What with Hurricane Dorian tearing
up the Islands and the East Coast, and Keynesian economics tearing up the world
economy, not to mention the economic antics of China that is increasingly
relying on expanding its bubble economy at everyone else’s expense, it’s easy
to overlook what else is going on:
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| Carrie Lam to Slaughter |
• Hong Kong Withdraws Extradition Bill.
Carrie Lam, head of the Hong Kong government (such as it is) has
withdrawn the extradition bill that started the current round of protests. Given the length of time it took to do so, it
is hardly likely that meeting the original demand will end the protests. Had the bill been withdrawn at the beginning,
it probably would have, but the overreaction from the Party and the beatings
and arrests have virtually ensured that it is no longer enough. The government may find that they have let
the genie out of the bottle and people will start demanding freedom, democracy,
and economic justice. After all, if Hong
Kong reformed its “Monetary Authority” (the de facto central bank) to
provide a stable, elastic, asset-backed reserve currency, there would be
nothing to prevent Hong Kong from becoming the hub of a transpacific economic
region that would leave traditional economic thinking in the dust.
• Hong Kong Government Anxious?
This morning the Hong Kong government took out a full-page ad in the Washington
Post and probably other liberal-leaning newspapers reassuring the American
public that it is committed to peaceful coexistence and the
One-China-Two-Systems policy. Reading
between the lines, the implication is that all the violence has been the fault
of the protestors, who evidently disguised themselves as police and began
shooting tear gas grenades and plastic bullets at themselves and bystanders, as
well as nurses trying to help the injured.
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| Rebuilding Puerto Rico might be more important than the Wall |
• Puerto Rico Recovery Financing. Illustrating the problems associated with
using outdated assumptions about money and development to guide thinking,
Puerto Rico’s recovery is being put on a back burner due to funds being
diverted to the wall to keep out illegal immigrants. This is a triple tragedy, because, one,
Puerto Rico occupies a position that gives it ready access to North, Central,
and South America, and it could easily become a financial and economic hub of
two continents. Two, development and
recovery can be financed with the expansion of bank credit in ways that creates
new owners instead of being a cash drain on existing money. Three, by showing how to revive an economy in
a way that benefits everyone, Puerto Rico could lead the way and make staying
in your own country far more attractive than making a dangerous trip to the
United States.
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| Concentrating wealth even more. |
• Concentrating Ownership Further.
Companies like Disney, Apple, and Deere and Co. are financing expansion
with cheap capital credit. This, of
course, ensures that ownership of these and other companies using the same
financing technique will become even more concentrated than before. Of course, if they wanted to make certain
they had a customer base in the future to purchase their products, they would
finance by issuing new shares, and pay out all earnings as dividends. New shareholders could then have shares that
paid for themselves with future dividends and thereafter yield consumption
income.
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| Msgr. Ryan: Fascist, Socialist, Modernist |
• U.S. Bishops Statement on Ownership. In commemoration of the 1919 U.S. Bishops
program for social reconstruction, the
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement on Labor Day
that mentioned ownership in a positive manner, notably ESOPs. While this is a nod in the right direction,
neglected was any mention of the qualifications and cautious nature of the
rather mild endorsement in the 1919 program as well as the 1986 Pastoral Letter
on the Economy, Economic Justice for All.
Of the 1919 program, Dr. Franz Mueller, a student of Fr. Heinrich Pesch,
S.J., had this to say: “It is hard to understand why neither [Monsignor John
A.] Ryan nor the Catholic War Council realized, or so it seems, the ‘corporatist’ [i.e., Fascist] implications of this statement.” (Franz H. Mueller, The Church and the Social Question. Washington,
DC: American Enterprise Institute for Policy Research, 1984, 107.) Expanded ownership is all very well, and a
desirable goal, but not if ownership is redefined in such a way as to turn it
into de facto socialism. As
Mueller noted, Ryan trivialized concerns about his program that the bishops
adopted by sneering that anyone who questioned him was not worthy even to be
spoken to. (Ibid., 106.)
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| Boris "Brexit Now" Johnson |
• More Brexit Bumps. Boris
Johnson, the new British Prime Minister, has to all appearances overplayed his
hand in pushing for a “deal-no-deal” exit of Great Britain from the European Union,
and is calling variously for the Queen to prorogue (delay . . . sort of)
Parliament and early elections, anything that he thinks will get Great Britain
definitely out. Meanwhile, the rest of
the Union is having trouble holding things together. In this writer’s opinion, much of the trouble
can be put at the door of bad monetary and economic policy. The Euro is the first widely used currency to
be based from the beginning on pure Keynesian/Modern Monetary Theory
principles, which means that the State has sole power to create money (as
opposed to the essential regulation thereof).
This means that the money supply is tied to government policy, not the
needs of the economy. As a result,
economic policy and money creation is determined by how much the politicians
can get away with spending instead of helping people to become productive. Thus, instead of finding ways for people to
own capital and produce with both labor and capital, whichever is better in a
particular situation, the goal is to find ways to get people to consume without
necessarily producing anything. It
becomes easy to understand why Great Britain would want out . . . and at the
same time why it would be disastrous if they do. What the EU needs is something along the lines
of a Capital
Homesteading program to implement economic personalism.
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| Keynes: Hide problems, don't solve them. |
• Anti-Recession Pre-Emptive
Strike. After jumping up and down
for weeks declaring that everyone should remain calm and there is no reason to
worry and that there is absolutely, positively no danger in any way, shape, or
form of a(nother) recession and it is unnecessary to take any action at all, the
pundits are now saying that there is absolutely, positively no danger in any
way, shape, or form of a(nother) recession . . . but that it may be necessary
to take pre-emptive measures in order to ensure that there will not be
a(nother) recession. Of course, if they
realized that we are still firmly ensconced in the “boom or bust” cycle that
necessarily accompanies tying government and economic policy to the Currency
Principle (viz., the amount of money determines economic growth or lack
thereof) instead of the Banking Principle (viz., the level of economic
activity determines the amount of money), and that only massive currency
manipulation by governments have masked this, they could stop the insanity with
some relatively straightforward reforms as outlined in the Capital Homesteading
proposal that applies economic personalism.
The problem then, of course, would be finding bad news for the pundits
to deny. . . .
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| Look, Alice, a cat with a grin! |
• 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 35 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, India, Rwanda,
Spain, and Australia. The most popular
postings this past week in descending order were “The
Modernist Monsignor,” “A
CPA’s Perspective on Pope Francis,” “News
from the Network, Vol. 12, No. 35.” “Democracy
in America,” and “The
Purpose of Production.”
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.” Due to imprudent
language on the part of some commentators, we removed temptation and disabled
comments.
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