Not as many news items as last
week, but there are still significant events going on, especially as the
powers-that-be insist on ignoring the Just Third Way:
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| Dr. Harold G. Moulton |
• Mexican Tariffs? One of the worst things
that can happen, speaking politically, is to use the monetary and tax systems
for political ends. In the 1920s and
1930s most governments abandoned precious metal standards for their currencies
and began using the tax system for social engineering. According to Dr. Harold G. Moulton, then-president
of the Brookings Institution, control over money and credit was the principle
means by which governments were able to control people. By shifting the backing of the currency from
private sector assets to government debt, the idea was to make all trade and
commerce dependent on the State.
Similarly, using the tax system to coerce desired behavior and punish
undesired behavior greatly reinforced government control, the dictum being “the
power to tax is the power to destroy.” There can be legitimate uses of tariffs (e.g.,
make certain that a country’s ability to feed itself without foreign imports is
not endangered), but that does not appear to be the case with the threatened
Mexican tariff, which is purely punitive.
Economic competition should focus on producing goods at a higher quality
and lower cost than the competition, not raising costs artificially for consumers,
which is what a tariff does.
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| De Lamennais, leader of Neo-Catholicism |
• China’s War With Christians. (And everybody else.) In the Wall Street Journal (05/31/19,
A-13), Nina Shea and Bob Fu noted that the Chinese government is coming down
very hard on both Catholics and Protestants to transform and control religion
to support socialism. Ironically,
although the writers treat this as something new, it has been going on from the
beginning of organized religion. The
modern phase, which began about two-hundred years ago, is characterized by
socialism being promoted as a replacement for traditional religion and politics
and even family. Socialism, in fact, was
first called “the Democratic Religion,” and then “the New Christianity” and “Neo-Catholicism.” The idea is to remove all religious elements
from religion and turn religious institutions into government agencies to control
people (for their own good, of course).
Chillingly, just yesterday the Catholic Herald in the United Kingdom
published an article on how the Catholic Church is turning socialist — and it
is a good thing (“The
Catholic Turn to Socialism Is Something to Celebrate”). One wonders if they are even aware of the
consistent condemnations of socialism for two centuries, or what it means to
implement socialism in place of actual religion of any kind.
• New Jersey Public Pension Woes. The state of New Jersey (no, we don’t know
which exit) is considering shifting part of their pension benefits for new
public employees over to a quasi 401(k) type arrangement that will help them
save for retirement, and lessen the burden on the state’s already overburdened
pension obligation, one of the most indebted in the United States. The problem is that this wouldn’t really
solve the problem. A 401(k) or an IRA
simply shifts consumption from the present to the future. It reduces current consumption to provide for
future consumption. That dodges the
whole issue of where does the production come from to consume? A better solution would be to turn people
into lifelong producers so they can be lifelong consumers rather than
redistribute what some produce now for the benefit of others, or from what
people produce now to consume later. A Capital Homesteading
program would empower everybody, even government workers, to be productive
their entire lives without redistribution.
• Perth Herald Tribune. For
non-U.S.-centric news that isn’t filtered through the news agencies (not that
there’s anything wrong with them, but they have different ideas about what you
might want to hear about), check out the online “Perth Herald Tribune.” An overview of the site reveals that the
small monthly subscription fee might be well worth it — and the Mission
Statement is derived in part from CESJ’s Core Values!
• 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 34 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, Kenya, Canada, India,
and the United Kingdom. The most popular
postings this past week in descending order were “Chesterton
and Shaw: The Last Debate,” “Thomas
Hobbes on Private Property,” “Brothers
Under the Skin,” “News
from the Network, Vol. 12, No. 21,” and “A
New View of Society.”
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#