The Big News this week seems to be
the debates about more “stimulus” in the trillions of dollars. We keep wondering why when we first proposed
allocating $2 trillion worth of capital credit to finance new capital formation
to be broadly owned and in a non-inflationary way, it was called insanely
risky. Not like issuing $6 trillion or
more of new money backed only by future tax collections that might never
materialize. And then there’s this:
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| This was "free money," too. |
• Free Repayable Stimulus! According
to the Motley Fool financial analyst website, the
proposed $5,000 stimulus for “seniors” is actually a hidden loan from
future Social Security payments. This,
of course, without the Fool (we mean that in a nice way) knowing it, is the
best argument for Capital
Homesteading as a way of “saving” Social Security by creating a stream of
ownership income that replaces the current system as the primary source of
income. We’ll repeat that, for we would
leave Social Security in place and meet all current promises, but be careful
about making new ones. Social Security
should be “means based,” so that people who have nothing else can be secure (as
the name says), but it should not be an across the board entitlement. If Capital Homesteading were in place, a
$5,000 non-repayable advance out of Social Security would 1) make sense, 2) not
put a strain on the system, and 3) probably not even be necessary, as Social
Security payments would be larger, anyway, with fewer recipients, and with more
“seniors” having ownership income, there would be less financial need in the
first place.
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| Hilaire Belloc |
• Usury and Other Dishonest Profit.
We’ve been seeing an upswing in condemnations of usury lately, often
citing Hilaire Belloc as the authority . . . but getting what
Belloc actually said a little wrong. The
problem was that Belloc got a little garbled in his explanation of usuary due
to the fact that he was locked into the flawed Currency Principle, but he
correctly stated the principle: usury is not any interest on a loan, even high
interest. Usury is taking interest on a
loan of money that is not put to productive use to produce a marketable good or
service, but is used for consumption. That
is, usury is taking a profit when no profit is due, hence the “real” title of
the 1746 encyclical Vix Pervenit is “On Usury and Other DISHONEST
Profit.” All profit is not condemned, only dishonest profit.
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| Mark Cuban |
• Mark Cuban Speaks. According
to the bulletin of the National Center for Employee Ownership in Oakland,
California, Billionaire
investor Mark Cuban has come out strongly in favor of employee ownership. As the NCEO reports, “Cuban also said, ‘if
you’re running a company now and you need help from your employees, give them
equity. Give them stock in a meaningful
way, because you’re going to need them to grow your company. We’re all going to need them to grow this
country and this world back to where we were economically.’ He argued that
stock ownership can increase economic security and help reduce social
inequality.” Now, we agree with most of
what is said, but we have a quibble with the word “give” and, later, in a quote
we didn’t quote, “reward.” Ownership is
a right, not a gift. As
Pope Pius XI reminded us (even if you’re not Catholic or even Christian), “no vicarious charity can substitute for justice which is
due as an obligation and is wrongfully denied.” (Quadragesimo Anno, §
137.) We have a hunch Cuban is not
really giving shares away, but is selling them, but it should be made clear
that, while current owners have every right to keep what they own (and can give
it away or sell it out of charity), everyone should have the opportunity and
means to become an owner of the future growth of the economy.
• Fall Conference?. The CESJ
Core Group and the Humphrey Fellows are discussing the possibility of a “virtual
conference” in the Fall on “A New Monetary System for Sustainable Growth and
Economic Justice” (tentative title). The
idea is to issue a “call for papers” inviting researchers and experts to contribute theoretical
and empirical research studies, concept papers, or technical reports addressing timely issues and
developments in the fields of money, credit, finance, and central banking, from
the perspective of social and economic justice as understood within the Just
Third Way. A number of academics have
already expressed interest.
• Universalizing Capital Ownership.
Michiel
Bijkerk, of the Arco Caribbean webzine, let us know he will be publishing CESJ’s
paper on "Universalizing Capital Ownership." Be sure to visit his multilingual website.
• 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 84 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, China, India,
Bangladesh, and Brazil. The most popular
postings this past week in descending order were “News
from the Network, Vol. 13, No. 20,” “R.M.
Hutchins and M.J. Adler on ‘The Great Books’,” “The
Labor Theory of Value,” “Social
Justice IV: The Characteristics of Social Justice,” and “Some
Labor Problems.”
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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