It’s time again for our annual news
roundup, the first part of which we will post today, and the second part next
week. There is such a volume of material
that for once we decided to forgo illustrations:
• (January) The Jailbird Pope.
This is of interest to the Just Third Way because (contrary to popular
belief) Pope Pius IX (Giovanni Maria
Mastai-Ferretti, 1792-1878, elected 1846) was a real liberal reformer
. . . who ticked off the radicals and got labeled unfairly as a reactionary. It turns out that before his election to the
papacy, Pius IX served as a soldier and was a jailbird. It seems that when he was sent on a mission
to South America, he and the other priests in the group on board ship were a
little too free in voicing their opinions of the more radical revolutionaries
in Chile . . . some of whom, unbeknownst to the priests were among their fellow
passengers. When they stopped in Spain,
the Chileans reported them to the authorities out of spite, and they were
detained in prison for a few days before the matter was straightened out. (Cecilia Ascher, “Pius IX in South America,” The Ladies Repository: A Monthly Periodical
Devoted to Literature, Arts, and Religion, Vol. 6, No. 1, July 1870, 24-26.).
• (January) Bad Assumptions = Baffled Analysts. In the Wall
Street Journal of 01/11/19, James Mackintosh opined that “Investors Can’t
Figure Out Fed” (B-1, B-10). The
problem, of course, was that both the Federal Reserve and the investors were
using an erroneous assumption, one that has increasingly taken over both
private and public understanding of money and governed monetary and fiscal
policy of the world since the early 1930s.
And that is? That the amount of
money in the economy determines the “velocity” of money (the average number of
times each unit of currency is spent in a year), the price level (how much
things cost), and the number of transactions.
This is stated mathematically as the Quantity Theory of Money equation:
M x V = P x Q. Anyone who has taken high
school algebra, however, will instantly see the problem: you can’t have three
“dependent variables” and only one equation!
In other words, you can’t fiddle with M (the quantity of money) and
expect V, P, or Q to mean anything. Of
course investors can’t figure out what’s going on, because the Federal Reserve
doesn’t know what’s going on. They
haven’t caught on to the fact that V, P, and Q should determine M (that is, M
should be the dependent variable), not the other way around, or all you will
have is chaos . . . which is (not by coincidence) precisely what we have.
• (January) Violating the First Principle of Reason Department. From the same issue of the Wall Street Journal, in the Finance
section, there were two headlines on the first page, B-12. One was, “Energy Stocks Go From Drag to
Leader.” The other one read, “Don’t Bet
On Oil’s Bounce To Continue.” The
problem was the same that plagues “investors” at year end, that people think the
prices on the stock market actually mean something other than reflecting the
emotional state of gambling addicts. The
editors of the Journal might be excused for trying to have their cake
and eat it, too, by predicting both a continued boom and a downturn on the same
page, but readers should be a little more savvy and possibly start to use their
own brains for something.
• (February) “Evolved Distributism”?
We came across a new term in February: “evolved distributism.” It seemed to be one of the many ways that
people have found to transform the thought of Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936)
and Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc (1870-1953) away from private property and into
some form of socialism. Interestingly,
while Chesterton was able — more or less — to suffer such fools gladly . . . up
to a point (meetings of the Distributist League became so unpleasant for
Chesterton that he avoided them except for the annual celebration, and then sat
and doodled before retiring to the bar as fast as possible), Belloc referred to
them as “cranks” (and Chesterton called them “fantastic forms”) and after
Chesterton’s death attempted to purge the distributist movement of their
presence and thought. His failure to
return distributism to its founding principles embittered him, and he left the
movement to those who had taken it over.
As one biographer of Chesterton noted, “Gilbert’s death signified the
end of the philosophy, if that is what it was, as a serious proposition. He had kept it alive; squabbles and lack of
direction tore the movement apart.” (Michael Coren, Gilbert: The Man Who Was G.K. Chesterton. New York: Paragon House, 1990, 243.).
