Modern politics is a wonder . . .
you wonder why no one running for office has picked up on the obvious
advantages of adopting the Just Third Way of economic personalism as a main
plank of a platform. That being said:
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| "As Diamond Jim Brady said, 'Hell, I'm rich!' Fugedabadit!" |
• Saving Social Security.
This past Sunday former New York City mayor Michael
Bloomberg announced his plan to save Social Security and revamp America’s
retirement system. Part of the
billionaire contender’s proposal is to raise the minimum benefit to above the
poverty line. Which poverty line does
not appear to have been specified, nor the effect of increasing demand without
a corresponding increase in production, but doubtless these details will be
revealed in the future. Bloomberg is
“consider[ing] options for preserving and strengthening Social Security’s
long-term finances, while maintaining and enhancing benefits for the neediest
recipients.” His plan includes a “supplement”
to lower-income retirement options with a public savings option with automatic
contributions for all income earners.
Unfortunately, Bloomberg was a trifle vague about funding the increased
benefits. He does not appear to have
considered something along the lines of Capital Homesteading,
which would help people meet their needs through their own efforts instead of
relying on redistribution or cutting current consumption to save for
retirement. (This item was obviously written
prior to the debates on Wednesday night and might be moot at this point. . . .)
• Congress and Widespread Ownership.
According to the monthly bulletin of the National Center for Employee
Ownership in Oakland, California, Congress is getting ready to discuss
implementation of the “Mainstreet Employee Ownership Act” and its
regulation. As the background memo
stated, “Congress’[s] charge to ensure the federal agencies who deliver
capital access programs do not discriminate against certain business[es] based
solely on their ownership structure. Because these businesses have been proven
to be a net positive on local economies and creating real wage growth for
workers, it is incumbent upon Congress and the federal agencies it oversees to
make it easier, not harder, for businesses to operate in an employee-owned
model.” Next step logically would be a Capital Homestead Act.
• State of the Cooperative Report. Also according to the NCEO, in January the
U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives and the Democracy at Work Institute
issued an annual report on the state of worker cooperatives in the United
States. There are 465 (known) worker
cooperatives. They employ 6,454 people
with annual revenue of about $505 million.
They are scattered throughout the country, with most of them being in the San Francisco Bay
Area, the corridor from Washington, D.C. to Boston, and Puerto Rico. Most were founded as start-ups. A quarter of known worker coops, however,
converted to the cooperative form from other business organizations.
• American Compass. A new think
tank is forming that — although being described by some as “anti-free market” —
is simply saying that the free market is not an end in and of itself. “American
Compass” is an initiative of Oren Cass (formerly of the Manhattan Institute
and author of The Once and Future Worker (2018), is being launched in
May of this year. The new organization
will strive “to embody the principles and practices of a healthy
democratic polity, combining intellectual combat with personal civility. [They]
welcome converts to [their] vision and value disagreement amongst [their]
members. [They] work toward a version of American politics that remains
inevitably partisan and contentious but operates from a common commitment to
reinforcing the foundations of a healthy society.” Viewing the website and the description of
Cass’s book, it appears that they are not familiar with either the work of
Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler, or the Just Third Way, which have the potential
to address the problems they cite.
Everything seems geared toward improving the wage system instead of
going beyond it to an ownership system.
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| "I'm still da man, dudes." |
• Interfaith Dialogue. In
response to a question about the role of natural law in faiths and philosophies
other than those adhering to the Abrahamic tradition and Aristotelian
philosophy, we gave this response: “All faiths and
philosophies have some idea of natural law. The differences come in how it is
discerned and how it is interpreted. Most will agree on fundamental principles.
Genuine interfaith dialogue generally consists of reconciling semantic issues
on natural law, not debating purely religious matters based on faith. CESJ’s
framework for interpretation is Aristotelian-Thomist, but that does not
invalidate others.” To this one
individual responded, “Thanks, this is the simplest and most coherent
description of ‘interfaith dialogue’ I’ve seen.”
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| "Show me the money!" |
• 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 37 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this blog over the
past week. Most visitors are from the United States, India, the United Kingdom,
Spain, and Canada. The most popular
postings this past week in descending order were “Social
Justice IV: The Characteristics of Social Justice,” “Thomas
Hobbes on Private Property,” “News
from the Network, Vol. 13, No. 3,” “The Green
Economy,” and “News
from the Network, Vol. 13, No. 7.”
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.
Just to see if you read this far, here's a video treat for you. It's less than five minutes.
#30#