim.
Of course, it is difficult for a central bank to be independent when the
reserve currency is backed 100% by government debt, the government retains
legal control and the right to “give such directions to the Bank as it may,” and
the government appoints the head of the Bank.
Independence of a central bank under those conditions as Dr. Harold G.
Moulton of the Brookings Institution pointed out in the 1930s, is a myth. Only by backing the reserve currency with
private sector hard assets as was the original theory of central banking is it
possible to have a uniform, stable, elastic, asset-backed reserve currency and
avoid both inflation and deflation. Only
by having widespread capital ownership and universal citizen direct ownership
of the central bank, limiting the government’s role to regulation and
enforcement of contracts, and a tax system that raises sufficient revenue to
run the government and pay down past deficits with only short term borrowing
out of existing accumulations of savings to cover temporary shortfalls in tax
collections will the system be sustainable.
 |
| Andrew Abela |
• (11/09/18) Expanded Ownership Quote of the Year.
This is not actually the best expanded ownership quote from this year —
which still has two months to run, so we’re taking a bit of a chance, anyway —
but the best expanded ownership quote we’ve come across this year . . . so far. This is from Dr. Andrew Abela, former dean of
the School of Business and Economics at the Catholic University of America and
currently University Provost. It’s from
a blog posting on July 1, 2013, “Business
Leaders are Going John Galt”: “Earlier this year, CUA created
its own School of Business and Economics. One of the major motivators in
creating the School is the urgent need to re-propose to society that business
is a moral endeavor, that business leaders serve society by their very actions
of creating products and services, wealth and employment.
How can you help? By doing whatever you can
to educate others on the value and values of ownership. Do you have a
successful business model? If so, have you considered franchising as a way to
grow your business without additional capital investment on your part — and as
a way to help others become business owners? Do you have an Employee Stock
Ownership Program (ESOP) so that your employees can become owners too? Have you
considered “spinning out” parts of your business by selling ownership stakes to
the management teams that run them?
The
greater the proportion of citizens who are owners and investors, the less
ability others have to vilify the business economy. The more people who
understand how a culture of ownership brings political and economic stability,
the less temptation there will be to attack business, and hopefully the less of
a tendency to “go John Galt.”
• (11/09/18) Smithfield Foods, Inc.
Smithfield Foods, Inc., for which some years ago CESJ proposed a worker
buyout to keep the ownership in the United States, was purchased by the
Chinese. According to a report in
today’s Wall Street Journal,
Smithfield Foods is receiving a subsidy from the United States government to
offset the effects of the new tariffs.
In other words,, the U.S. taxpayer is paying China to offset the effect
of higher prices to the U.S. consumer.
• (11/09/18) Saudi Arabian Financing. According to the Wall Street Journal earlier this week,
much of the money for new startups in Silicon Valley is still coming from Saudi
Arabia. This may explain the reluctance
in certain quarters to make too great a fuss about certain recent events . . .
which would not be a problem if companies shifted to “future savings” to
finance replacement capital and expand operations, freeing up “past savings” to
finance startups and other risky ventures as well as for consumption, thereby
also decreasing the demand for unserviceable consumer credit. There would be no need of foreign financing,
especially if domestic consumer demand were to be enhanced by access to
ownership income as well as wage and welfare income on the part of the average
American through a program of Capital
Homesteading.
 |
| Wants higher minimum wage. |
• (11/16/18) Arkansas Wants Highest Minimum Wage.
The state of Arkansas recently announced that it wants to have the
highest minimum wage in the United States.
From a Just Third Way perspective, it might be better to go for the
highest minimum income in the United States, but that would entail widespread
ownership, which means sharing power.
One thing the minimum wage does that widespread ownership does not is
ensure that whoever has power remains in power, with as many other people
dependent on him or her as possible.
• (11/16/18) Global Economy Slowing Down? Today’s Wall
Street Journal opined that the global economy was slowing down, although
the growth in the United States was masking this for most people. Of course, when “they” say that the global
economy is slowing down or that the U.S. is experiencing economic growth, it
means in the aggregate, which in turn means that it isn’t real unless it
affects you personally. Also, despite
the numbers, few people realize that the so-called growth in the U.S. has been
fueled by government debt instead of private sector future savings, meaning
that eventually the U.S. taxpayer will have to pick up the tab.
