Back in the early nineteenth
century, the proto-socialist and founder of “the New Christianity” Claude Henri
de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), tried to commit suicide by
shooting himself in the head. He missed,
but his followers claimed that the shock brought about his realization that he
was either God’s Special Messenger or possibly even God. Ever since, failure has been taken as proving
that socialism actually works. It only
fails because people can’t seem to deal with a system that relies on them
becoming God. We, of course, just assume
that people are going to keep on being people, so the Just Third Way is based
on working with human nature rather than trying to change it:
 |
| Richard Lugar |
• Richard Lugar, Just Third Way Advocate. Richard Lugar, who died April 28, was one of
the co-sponsors of the legislation in 1985 the Presidential Task Force on
Project Economic Justice. In 1987, CESJ
representatives presented the Task Force report, High Road to Economic
Justice, to President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, as a result of
which His Holiness personally encouraged the work of CESJ. CESJ’s compilation, Every Worker an Owner,
served as the orientation book for the task force. This book was later translated into Polish and
40,000 copies were distributed throughout Solidarity channels in Poland, prior
to the collapse of the Soviet system. It
should be pointed out that the work of the Task Force was carried out without
one cent (or even more) taxpayer money.
 |
| Volodymyr
Zelenskiy |
• Ukraine’s New President.
Volodymyr
Zelenskiy, a Jewish comedian (whoever heard of such a thing!) managed to get
elected president with 73% of the vote without making too many concrete
promises.
His previous experience in
politics consisted of playing the part of president on television; he supports
free distribution of weed (
for
medicinal purposes only, of course), free abortion (eliminating future
voters who might go the other way), and legalized prostitution and gambling.
He also opposes the legalization of “weapons,”
which we assume means firearms, since virtually anything can be turned into a “weapon”
one way or another.
Although many people
in Ukraine don’t know what to expect, they do know they want change.
With the right kind of change, of course, it
wouldn’t matter what the president supports or opposes if it went against the
will of the people, for the right kind of change would empower people, not
government.
That is the kind of change
Zelenskiy should work for, and the Just Third Way embodied in
the platform of the Unite
Ukraine Party . . . that is, the Unite America Party could be just what the
people ordered.
 |
| Stephen Moore |
• Federal Reserve Follies.
Fixated
on the Keynesian dogma that economic growth is impossible without inflation
(except that Keynes claimed in his
General
Theory that a rise in the price level before reaching full employment is
not real inflation . . .), Keynesians and MMT adherents have gone into hysterical
overdrive over the nomination of Stephen Moore to the Federal Reserve
Board.
This is because Moore has the
quaint idea that economic growth is possible without inflation, or even a rise
in the price level due to other causes, as Keynes said.
This, of course, begs the question, for a
rise in the price level IS inflation!
Keynes’s
analysis is like saying no longer being alive is due to causes other than death.
In any event, history and the analysis of
Harold G. Moulton, president of the Brookings Institution from 1928 to 1952
contradict the Keynesian doctrine.
Moulton
pointed out that following the Civil War, at a time when there was serious
deflation and a falling price level, the
United States experienced a period of economic growth unequaled in history.
This could not have been due to the Homestead
Act of 1862, because according to academic experts, the Act was a failure and
only benefited a few people other than the rich.
It couldn’t have been due to inflation,
because the problem (as William Jennings Bryan and others declared as they
agitated for “cheap money” and “free silver”) was deflation.
Now, we disagree (sort of) with Moore’s prescription
about how to bring about growth without inflation,
viz., tax cuts, deregulation, sound money, and pro-business
policies.
These are good things . . .
but how to achieve them is rather questionable within Moore’s “Currency
Principle” paradigm that takes the idea that money is a commodity as a
given.
On the other hand, if William
Jennings Bryan could be convinced of Just Third Way monetary reforms to the
degree that he and Carter Glass were the champions of the Federal Reserve Act
of 1913, then there is surely hope for Moore.
• Texas House Bill 1198 Moves Forward.
According to the National Center for Employee
Ownership, a state bill in Texas to encourage ESOPs is gaining ground, but it may
need some help.
If you’re in Texas and
want to move things forward, the NCEO asks that you please contact Corey Rosen
at
crosen@nceo.org as soon as possible to
get the names and contact number of members to contact about the bill.
 |
| Kelso: "Property in everyday life, is the right of control.” |
• What Do You Mean by “Ownership”?.
As reported by the NCEO, Huawei, the world's largest telecom equipment
and communications electronics vendor, claims it is 99% owned by most of its
174,000 employees.
Others claim it is
really controlled by the Chinese government. A paper by Donald Clarke of George
Washington University and Christopher Balding of Fulbright University Vietnam argues
that while employees “own” 99% of the company’s equity value through a union-operated
“synthetic equity” plan, workers have no control. The remaining 1% is owned by
the founder. Clarke and Balding say that because the union is effectively
controlled by the government, the government really controls the company.
Huawei disagrees. Assessing this issue depends on what people mean by “ownership.”
Of course, as Louis Kelso said, “Property in everyday life, is the right of
control.”
As Kelso said this in a 1957 article titled “Karl
Marx: The Almost Capitalist,” it appears that the Chinese government learned
its Marxist lessons well.
Or it could
have been the agrarian socialist Henry George, who noted that as long as the
State receives all the fruits of ownership, it doesn’t actually have to hold
legal title!
 |
| Robert Owen |
• Life of Robert Owen.
This
week we received two biographies of Robert Owen, whom many consider England’s
first and greatest socialist, the two volume life by Frank Podmore, who was one
of the founders of the Fabian Society, and Frederick Packard’s.
Owen was, at least, England’s most sincere
and honest socialist: where other socialists demanded that the rich give up
their wealth, Owen used his own fortune and nearly went bankrupt trying to get
his utopian community of New Harmony, Indiana (near Evansville), off the ground,
a lesson learned by Friedrich Engels, who thought it better to confiscate the
wealth of others to finance socialism instead of using his own money.
(Side note: according to Engels, the reason
he and Marx decided to use the old term communism for their version of
scientific socialism instead of the new term socialism was that followers of
Owen had captured socialism for Owen’s theories.)
Owen believed in absolute equality of all
people, men, women, and children . . . unless they were black, in which case he
excluded them from his Utopia.
(His son,
however, claimed that he, Robert Dale Owen, suggested the Emancipation
Proclamation to Lincoln, possibly to make up for his father’s racism.)
Owen also claimed that the establishment and
maintenance of the Kingdom of God on Earth meant getting rid of organized
religion, abolishing private property, and eliminating marriage and family, as
all three interfered with the human person’s natural development into a moral
being.
After the collapse of the New Harmony
project, Owen returned to England and continued writing about his ideas, living
on an annuity of £300 ($1,500) provided by his sons, and communicating with the
spirits of the Duke of Kent, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Shelly, Byron, and a number of the prophets and patriarchs..
•
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.
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#
