News from the Network, Vol. 12, No. 35

Immediately after news reports that the stock market was going to end the month of August by rising and recouping losses, it plunged.  As this is being written, however, it may turn around again.  In real news affecting real life:

The Circle of Ownership

As we saw in theprevious posting on this subject, the idea that labor, whether by itself or “enhanced” by capital, is responsible for all production cause a few problems with consistency or even common sense.  A large measure of this is due to the fact that common sense and natural law both support the right of an owner to the fruits of ownership: income and control.  Capitalists and socialists both agree on that.  The only argument relates to what can legitimately be owned and what is productive — and that is a problem.

The Theory and Practice of Ownership

In 1931, the second year of the Great Depression and which saw the issuance of Quadragesimo Anno, a teenager by the name of Louis Orth Kelso (1913-1991) noticed something that belied the characterization of the United States as the Land of Opportunity.  Able-bodied men were hopping freight trains to somewhere, anywhere, they thought they might find work and not finding it.  By 1933, the official unemployment rate was 24.75%.

Redefining Natural Law

As we saw in the previous posting on this subject, we saw how socialists and modernists got right to work shifting the interpretation of social charity and social justice away from a natural law understanding, and to a less person-centered focus.  Among the foremost leaders of the reinterpretation movement, none was more effective than Monsignor John A. Ryan (1869-1945) of the Catholic University of America.

Another Louis Kelso Video

From the treasury of videos of the Harold Channer Show, we bring you another video of ESOP-inventor Louis O. Kelso.  Don't be turned off by the 45 seconds or so that it takes to get into the show.

News from the Network, Vol. 12, No. 34

We probably should report that the stock market is extremely volatile, going up and down apparently at random, but this is supposed to be a weekly news roundup, and stock market volatility hardly qualifies as news these days.  There are, however, actual important things going on:

Death and Distribution, Part II

As we saw in the previous posting on this subject, there are some things, such as redistribution, that are permitted in an emergency, but not as a usual thing.  Unfortunately, many people like to take the exception, and turn it into the rule.

The Weird World of Ignatius Loyola Donnelly

He is almost unknown today except among a small group of in-the-know devotees, but at one time the populist politician, spiritualist, novelist, and amateur scientist Ignatius Loyola Donnelly (1831-1901), “the Sage of Nininger,” was someone to be reckoned with.  Among other things, he has been described as “America’s Prince of Cranks” and “the Apostle of Discontent.”  (Walter Monfried, “America’s ‘Prince of Cranks’,” The Milwaukee Journal, May 15, 1953, 8.)

Death and Distribution, Part I

Many people today, regardless of their religious or philosophical persuasion, cannot tell the difference between a principle, especially an absolute principle, and the application of the principle.  For example, in the Catholic Church the former is doctrine and cannot be changed even to meet greatly changed conditions, while the latter is discipline and must be changed to meet changing conditions.

Louis Kelso on the Harold Channer Show

Starting in the early 19802, Harold Channer did a series of television shows with Louis O. Kelso.  Channer, who has one of the longest running public access television shows in the United States, has featured a number of innovative and pivotal figures whose significance the usual media outlets tend to ignore:

News from the Network, Vol. 12, No. 33

Things are starting to heat up . . . if by that you mean the thermometers.  Other than that, things are all over the map, as people try to maintain their discredited paradigms in the face of reality:

Dorothy Day, Catholicism, and Communism, Part II

On Tuesday, in the previous posting on this subject, we noted that the Jesuit publication America had run “The Catholic Case for Communism,” an article by Dean Dettloff, their correspondent in Toronto, Ontario, which not very subtly turned Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, into a shill for communism.

Forty Years After

As we noted in the previous posting on this subject, both capitalists and socialists managed to reinterpret Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum to fit their particular paradigms.  The possibility that what Leo XIII was talking about was something entirely different does not appear to have occurred to many people.

Dorothy Day, Catholicism, and Communism, Part I

America magazine, a publication of the Jesuits, a Catholic religious Order, recently — July 23, 2019 — published an article by Dean Dettloff, America’s Toronto, Ontario, correspondent and a junior member of the Institute for Christian Studies.  The article, “The Catholic Case for Communism,” is a graphic illustration of the problems associated with people projecting their own opinions on to individuals or groups they admire, whether the admired individuals or groups ever expressed sympathy with them, or even if they were opposed to them.

Louis Kelso, ESOP Association Address, 05/10/1984

Maybe the quality of the recording isn't all it should be, but here is an interesting recording may on May 10, 1984, a month after the founding of CESJ, at the annual ESOP Association Conference.  Kelso gave the keynote address:

News from the Network, Vol. 12, No. 32

We  do not have as many news items as we had last week, but they are at least as significant.  Rather than telling you about what we’re going to tell you about, we’ll just go straight to the news:

Of Dissent and Distributism

In yesterday’s posting we saw that the “cause” for the canonization of G.K. Chesterton was given the thumbs down by Peter Doyle, Bishop of Northampton, and that this excited a somewhat negative reaction on the part of some Chestertonians, as followers of Chesterton are called.

Of Distributism and Dissent

For those of you who care (and we would be surprised if there were very many), the Chestertonian Community (i.e., fans of the English writer Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 1874-1936) sustained a shock on the order of 7.3 on the Richter Scale this past Friday.  It seems that His Excellency (or His Lordship; we aren’t up on the latest ecclesiastical lingo in the U.K.) Bishop Peter Doyle of Northampton in England, which was Chesterton’s home diocese, put the kibosh on Chesterton’s “cause” for canonization.

Subsidiarity and Democracy in America

One of the more interesting things we discover about Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville (1805-1859) and his greatest work, Democracy in America (1835, 1840), is that the author — like Orestes Augustus Brownson (1803-1876) a generation latter in The American Republic (1866) — considered himself a Catholic writing as a Catholic.  What surprises many people is to find out that both de Tocqueville and Brownson considered the American system (slavery excepted) to be the closest to “Catholic” political theory.

"A Piece of the Action"

For a while we've been featuring short videos of Mortimer Adler talking about philosophical topics that have a bearing on the Just Third Way.  Today for a change of pace we thought we'd present a short video about someone else who has made a significant contribution to the Just Third Way, in fact, can be considered one of the founders of it: Louis O. Kelso!

News from the Network, Vol. 12, No. 31

An interesting batch of news items this week, most of them coming out in this morning’s Wall Street Journal — and most of them having to do with efforts to solve problems using the same paradigm that caused the problems in the first place!  Why not just take the easy way out and go with the Just Third Way?  After all, it might actually solve a few problems instead of creating more:

The Ultimate Social Power

In the previous posting on this subject, we looked at the essence of subsidiarity, that is, where power in society subsists in a properly structured social order.  Within the context of “Thomist personalism” and the Aristotelian-Thomist concept of natural law we found that all power properly resides in the human person, not in any form of society.  As Pope Pius XI noted in his social analysis, “Only man, the human person, and not society in any form is endowed with reason and a morally free will” (Divini Redemptoris, § 29), and thus even a human person in an official capacity has only such rights as are delegated from people.