• (11/16/18) McGill University Conference. Norman Kurland’s presentation to a group at
McGill University went very well, with participants and audience pleased with
the result. About a dozen or so people
tuned in on the internet, and the presentation came across very clear. During the question and answer period a
number of insightful questions were asked which, although they did not
demonstrate a complete understanding of the Just Third Way, indicated a
willingness to listen and dialogue on the ideas.
• (11/16/18) Catholic Internet TV (CITV). One of the participants
tuning in to Norman Kurland’s talk at McGill was Stephen DeVol of Catholic
Internet TV, a project of the Catholic Worker Movement. Steve expressed great interest in having Norm
record a session for broadcast on CITV, with the result that a taping is
scheduled for next week before Thanksgiving.
• (11/16/18) Please Don’t Throw Me in the Briar Patch Dept. A leading Chinese venture
capitalist is threatening
to “scale back” investment in the United States. Kai-Fu Lee, former president of Google China
says that if relations continue to deteriorate between China and the U.S., he
would begin reducing investment. That is
very welcome news to anyone who understands the science of finance and the
dangers of relying on foreign investment capital to run an economy. The Federal Reserve System was established
primarily to provide the U.S. economy with sufficient liquidity to keep the
economy running smoothly. If it were to
be used to finance private sector investment instead of monetizing government
deficits, there would be no need for foreign investment at all, and the U.S.
could start paying down its debt. By
adding Louis Kelso’s “Expanded Ownership Revolution” and turning every child,
woman, and man into a capital owner, making dividends tax deductible at the
corporate level, paying out all earnings, and financing growth using commercial
bank credit backed up by the Federal Reserve (and, of course, forcing
government to live within its means by imposing a balanced budget), there would
be sufficient consumer demand to establish and maintain full employment. Further, the U.S. would again become a net
exporter as widespread ownership encouraged greater efficiency and
profitability. China threatening to cut
back on investment in the U.S.? Please
do.
 |
| A socialist symbol? Yes! |
• (11/23/18) 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.
• (11/23/18) 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.
 |
| A media superstar? |
• (11/30/18) Catholic Social Media Bishop? In today’s
Wall Street Journal there is an interesting piece about Auxiliary
Bishop Robert Barron of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, “The Bishop of Catholic
Social Media,” A-17.
According to the
article, only Pope Francis has more media followers than Bishop Barron,
although it is hard to say which has the more attacks . . . probably Pope
Francis wins that, hands down.
Be that
as it may, what His Excellency is reported as saying is very close to the Just
Third Way, with one exception: the implicit assumption that a political party
that embodies Catholic social teaching would necessarily be a “Catholic
political party.”
Our contention is that
as Catholic social teaching is based on and derived from natural law, it is
common to every human being.
In that
sense, there is no such thing as
Catholic
social teaching distinct from Protestant social teaching, Jewish social
teaching, Islamic social teaching, Hindu social teaching, or anything
else.
The natural law is “written in the
hearts of all men,” and thus applies to every human being regardless of faith,
philosophy, or lack thereof.
That being
the case, we have good news for Bishop Barron . . . if he’s not afraid to hear
it.
There is a “political party” (if you
want to call it that) that has a platform with everything he says he wants:
the
“Unite America” platform, which can be found here.
So to address Bishop Barron directly, and
with all due respect, Your Excellency, are you willing to put your money where
your mouth is?
After all you
did say, “If you can espouse all of
those positions, you’d be in the party I’d happily be involved with.”
There it is.
Pick up the phone and give Dr. Norman Kurland, president of CESJ a call,
contact
information is here on the CESJ website.
What are you waiting for?
You were serious, weren’t you?
It’s relatively safe.
We haven’t bitten anyone, at least lately.
And other readers, what’s stopping you from
asking His Excellency to check out the Just Third Way?
Suggest it to him.
He can be reached
here (it’s a general email and mailing address, but
might get to him, you never know).
• (11/30/18) GM Plant Closings.
The big news this week in the non-expanded capital ownership world is
that General Motors, which just announced it was closing five plants in the
United States and Canada and laying off a few thousand workers.