• (February) Credit Course in Binary Economics Offered. Also
in February Dr. Robert H.A. Ashford reported that Syracuse University now
gives credit to students taking his class on binary economics. This is a major
breakthrough in Academia for the Just Third Way and the economics of reality.
• (February) Interest in History at an All-Time Low. Recent (as of this past February) reports out
of Academia are that people majoring in history and taking degrees in the
subject is at an all-time low, having fallen by about 25% over a few years
ago. Some colleges are simply dropping
history requirements and even classes and departments. The main problem, however, is that widespread
ignorance of events of history leads directly into misunderstanding current
events. Even something as trivial as understanding a satiric cartoon
becomes problematical. Given widespread
ignorance of history, it is no wonder that so many people ignore the Just Third
Way and slavishly adhere to socialism and capitalism.
• (February) Top Wage Incomes Rising, Bottom Falling. Much to the astonishment of the experts who
demand a higher minimum wage to increase the income of wage earners at the
bottom, the income of wage workers in the lower levels continues to drop
dramatically in response, while that of wage workers in the upper tiers
continues to rise. In other words, as it
becomes more expensive to hire lower paid workers, fewer are hired and more are
replaced with technology or the jobs moved to lower wage areas. At the same time, jobs that are not (yet)
threatened by technological displacement face a lack of qualified people to
fill them, so the price goes up in order to get the people they need. The underlying problem, of course, is the
assumption that income can only come from wages and welfare, not ownership.
• (March) China’s Free Market?. It appears that the Chinese
leadership may have given a
unique twist to the free market reforms that have been allowed in the
country. It turns out that freedom is
all very well in its way, but let’s not get crazy. What the Chinese leaders want are the
benefits of free market economics combined with rigid government control of the
economy. As a result, some Chinese
entrepreneurs see no future in their own country. Of course, the underlying problem is that
ordinary people are not empowered with capital ownership, and without that,
there is no real base of support for a free market — or for keeping a country’s
brightest and best at home. As Pope Leo
XIII reminded us back in 1891, when capital ownership is widespread, “Men
always work harder and more readily when they work on that which belongs to
them; nay, they learn to love the very soil that yields in response to the
labor of their hands, not only food to eat, but an abundance of good things for
themselves and those that are dear to them. That such a spirit of willing labor
would add to the produce of the earth and to the wealth of the community is
self evident. And a third advantage would spring from this: men would cling to
the country in which they were born, for no one would exchange his country for
a foreign land if his own afforded him the means of living a decent and happy
life.” (Rerum Novarum, ∞ 47.).
• (March) Social Justice and Immigration. While many people concerned with social
justice issues are concerned with the “immigration crisis,” no one seems
willing to discuss a possible long-term solution along the lines suggested by
Leo XIII when he listed the benefits of expanded capital ownership. If someone owns a farm or business and has a
just government, why would he or she leave everything to go to another
country? As it is, virtually all
immigrants that fall into the “crisis” category are leaving their own countries
because of war, political oppression, or lack of economic opportunity. If they had those things at home, why would
they seek them elsewhere? Further, if
all countries had something along the lines of Capital Homesteading,
workers would be in demand, and immigration would be encouraged rather than
discouraged..
• (March) Oregon Rent Control.
In its quest to make housing affordable for low income people, the state
of Oregon has enacted state-wide rent control to keep housing prices
affordable. While the initiative is no
doubt well-meant, rent control adopted as a solution rather than as a temporary
emergency measure virtually guarantees that there will be a housing shortage,
as the situation in New York City demonstrates.
Rather than artificially raising wage rates (which automatically puts
upward pressure on housing costs), it would be better to adopt a “minimum
ownership” rate, not mandated, but enabled by opening up access to key
institutions so that people can become capital owners gaining consumption
income in a way that does not raise prices for them and everybody else. As for affordable housing, why not adopt
something like the proposed Homeowners
Equity Corporation?
