Merry New Year's Eve!

 Or we hope so, anyway:

News from the Network, Vol. 13, No. 53

This is the second half of the annual year-end news round-up.  We’re bringing it out today as Friday is New Year’s Day.  This year, instead of editing items from past News from the Network blog postings, we put them in as they originally appeared.  Thus, you should substitute “Economic Democracy Act” for “Capital Homesteading,” and adjust mentally for other things that might have turned out slightly differently than anticipated. . . .

A Systematic Solution to Structural Racism in America!

By Guest Blogger Rick Osbourne

[Editor’s note: Rick uses the term “Capital Homesteading” in his article.  We are now using the term “Economic Democracy,” but it makes no difference in the substance.  Everything else in this posting is Rick’s work, and is not necessarily the position of this blog or CESJ.]

JTW Podcast: RH Benson’s Lord of the World

No, really, this is about the Just Third Way.  Back in the early twentieth century, Msgr. Robert Hugh Benson published a satirical novel (that many people have mistaken for some kind of prophecy), lambasting the “new things” of socialism, modernism, and the New Age from a “Catholic” point of view.  Despite the overtly religious nature of the novel, however, it delivers a universal message about the dangers of shifting away from the human person to the abstraction of “humanity”:

Merry Christmas!

 As we say every year . . . what on peace on  earth are you doing reading this blog on Christmas?

Happy Christmas Eve!

 Just in case you happened to wander to this blog today when you should be spending time with your family. . . .

News from the Network, Vol. 13, No. 52

This is the first half of the annual year-end news round-up.  We’re bringing it out today as Friday is Christmas.  Next week’s will also come out on Wednesday, as New Year’s also falls on a Friday.  This year, instead of editing items from past News from the Network blog postings, we put them in as they originally appeared.  Thus, you should substitute “Economic Democracy Act” for “Capital Homesteading,” and adjust mentally for other things that might have turned out slightly differently than anticipated. . . .

“Power Follows Property”

In the previous posting on this subject, we noted that while the Chinese version of social credit differs in most respects from that of Major Douglas, both either assume or impose a condition of total dependency on the State on most people.  The Chinese version of social credit assumes that all people are effectively owned by the State outright, while Major Douglas’s version imposes total dependency by making everyone dependent on the government for their income, one way or another.

JTW Podcast: The Act of Social Justice

One of the things that we discovered early on in the Global Justice Movement is that there are a lot of definitions of “social justice” floating around.  A frequent problem, then, is that we often get into arguments with people who insist that social justice means one thing, when we clearly mean something completely different. . . .

News from the Network, Vol. 13, No. 51

There is a great deal going on, but much of it is in progress, so it’s difficult to report on it in a coherent manner.  Still, there are a number of things going on:

Are Some More Equal Than Others?

As we saw in the previous postings on this subject concerning the Chinese version of “social credit” and that of Major Douglas, there seems to be no connection between the two.  On the surface, they describe two different systems, one concerned with regulating people’s behavior to “encourage” them to act in socially acceptable ways (as determined by the Party), and the other looking at the problem of inadequate demand and thus insufficient consumer income to clear marketable goods and services.

“Christianity in Action”?

We’ve never been able to track down the original source of it, but adherents of Major Douglas’s version of “social credit” claim that Douglas declared that it is “Christianity in action.”  If he did, indeed, say it (and we’re not doubting it, just saying that we couldn’t find the source), it is fully consistent with what we do know about social credit and its antecedents in “the New Christianity.”

What is “Social Credit”?

When settlers from Europe became somewhat familiar with the flora and fauna of the New World, they naturally began giving names to what they found.  They made a number of mistakes, such as calling the indigenous inhabitants “Indians” even long after it was obvious that the lands were not India.  There was also the problem with things like buffalo (which are really bison), and calling a wapiti an elk, and then when a true elk was found, calling it a moose, since the e-word had already been given to another animal.

JTW Podcast: “They Lived the Faith” Book Review

Oh, no!  Not another Catholic video podcast!  You’re right, it’s not . . . at least, not very much.  You’ll notice the clever way we inserted a discussion of how Catholic social teaching and the economic justice principles of Louis Kelso and Mortimer J. Adler come together in the Just Third Way of Economic Personalism. . . . Besides, we wrote the foreword and it's almost wholly Just Third Way:

News from the Network, Vol. 13, No. 50

 

Never has the phrase “no news is good news” been more true, as we’d rather have no news at all than our first item:

Economic Democracy for All

In the previous posting on this subject, we looked at how the ESOP — the Employee Stock Ownership Plan — invented by Louis O. Kelso as a way in which private sector corporate employees could become part owners of the companies that employed them without having to use (non-existent) past savings or take reductions in pay.

“Farewell to a Father”

Sunday evening, December 6, I received some extremely shocking news.  John Moorehouse, an old friend and professional colleague, had died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 51.  He left a wife and five children.  TAN Books, for which John served as editor, has started a GoFundMe campaign for his family.

The Expanded Ownership Revolution

As we saw in the previous posting on this subject, Harold Moulton solved the problem of where to get the funds to finance new capital formation without cutting consumption, but it left unanswered the question of how people are to gain consumption income if they are being replaced by advancing technology and are unable to produce.

JTW Podcast: Concerns With Fratelli Tutti

Yet again it looks as if we’re not only getting explicitly religious here, but we’re picking on Pope Francis.  Neither assumption would be correct, however.  The fact is that Pope Francis’s recent encyclical contained some statements regarding private property that appear to be at variance with the natural law, and we want to make certain His Holiness gets a chance to explain them.  Then we can pick on him. . . .

News from the Network, Vol. 13, No. 49

What with the holiday season and everything else going on, and our general disinclination to make anything other than general comments about politics, religion, and the Great Pumpkin, the news is a little thin this week, but there are a few important occurrences:

Another Question

In the previous posting on this subject, we noted that there was another question about the financing of new capital formation that we hadn’t addressed.  We did note the presumed existence of the economic dilemma, however . . . which turned out to be ephemeral, as Harold G. Moulton noted.

The Formation of Capital

 

Today we start to give a brief look at an alternative to the Vast Keynesian Conspiracy that has wrecked global economies and left the world in a seemingly hopeless situation.  As we shall see, however, it doesn’t have to be this way, and it could be fixed quite easily . . . if only the powers that be didn’t gain so much power at everyone else’s expense from the present system.

Capitalism Versus Socialism?

Many people automatically assume that socialism/communism and capitalism have been the bitterest of enemies from Day One of recorded time.  Shocking as it may seem, this is not the case.  Capitalism and socialism are much closer than many people imagine, or that some of the can imagine.