This is after getting a rather large tax
break to retain jobs, which the company apparently spent on a stock buyback and
increasing executive compensation.
For
some reason we doubt whether the adage that what’s good for GM is good for the
country.
Also, we were wondering whether
the plants would have been closed had workers owned shares and what was left
was spread out among the public rather than a few capitalists.
It would have been interesting to see what
the reaction of, say, the late Walter Reuther would have been . . . Oh, wait,
we already know.
As Reuther said in his
testimony before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress on the President’s
Economic Report, February 20, 1967, “Profit sharing in the form of stock
distributions to workers would help to democratize the ownership of America’s
vast corporate wealth which is today appallingly undemocratic and
unhealthy. The Federal Reserve Board recently published data from which
it is possible to estimate the degree of concentration in the ownership of
publicly traded stock held by individuals and families as of December 1962.
Preliminary analysis of these data indicates that, despite all the talk of a ‘people’s
capitalism’ in the United States, little more than one percent of all consumer
units owned approximately 70 percent of all such stock. Fewer than 8 percent
of all consumer units owned approximately 97 percent—which means, conversely,
that the total direct ownership interest of more than 92 percent of America’s
consumer units in the corporation-operated productive wealth of this country
was approximately 3 percent. Profit sharing in a form that would help to
correct this shocking maldistribution would be highly desirable for that reason
alone.… If workers had definite assurance of equitable shares in the profits of
the corporations that employ them, they would see less need to seek an
equitable balance between their gains and soaring profits through augmented
increases in basic wage rates. This would be a desirable result from the
standpoint of stabilization policy because profit sharing does not increase costs.
Since profits are a residual, after all costs have been met, and since their
size is not determinable until after customers have paid the prices charged for
the firm’s products, profit sharing as such cannot be said to have any
inflationary impact upon costs and prices.”
• (11/30/18) Chinese Monetary Imperialism. According to a
report in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal,
the Republic of the Maldives and a number of other countries have discovered a
downside to Chinese largesse: creditor conquest. As has been known for a few thousand years or
more, the easiest way to conquer or control another country is to get them in debt
to you. This, incidentally, is also why
it is a very bad thing when governments figure out ways to stay in power
without taxation: it takes away the ability of the citizens to cut off the flow
of funds by withholding taxes. That is
also why Henry Carter Adams (1851-1921) noted, “The facts disclosed
permit one to understand how deficit financiering, carried so far as to result
in an interchange of capital and credit between peoples of varying grades of
political advancement, must endanger the autonomy of weaker states unable to
meet their debt-payments. Provided only that the interests involved are of
sufficient importance to make diplomatic interference worth the while, the
claims allowed by international law will certainly be urged against the delinquent
states, and the citizens of such states may regard themselves fortunate if they
succeed in maintaining their political integrity. (
Public Debts, An
Essay in the Science of Finance. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1898,
28-29.)
Just because Keynes said you
could increase debt without danger doesn’t mean it’s true.
• (12/07/18) Bitcoin Bonanza Bottoms Out?.
Warnings
about the downfall of the Bitcoin, the leading “crypto currency” in
the world, are starting to proliferate.
While “the experts” still have a foggy notion of the true nature of
money (or they wouldn’t be experts, they’d be rich), they are starting to
realize that a currency of any kind that costs more to obtain than it is worth
is not sustainable.
A Bitcoin is currently
“worth” (the term is used advisedly here) $3,397.89 (we just checked), down
from a high of $19,783.06 a year ago (a currency that loses more than 80% of
its value in a year is good?), but “new” Bitcoins cost $4,758 to “mine” in the
U.S., which seems to be about the average for a number of countries.
It’s almost $10,000 a couple of places, while
in Venezuela it’s $531, but there may be other reasons for not taking it away
to South America.
The “blockchain”
technology appears to be useful, but the Bitcoin and similar cypto currencies,
as they ignore the true nature of money, may be on the way out as people become
more educated, or at least more wary.
• (12/14/18) Close, But No Cigar.
This article, “
A
Better Way to Share the Wealth” by Joseph Blasi and Maureen Conway,
accurately points out that the real problem is not the income gap, but the
wealth gap underlying and causing the income gap.
Unfortunately, it tries to address the
problem of how to get a better distribution of wealth by focusing on how to
divvy up what already exists instead of making it possible for people to get
their own.