• (March) Minimum Wage, Maximum Employment?. Now that New York City has rent control and
no affordable housing, and a minimum wage so that people still cannot afford to
live in the city, there is now an initiative to make it harder for employers to
get rid of workers. This, of course,
will make prospective employers very reluctant to hire anybody they think might
be marginal; there will be no more giving people a chance to see if they work
out. Anyone with the slightest blemish
on his or her work record (or even a lack of a work record) will have a very
hard time finding a job, even at minimum wage.
As for recovering alcoholics, former drug users trying to go straight,
people with any conviction for anything, or who don’t look right, are too fat
or skinny, you name it — fuhgeddaboudit..
• (March) Anti-Worker Legislation?
A rather odd provision of the new guidelines for SBA loans that went
into effect April 1 of this year appears to deny their application to Coops and
ESOPs. As reported by the NCEO, “The
provisions allow SBA-backed loans to finance ‘any transaction costs associated
with purchasing a controlling interest in the employer, but not costs
associated with setting up the ESOP or cooperative’ and mirror loans to create
an ESOP. The guidance also specifies that ‘any seller who remains as an owner,
regardless of percentage of ownership, must provide their guaranty.’ (The above
is from Chapter 2, paragraph V.H.1-2.) The guidance also appears to deny the
use of the expedited preferred lender program for employee ownership
transitions, although the guidance only mentions loans for cooperatives, not
for ESOPs. The implication is that the SBA will have to approve each loan on a
case-by-case basis.” Weirdly, the
guidelines were issued as part of the “Main Street Employee Ownership Act.”
• (March) Educating About Ownership You Can’t Have. Another provision of the Main Street
Employee Ownership Act is for the SBA to encourage education about worker
ownership. Judging from the guidelines
just issued (above), what workers are to be taught about ownership is that it
isn’t for them if the SBA has anything to say about it..
• (March) Fascinating Fabian Facts.
While researching possible ties between the New Deal of President
Roosevelt and Fabian socialism to compare it with the proposed Green New Deal
and its roots in democratic socialism, we came across this statement by noted
Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw: “Under [Joseph Stalin] the Soviet
government has turned communism into Fabianism.
But the Communists won’t take our name so we must take theirs. After all, Russian communism is nothing more
than the program the Fabians have been preaching for forty years.” (The
Washington, DC Evening Star, Friday, November 27, 1931, B-11.) Interestingly, the Fabian Society claims to a
socialist organization whose purpose is to advance the principles of democratic
socialism. (Margaret Cole, The Story of Fabian Socialism, 1961;
George Thomson, “The Tindemans Report and the European Future,” Address to the
European Movement, March 1, 1976.)
Prominent members of the Fabian Society include R.H. Tawney, who was on
the Executive of the Society from 1920 to 1933, and John Maynard Keynes’s protégé, E.F. Schumacher, who was a
member of the New Fabian Research Bureau.
The coat of arms of the Fabian Society is the Wolf in Sheep’s clothing,
adopted because of their tactic of infiltrating organizations to turn them
socialist without calling it socialism.
• (March) The Coming Debt Crisis.
According to an article in the Wall
Street Journal, as soon as holders of U.S. government debt realize that the
government has been spending beyond its means for almost a century (yes, it
won’t be long before 2033), they will start demanding more interest on the U.S.
“bonds” they hold. Why did we put
“bonds” in quotes? Because bonds,
properly speaking, are financial instruments representing borrowing existing
savings, and thus bear interest. In
reality, however, most government financial instruments known as bonds are in
reality what are called “bills of credit” representing no borrowing of existing
savings, but new money creation, and that should properly not bear interest,
but pass at a discount. That is a
subject for another day, however. The
issue today is the claim in the article, “The Debt Crisis Is Coming Soon” (WSJ,
03/01/19, A-19), that the only way to avoid (or evade, depending on your point
of view) the anticipated crisis is to make a drastic reduction in spending on
entitlements, e.g., Social Security,
Medicare, and other New Deal and New Deal type programs. Unfortunately, having made as many people as
possible utterly dependent on these programs, cutting them is neither moral nor
politically feasible, however weak (or non-existent) the original moral or
political justification for them was in the first place. Oddly, neither the opponents nor the
defenders of entitlement spending do the obvious and investigate a financially
sound and politically feasible replacement for entitlements, Capital Homesteading.
