If you can tear yourself away from
reading the latest news flashes about why Hollywood no longer casts Rocky
Schwartz in films, how tuna instead of salmon is causing global warming, or why
we need to bring wooly mammoths (or maybe it was Sheb Wooley) back to life,
here are this week’s news items from the Just Third Way:
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| Pope Pius XI defined social justice differently |
• Misunderstanding Social Justice. Some years ago CESJ was referred to
the late Father Gerry Creedon as the individual with whom CESJ should be in
touch on matters of Catholic social teaching.
After making some follow-up efforts, the attempt was dropped as Fr.
Creedon expressed no interest in CESJ’s work.
Recently, friends and follows of Fr. Creedon established the “Gospel Advocacy and
Leadership Foundation” (GALF) to continue his work, which they characterize
as “social justice.” While the work the foundation is doing is good and
necessary, however, it is not social justice as defined by Pope Pius XI and
analyzed by CESJ co-founder. Fr. Creedon’s
concept of social justice was to meet individuals wants and needs directly,
while Pius XI’s concept of social justice as a particular virtue (based on
Father Aloysius Taparelli’s principle of social justice) is to direct organized
efforts to the institutions of the common good to restore the functioning of
individual justice and charity. This is
the understanding of social justice found in CESJ co-founder Father William J.
Ferree’s doctoral thesis, The
Act of Social Justice (1942, © 1943), and pamphlet, Introduction
to Social Justice (1948).
Assuming that social justice pertains to the individual order is to turn
Catholic social teaching into a rather vapid and flabby variety of Fabian
socialism.
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| William Cobbett: Turn tax eaters into tax payers |
• National Debt of the United States.
It isn’t October yet and time for the Halloween Horror Specials (which
get less entertaining the more horrible the current situation becomes), but
here’s a horror story for you: nobody
has any real idea about what to do with the national debt. Now, we at the Just Third Way have a very
good idea what to do, but evidently people aren’t quite scared enough to do
something sensible, like adopt a Capital Homesteading program. Instead, they seem to be waiting around for
somebody else to wave a magic wand and make the debt disappear and let the
government continue to spend more and more money. Ironically, the excuse given for government
spending is that the private sector needs the government to go into debt to
have economic growth. Yet the commercial
and central banking systems of the world were invented and set up to do that
very thing at a profit, not a gargantuan loss!
In a modern advanced economy, there is actually no justification for
having government debt at all, except to cover a temporary shortfall in tax
collections. The problem is that most
people cannot be productive unless they own capital, and few people own capital
and therefore do not generate enough income to tax. Instead, they become cost centers, receiving
government aid instead of paying taxes; “tax eaters” instead of “tax payers,”
as William Cobbett put it.
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| Dr. Harold G. Moulton |
• We Owe It to Ourselves. Back in 1943 Harold G. Moulton published a
pamphlet titled The New Philosophy of Public Debt. In it, Moulton pointed out the logical
fallacy of the Keynesian claim that the national debt is not a problem because
“we owe it to ourselves.” On the contrary,
as Moulton explained, debts have to be paid.
A national debt is not an unrepayable debt that we move from one pocket
to another. Unfortunately, the
Powers-That-Be are still convinced after seven decades that nobody has to pay
down the national debt.
• Justice University Seminar/Workshop. The Justice University Seminar/Workshop has
been tentatively rescheduled for Friday evening, October 11, 2019, from 7-10 pm
EDST.
• Possible Belgian Research Fellow. Yann B., from Lisle in Wallonia
(the French-speaking part of the country) had lunch with the CESJ core group
last Friday. The meeting went well, and
Yann expressed great interest in developing a Fellowship program integrating
his interest in healthcare with a just economic system.
• Dignity, Power, and
Justice (or Power Through Justice). The draft of the book on economic personalism
and the Just Third Way is currently in the final stages of editing and should
soon be ready for final review by Tom P., CESJ’s expert on Solidarność, and who
interviewed many of the key people involved in the movement, making his notes
available during the drafting of the manuscript. If Tom gives the “thumbs up,” we can begin
indexing and formatting the book. It is
conceivable that it could be available for sale by the end of October. We may even have a line or two to some
prominent commentators who might give endorsements or even write reviews for
this important work. Obviously, however,
no final decision has been made on the title.
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| Louis O. Kelso |
• Kelso Documentary. Joyce
Hart, award-winning producer of Sisters
of Selma, reported that she is making great strides in her proposed
documentary on the vision of Louis Kelso, Own It!: Louis Kelso’s Macroeconomic Fix.
• Eugene Gordon/DASFESJ. Gene Gordon, founder and prime mover of
Descendants of American Slaves for Economic and Social Justice, reported that
he is shifting tactics to take the message directly to the grassroots as
community leaders may be too busy trying to secure their own positions to worry
about the people they are ostensibly serving.
• Lincoln Park Initiative. Chris Dardzinski,
a councilman for Lincoln Park, Michigan (a suburb of Detroit), reported he was
not making any headway with leaders and, like Gene Gordon, would go to the
grassroots. He reported he was having an
open house on Sunday, and would work on getting people signed up to try
something different, like the Just Third Way.
• Hartford, CT Developments. Russell Williams reported that he has been
working on starting
to form a Hartford CESJ chapter and they have been meeting regularly. They have a meeting scheduled on September 24
with the Hartford Commissioner for Development to see if some aspects of the
Just Third Way could be adapted to help rebuild the city.
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| Cardinal Etchegaray |
• Cardinal Etchegaray. Roger Cardinal Etchegaray who died September
4, 2019, was one of the figures at the Vatican who was positive toward the Just
Third Way, although not in any spectacular fashion. When the Center for Economic and Social
Justice gave a seminar on the role of private property in capital to deal with
global poverty at the Vatican in 1992 hosted by Cardinal Silvestrini, Cardinal
Etchegaray commented favorably. A few
years later (April 11, 1995), he again commented, this time on the book we
developed out of the seminar proceedings. As his Eminence wrote after reading the
book, Curing
World Poverty: The New Role of Property (1994), “I trust this book will
be read and studied by many since it offers a number of interesting proposals
which might make a contribution to a more equitable economic system.”
• 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 26 different
countries and 40 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this
blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, Spain, Canada,
Australia, and India. The most popular
postings this past week in descending order were “News
from the Network, Vol. 12, No. 37,” “An
Economic Revolution,” “Church
Versus State,” “Just
Third Way Video on Say’s Law,” and “Dispelling
Some Monetary Myths.”
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.
#30#