Apparently at least one person on
Earth is offended by the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights,
specifically Article 17: “(1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as
well as in association with others. (2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of
his property.” We suspect that some
offended people don’t know what property is, may not be too clear on the fact
that “everyone” includes “everyone,” or maybe just got up on the wrong side of
the bed this century. In any event, here
are a few tidbits of news from around the network:
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| Robert Owen (1771-1858) |
• Socialism and Early America.
On July 4, 1826, Robert Owen, re-founder of the utopian settlement of
New Harmony, Indiana, gave a speech entitled, “A Declaration of Mental
Independence.” As he declared, the
American Revolution had gained people political independence, but there were
three great evils remaining to be abolished.
In order these were 1) private property, 2) organized religion, and 3)
marriage. Owen was possibly the most
influential English socialist before he left England in the 1820s after
purchasing New Harmony from the Rappites.
Charles Newman, brother of John Henry Cardinal Newman, converted to the
Owenite doctrines, which appears to have increased John’s suspicion of the “New
Christianity” that had virtually taken over the Church of England and that
first supported and then opposed the Oxford Movement. Machinations by the New Christians eventually
led Newman to investigate the claims of the Catholic Church and convert. Along with the ideas of other socialists such
as Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Félicité de Lamennais, Étienne Cabet,
and others such as Henry George, some of Owen’s ideas were embodied in the
social movements that led to the development of Fabian socialism and came to
partial fruition in the New Deal.
• Government Debt and Economic Growth? A standard doctrine taught in college
economics classes is that you need to increase government debt in order to have
economic growth. How this explains the
phenomenal growth of such countries as the United States in the nineteenth
century when you had very little government debt, relatively speaking. Taking land from the Indians and slavery do not
account for it, for developing the land and exploiting other human beings still
requires financing. Still, as an article
in Monday’s Wall Street Journal
claims, “Spending Fight Casts Cloud on Growth” (04/08/19, A2) if the federal
government reduces spending, economic growth will fall off. Of course, if they were really serious about
growth, they would back the money needed for growth with private sector assets,
not government liabilities, and create new money in ways that creates new
owners of those assets . . . but perhaps that makes too much sense.
• Rage Against Private Property.
Advocating widespread capital ownership, or even explaining what private
property really is, seems to excite an almost pathological reaction among some
people who claim they are in favor of widespread capital ownership. The problem is that a number of people who
think they are experts aren’t too sure what property is, and having no response
that makes sense, resort to personal attacks against anyone who defends private
property or advocates expanded ownership in a way that is not collectivist.
• Just Third Way Offends FaceBook Community Standards. Or not.
Earlier this week a comment on a blog posting precipitated a complaint
that the Just Third Way has been deemed “offensive” to people. On investigation the complaint was deemed
groundless, but the readers of this blog can judge for themselves:
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| "Come on, get happy!" |
• 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 28 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, Canada,
India, the United Kingdom, and Australia.
The most popular postings this past week in descending order were “News
from the Network, Vol. 12, No. 14,” “Distributism,
Socialism, and Syndicalism, What’s the Difference?” “How
Finance Really Works in Theory,” “Thomas
Hobbes on Private Property,” and “A
Contradiction in Terms?”
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#