• (March) Premier of New Video Short. CESJ completed “People and Things,” a short (less than two
minutes) video designed to intrigue people about the Just Third Way and get
them interested in finding out what this whole “Just Third Way” shtick is all
about. We’d like you to give a quick
view and let us know how it strikes you.
A few caveats: 1) The video makes no pretense to presenting the entire
Just Third Way; it’s sort of a “commercial” to get people interested in
learning something about the Just Third Way.
You don’t expect a 30-second spot on television to tell you all about a
product. The idea is to let you know the
product exists and let you know a little bit about what it does. True, once in a while an automobile
commercial (to take an example) will tell you some technical details, but
that’s really to impress you with the quality of the product, not to teach you
how to build or even drive a car! So,
give the video a look, and if you’re inspired to find out more, pay a visit or
two to the CESJ website..
• (March) Revival of the Arco
Caribbean Magazine. Michiel
Bijkerk, a CESJ stalwart in the Netherlands Antilles, relaunched his magazine, Arco Caribbean, as an ezine. The first issue, which can be obtained from
the website, http://www.arcocarib.com, is an impressive production, showing a
great deal of hard work and thoughtful effort.
Unusually, the single issue of the magazine is written in four separate
languages, English, Spanish, Dutch, and Papiamentu. This gives the publication a unique
cosmopolitan “feel” that comports well with Michiel’s universal outlook. Of special interest is the fact that Michiel puts
a great deal of Just Third Way material in the magazine.
• (April) Italy and China.
According to the Wall Street
Journal of 04/04/19 (page A-15), “The Silk Road That Leads to Rome,” the
Republic of Italy and the People’s Republic of China have been working hard at
building relationships. A Canadian
studying in Italy noted that Chinese students made up 70% of the students in
his classes. Italy, in fact, is the
first “Group Seven” country to join China’s “Belt and Road Initiative,” a
combination of “the Silk Road Economic Belt” and “the 21st Century Maritime
Silk Road.” It is focused on
infrastructure development and investment initiatives that would stretch from
East Asia to Europe. The project, sometimes known as “the New Silk Road,” is
one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects ever conceived. Some analysts see the project as a dangerous extension
of China’s power through granting credit for infrastructure. Not surprisingly, the costs of many of the
proposed projects have skyrocketed, increasing opposition in some participant
countries. Purely by coincidence, Italy
has massive gold reserves, which would — of course — be seized by a creditor
nation in the event of default.
Ironically, the Just Third Way Citizens
Land Cooperative is a way to rebuild infrastructure that builds ownership
of self-liquidating infrastructure assets into the people of a country.
• (April) U.S. Schools and the Chinese Threat. In a related news item, “U.S. Schools Are
Waking Up to China Threat” (Washington
Post, 04/05/19, A-21), there appears to be a concern in American Academia
that the Chinese are infiltrating the United States by sponsoring students in
U.S. colleges and universities. While
the explanation is somewhat involved, there is no appreciation of the fact that
if every American citizen had the opportunity and means to build a capital
stake in a way that would result in an elimination of the national debt and
stabilize the economy, there would be no reason to be concerned about any
threat from China or anywhere else. Such
a program can be found in CESJ’s Capital
Homesteading proposal..
