As usual, there have been some
interesting developments in the Just Third Way this week, some of them even for
the better. So, not to waste any time:
• Italy and China. According
to the Wall Street Journal of
04/04/19 (page A-15), “The Silk Road That Leads to Rome,” the Republic of Italy
and the People’s Republic of China have been working hard at building
relationships. A Canadian studying in
Italy noted that Chinese students made up 70% of the students in his
classes. Italy, in fact, is the first “Group
Seven” country to join China’s “Belt and Road Initiative,” a combination of “the
Silk Road Economic Belt” and “the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road.” It is focused on infrastructure development
and investment initiatives that would stretch from East Asia to Europe. The
project, sometimes known as “the New Silk Road,” is one of the most ambitious
infrastructure projects ever conceived. Some
analysts see the project as a dangerous extension of China’s power through granting
credit for infrastructure. Not
surprisingly, the costs of many of the proposed projects have skyrocketed, increasing
opposition in some participant countries. Purely by coincidence, Italy has massive gold
reserves, which would — of course — be seized by a creditor nation in the event
of default. Ironically, the Just Third
Way Citizens
Land Cooperative is a way to rebuild infrastructure that builds ownership
of self-liquidating infrastructure assets into the people of a country.
• U.S. Schools and the Chinese Threat. In a related news item, “U.S. Schools Are
Waking Up to China Threat” (Washington
Post, 04/05/19, A-21), there appears to be a concern in American Academia
that the Chinese are infiltrating the United States by sponsoring students in
U.S. colleges and universities. While
the explanation is somewhat involved, there is no appreciation of the fact that
if every American citizen had the opportunity and means to build a capital
stake in a way that would result in an elimination of the national debt and
stabilize the economy, there would be no reason to be concerned about any
threat from China or anywhere else. Such
a program can be found in CESJ’s Capital
Homesteading proposal.
• Spam Telephone Calls. A
recent Just Third Way poll on FaceBook revealed that more people favor flogging
(preferably public, judging from the comments) over taxation as the solution to
spam telephone calls. One libertarian
type said that he would rather have a hundred times more spam calls than give an
already-wealthy government one cent.
Judging from the level of debt in virtually every country in the world,
however, it is unclear to which wealthy government he was referring. For our money, paying a few dollars a month
extra to drive spammers out of business would be money well spent, but everyone
has his priorities.
• The Three Threads of the Just Third Way. Unique among proposals for the restructuring
of the social order, CESJ’s Just Third Way combines the age-old necessity of
expanded capital ownership, the equally ancient monetary theory embodied in Say’s
Law of Markets, and the Act of Social Justice to form a comprehensive program
that covers all bases, at least socially, politically, economically, and
ethically. What someone chooses to do
with his or her personal life after that is, of course, his or her business,
but with the Just Third Way it becomes a personal choice instead of being
dictated by those with the money power, “[a] despotic
economic dictatorship . . . consolidated in the hands of a few, who often are
not owners but only the trustees and managing directors of invested funds which
they administer according to their own arbitrary will and pleasure.” (Quadragesimo
Anno, § 105.)
• Colorado Employee Ownership Commission. According to the National
Center for Employee Ownership in Oakland, California, “Colorado Governor
Jared Polis (D) is working to promote employee ownership in Colorado. He is
creating an Employee Ownership Commission that will be housed within the Office
of Economic Development and International Trade (OEDIT) and will be responsible
for advancing employee ownership statewide. It will be responsible for helping
develop a strategic plan, which may include additional legislative
recommendations.”
• 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 30 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, the United Kingdom, Brazil,
Australia, and India. The most popular
postings this past week in descending order were “Some
Thoughts on Distributism,” “A
Contradiction in Terms?” “ ‘But
You Are a Slave’, ” “Book
Review: A Field Guide for the Hero’s Journey,” and “News
from the Network, Vol. 12, No. 13.”
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#