Specifically, instead of
looking at tax and monetary reform to make ownership of newly formed capital open
to everyone, the article looks at tax reforms to encourage existing owners to
give up their ownership.
Even in cases
where both parties to the transaction benefit, there are some problems: 1) It
only affects people who are employed by for-profit business entities.
2) It relies on existing owners choosing to
give or sell productive assets to workers; it is no one’s right to obtain, even
at a fair price, what belongs to someone else if the owner doesn’t want to sell
or give it away.
3) It focuses on how
people gain income instead of how people become productive.
Specifically, the authors propose the
following: 1)
Reward businesses that
offer profit and equity shares. Translation: the U.S. taxpayer picks up the
tab.
2)
Incentivize retirees to sell businesses to employees. Translation: the U.S. taxpayer picks
up the tab.
3)
Promote public-private citizens trusts.
Translation: private property is abolished.
A much better and sustainable solution would
be to open up access to money and credit so that every child, woman, and man
can become productive through ownership of capital as well as through
labor.
Something along the lines of
Capital
Homesteading should be considered.
• (12/14/18) “Yellow Vest” Crisis in France.
It’s tempting to say it’s déjà vu all over
again as rioting continues in France.
This
is actually nothing new: whenever economic conditions deteriorate, the French
have a tendency to take to the barricades or the modern equivalent.
It almost always signals a fundamental change
in government, and usually not for the better.
The Old Regime fell in this way, as did the Restoration, the July
Monarchy, the Second Republic (indirectly; it’s complicated), and the Second
Empire.
Only the First and Second World
Wars and the Welfare State stopped the cycle, and then only for a time when it
became obvious that the level of entitlements could not be sustained.
As a result, President Macron is fast losing
what support he had, and the French can expect a brief Sixth Republic followed
by some variety of Third Empire, although it would not be called that (although
there is a group in Russia calling for Putin to become the Czar, so France just
might end up with Napoleon IV, V, or
XIV, if things
follow the usual pattern.
Of course, if
things don’t get out of hand too fast, Macron might have time to institute a
Capital
Homesteading program, or whatever name would be acceptable to his
constituents.
This would not only help
him out of a current difficulty but lay the foundation for a stable future for
France.
• (12/14/18) Legislation By Judiciary.
Today’s
Wall
Street Journal it was reported that “The Supreme Court May Begin to Tame
the Administrative State” (12/14/18, A-17).
Government agencies have gone mad with power (in a sense), creating a
vast body of regulations that have the force of law but that Congress never had
a say in.
The statistics are
frightening, if you want a society in which ordinary people can understand and
obey the law.
Even if the regulations
were consistent, however (which they are not), no human being on Earth could
ever grasp, much less understand 100,000 laws.
The irony is that people are looking to the Supreme Court to take away
the legislative power assumed by government agencies . . . the same Supreme
Court that has also usurped the power of Congress. . . .
• (12/14/18) Targeting Private Schools.
Also in today’s
Wall Street Journal is a piece on how New York State is requiring
private schools “to offer a specific set of classes more comprehensive than
what students in public schools must learn.” (“New York State Targets Jewish
Schools,”
WSJ, 12/14/18, A-15).
While the authors are rightly concerned about
the effect on Yeshivas (Jewish religious schools), it is clear that all
religious schools are being targeted.
This is consistent with Governor Cuomo’s comments about “extreme
conservatives” not being welcome in New York state.
Not only Jews, but Catholics and the Amish
have been singled out at various times by the champions of diversity in New
York who want everyone to march to their drum.
Of course, it would be interesting to see just how long politicians like
Cuomo and those controlling the New York State Education Department remain in
office once people who are currently powerless or nearly so and dependent upon
government largesse gain private property in capital and thus power to control
their own lives.
•
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 23 different countries
and 35 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this blog over
the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, Canada, the United
Kingdom, India, and Australia. The most
popular postings this past week in descending order were “‘Remarks
on Certain Passages in the Thirty-Nine Articles’,”
“News
from the Network, Vol. 11, No. 51,” “When the
Chips are Down,” “Putting
Pope Francis in Perspective,” and “Real
Bills for Real Wealth.”
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#