• (April) Delay in Mandatory Retirement Distributions? Also according to the NCEO Bulletin, “The ‘Setting
Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement (SECURE) Act of 2019’ passed the
Senate in April and is expected to pass in the House. It makes many changes to
retirement law, but only one is likely to affect ESOPs. The carefully named
bill would delay the start date for required minimum distributions from 70½ to
72.” Translation: someone who does not
want to start taking retirement distributions could potentially delay the start
of mandatory distributions for up to 30 months longer than now as the current
law specifies the year in which someone turns age 70½, not when someone turns
age 70½.
• (May) 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.
• (May) 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.
• (May) Dave Hamill 2019 Servant of Justice. Dave Hamill, host of the popular Just Third
Way podcast, was the recipient of the 2019 Servant of Justice award for the
podcast and all the other things he has done over the years to advance the
cause of economic and social justice for the Just Third Way. The presentation was made by Dr. Norman G.
Kurland, president of CESJ, during the CESJ Thirty-fifth Anniversary
celebration.
• (May) Campaign for Free Tuition.
The push to make state institutions of higher learning tuition free
seems to be gaining ground, or at least increasing media coverage. CESJ recently had a Fellow from Belgium who
rolled her eyes at the push for “free tuition.”
According to her, tuition is one of the lesser costs of attending
college. There is also the cost of
housing and meals, textbooks, and so on, but the single largest cost is . . .
student fees. No tuition, but the amount
and number of student fees more than make up for “free tuition.” The fact is that schools have to cover their
costs somehow, and if it doesn’t come from tuition, it will be made up
somewhere else. This was corroborated by
a friend in Germany, who had two daughters go to university there “tuition
free” . . . but the bills for student fees were out of this world.
• (May) Jonathan
Robert Spencer, RIP. Jonathan Spencer, 58, who worked with the
CESJ core group and others organizing the attempt for a worker buyout of
Ogleby-Norton, passed away on May 13, 2019. Jonathan is predeceased by his parents, Elliot
and Helen Spencer. He is survived by his brothers; Scott (Alice), Steven
(Lynne), and Brad; his niece Laura Costello (Sean); his nephews, Ryan Spencer,
Michael Spencer (Alex), Christopher Spencer, Garett Randall and Cameron Yip;
his grandniece Riley Heather Costello and his grandnephews Miles William
Costello, Zayden Randall, and Jamison Randall.
Jonathan graduated from Brown University and
received a law degree from Duke University School of Law. He served as the
General Counsel of the Museum of Science Fiction, Vice President and
Associate General Counsel of Verisign, General Counsel of Shenandoah Telephone
Company, and Associate General Counsel of Cable and Wireless.
• (May) Descendants of American
Slaves for Economic and Social Justice (DAS/ESJ). CESJ is working with member Gene Gordon to
establish Descendants of American Slaves for Economic and Social Justice
(DAS-ESJ) in St. Louis to apply locally CESJ's Just Third Way concepts for
rebuilding that city while economically empowering each of its citizens through
equal capital ownership opportunities.
Descendants of American Slaves for Economic and Social Justice (DAS/ESJ)
is a non-profit educational organization, think tank and social action catalyst
formed in May 2019 to promote, educate all citizens, and encourage systemic
change based on unifying vision and fundamental principles of Economic Justice
and Social Justice. They are dedicated to an advanced free enterprise growth
model that addresses racism, poverty and other violations of fundamental human
rights, not just for Descendants of American Slaves but for all citizens,
including Descendants of Native Americans, Descendants of Immigrants, and
Descendants of American Slave Owners.
• (May) China Financially
Invades Ukraine. Duplicating
the tactic that has worked so well in Africa and other places, the Chinese have
begun investing in Ukraine, which by conventional Keynesian standards is
starved for capital financing. This
gives China a secure foothold in the country, already plagued with a war to
repel the Russian invasion. It is a
classic case of what Henry C. Adams (1851-1921) pointed out over a century ago
as one of the most serious dangers to national sovereignty: foreign
indebtedness. The irony, of course, is
that Ukraine has the financial and industrial infrastructure in place right now
to make foreign investment completely unnecessary. By financing capital investment by opening
the discount window of the central bank to asset-backed agricultural,
commercial, and industrial paper accepted by commercial banks (bills of
exchange), Ukraine can self-finance all capital investment. By having a program of expanded capital
ownership to make every child, woman, and man in Ukraine a direct owner of the
new capital, it can also generate the essential consumer demand, and all
without an infusion of foreign investment or expansion of government debt. President Zalensky should be giving this
serious consideration. Ukraine’s current
low-wage and low-price economy can give it tremendous leverage in the global
market, but only if they implement sound monetary, tax, and ownership reforms.
