Some interesting developments this
week as world leaders and academics continue to flail and flounder around
trying to find the solution that has been staring them in the face for 2,500
years. If you want a stable and virtuous
society, as Aristotle pointed out in the first book of his Politics, you had better have widespread capital ownership. Otherwise, what you get is —
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| Venezuelans will soon be dying of embarrassment. |
• Venezuela Declares War . . . On Its Own People. Ironically for a socialist country that takes
as its fundamental principle the betterment of everyone, especially the poor,
Venezuela’s government is refusing to let food and medical supplies into the
country. As a result, people are
preparing to seize and distribute the withheld aid, while the government is
preparing to stop them with armed force.
It seems that the aid is tainted because the bulk of it comes from the
United States, which has declared the current government illegal, so to avoid
embarrassment, the government prefers to let its own people die and even kill
them if necessary.
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| Learn to take over the world by studying history. |
• Interest in History at an All-Time Low. Recent reports out of Academia are that
people majoring in history and taking degrees in the subject is at an all-time
low, having fallen by about 25% over a few years ago. Some colleges are simply dropping history
requirements and even classes and departments.
The main problem, however, is that widespread ignorance of events of
history leads directly into misunderstanding current events. Even something as trivial as understanding a satiric
cartoon becomes impossible. Given
widespread ignorance of history, it is no wonder that so many people ignore the
Just Third Way and slavishly adhere to socialism and capitalism.
• Teachers Continue to Strike.
Educationalists across the country continue to go on strike to obtain
higher wages and benefits and more administrative positions . . . all for the
good of the students, of course. The
latest threatened strike comes from the teachers of Oakland, California, who
are concerned that far too much money is being diverted to charter schools and
not to increase what they receive. No
one appears to be considering the possibility of a Capital Homestead Act that
would enable teachers to teach for free if they wanted to, and for students to
pay for an education at whatever school they wanted.
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| Who Will Own the Robots? |
• Top Wage Incomes Rising, Bottom Falling. Much to the astonishment of the experts who
demand a higher minimum wage to increase the income of wage earners at the
bottom, the income of wage workers in the lower levels continues to drop dramatically
in response, while that of wage workers in the upper tiers continues to
rise. In other words, as it becomes more
expensive to hire lower paid workers, fewer are hired and more are replaced
with technology or the jobs moved to lower wage areas. At the same time, jobs that are not (yet)
threatened by technological displacement face a lack of qualified people to
fill them, so the price goes up in order to get the people they need. The underlying problem, of course, is the
assumption that income can only come from wages and welfare, not ownership.
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| Gregory XVI: "You can't say I didn't warn you." |
• The “New Things” and the Climate of Dissent. Given the crises in the Catholic Church and
other denominations, it is surprising how little attention has been paid to the
root of many of the problems: the “climate of dissent” that suffuses Church,
State, and Family these days, as traditional virtues and moral values are
overturned and called into question as a matter of course. Most, if not all of this, can possibly be
traced to widespread acceptance of the “New Things” of socialism, modernism,
and the “New Age” of which Pope Gregory XVI spoke in 1832 and that Pope Leo
XIII revisited in his landmark encyclical, Rerum
Novarum, in 1891. When fundamental
principles are rejected or redefined, of course “anything goes.”
• 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 46 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this
blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, the Philippines,
Canada, Poland, and the United Kingdom. The
most popular postings this past week in descending order were “Fulton
Sheen and the Problem of Savings,” “Thomas
Hobbes on Private Property,” “New
Things, Part I,” “News
from the Network, Vol. 12, No. 7,” and “Fulton
Sheen and the Solution.”
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#