• (May) Negative Interest
Rate Fiasco. Europe and Japan seem
to have gotten themselves into a mess over the use of “negative interest
rates.” To explain, allegedly to
encourage commercial banks to lend their reserves instead of depositing the
cash with the central bank, the central bank charges a fee to the depositor
instead of paying interest. All this
does, however, is encourage hoarding by conservative financial institutions,
and risky lending by less conservative institutions. The practice is rooted in the Keynesian dogma
that commercial banks lend out of reserves, which is not usually the case. Instead, commercial banks create the money
they lend by accepting bills of exchange and mortgage securities, and issuing
promissory notes to pay for them, the promissory notes being used to back new
demand deposits. If central banks (or
the governments that control them) want to encourage lending, they need to call
a halt to the practice of backing the money supply with government debt and
creating money for consumption and speculation.
Creating money by lending instead of to lend would ensure a sound method
of finance, while financing growth in ways that creates more owners of the new
capital being formed would ensure that the consumer demand essential to make
the new capital feasible and sustainable would be in place..
• (May) 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.
• (June) Missing Link Discovered! For years we have speculated off and on over why Pope Pius XI used the term “social
justice” for his breakthrough in moral philosophy. By 1922, when he was elected pope, social justice meant socialism. Pius XI was the first pope ever to use the
term, and the first Catholic intellectual to use it since Msgr. Luigi Aloysius
Taparelli d’Azeglio, S.J. in the late 1830s and early 1840s. While head of the Ambrosian Library in
Milan from 1907 to 1914, the future pope became so well-versed in Taparelli’s thought
that, evidently having found the 1845 version inadequate for his purposes, he
translated Taparelli’s multi-volume work on natural law, Saggio Teoretico di
Dritto Naturale (1840) — “The Theoretical Essay of Natural Law” — into
German, Versuch Eines Auf Erfahrung Begrundeten Naturrechts. When he became pope, Pius XI immediately
launched his campaign to restore the social order, with the chief means being
the act of social justice, which he developed from the thought of Taparelli integrated
with the political philosophy of Robert Cardinal Bellarmine.
• (June) Say What? Department.
Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) stated his belief that many
of his colleagues in the Congress are struggling financially and need a raise. Before you snort in derision, it’s quite
possible, even probable, if you’re someone of ordinary means in Washington, DC,
who has to maintain a home and an office in the DC metro area AND at least one
of each in your home state. Would YOU
vote for a Representative or Senator whose legal residence was outside the district
or state he or she represents? That
being said . . . yeah, come off it, man.
Many of your constituents are not merely “struggling,” they’re facing
disaster in large measure because you won’t put the country’s house in order
and pass a Capital
Homestead Act, you exempt yourself from onerous legislation, make rules for
others that don’t apply to you, get lifetime benefits for working a minimum of
two years on the job, AND you vote yourself a raise? Show a little sensitivity for the poor boobs
who voted you into office.
• (June) The Advance of Fuzzy
Socialism. According to
today’s Wall Street Journal . . . or maybe the Washington Post .
. . or it could have been the National Enquirer . . . the fact that
socialism has so many definitions (a dogma of the socialist movement), and that
what definitions there are, are “fuzzy,” has accounted for the rapid growth of
socialism among millennials. Evidently,
the less specific anything is, the easier it is to get people to believe
it. There is, however, a specific
definition of socialism, and it is why, e.g., the Catholic Church
condemns all forms of socialism due to its embodying a “concept of society
utterly foreign to Christian [or any other kind of] truth.” And that is?
That some form of society has rights that the human person does not
have. This means that an abstraction created
by human beings that has no existence apart from the human mind is greater than
the human beings who created it. This
completely defies logic, and sets up the contradiction that the created can be
greater than the Creator. Capitalism
does almost the same thing, except it does it incompletely, maintaining that
only an élite has rights or effective exercise of rights. Thus, where socialism gets condemned
outright, capitalism “only” gets criticized.
• (June) RoboMac. According
to today’s Wall Street Journal, “McDonald’s Corp. is designing voice-activated
drive-throughs and robotic deep fryers as the burger giant works to streamline
its menu and operations to speed up service.”
(Wall Street Journal, “To Speed Up, McDonald’s Enlists Robots,”
06/21/19, B-3.) Somewhat deeper in the
article is the mention of the movement to raise the minimum wage, which might
actually be the primary motive for automation.
As Jean-Baptiste Say noted over two centuries ago, no businessman is
going to purchase machinery unless it can do something less expansively than
labor — and raising the minimum wage provides a tremendous incentive to replace
human workers with robots. Of course,
thinking it through, one realizes what the late Walter Reuther recognized as
the chief problem underlying the replacement of human beings with robots. Reuther toured a Ford plant that had become
largely automated and was twitted by the Ford executive giving him the tour,
“You’ll have a hard time collecting union dues from those machines,
Walter.” Reuther, president of the
United Auto Workers, responded instantly, “You’ll have an even harder time
selling them automobiles.” Of course,
Louis O. Kelso gave the solution in a 1964 interview in Life magazine,
“If the Machine Wants Our Job, Let’s Buy It.”
If workers owned the machines that were putting them out of work, it
wouldn’t matter, because the income generated by the machines would go to the
workers who would spend it on consumption.
• (June) Gary Reber Appointed CESJ Board Member. CESJ
was pleased to announce that long-time CESJ member Gary Reber was unanimously
appointed to the CESJ Board of Directors.
Gary is one of the longest-lasting people in the Kelso movement, and has
been very faithful in participation. He
has been active on FaceBook, and has the limit of 5,000 friends (evidently
FaceBook doesn’t want you to get too friendly). Gary got to the head of political science
department at the University of California at Berkeley, and he taught a class
there. He was involved in Agenda 2000.
• (June) Robert Brantley Appointed to CESJ Board of Counselors. The
Reverend Dr. Robert Brantley was appointed to the CESJ Board of Counselors,
which functions as the CESJ advisory board.
Counselors
may attend board meetings and have an advisory role. All Counselors are invited and are given
permission to attend in an advisory capacity and to offer brief comments or
statements on relevant topics.
• (June) Great Game of Business
Training Session. Dawn Brohawn and Rowland Brohawn attended
a Great Game of Business training
session at the New Belgian Brewery. Dawn
Brohawn reported that workers become responsible for promoting the good of the
company by focusing on particular key/critical numbers. The idea is make work fun, with games, small
prizes, and that sort of thing. Rowland
Brohawn reported that they focus on teaching people about finance and what the
numbers mean. Some companies went ESOP
after going through the Great Game of Business. Dawn Brohawn said that
the big question is money, getting our financing ideas across to business
people and those in the insurance industry.
Mutual insurance is a natural for capital credit insurance.
• 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 50 different
countries and 54 states and provinces in the United States and Canada (8 out of
10! Manitoba and Prince Edward Island
were the only holdouts) to this blog over the past week. Most visitors are from
the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, India, and Australia. The most popular postings this past week in
descending order were “What
They Should Have Read,” “The
Challenge With Russell Williams,” “Nothing
Is Impossible in Social Justice,” “Thomas
Hobbes on Private Property,” and “News
from the Network, Vol. 12, No. 50.”
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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