News from the Network, Vol. 14, No. 08

Another week has gone by with the world enslaved to the Keynesian concept of the absolute necessity of past savings to finance new capital formation and economic growth, and the related Keynesian idea that to stimulate consumer demand you need to flood the world with fiat money backed only by government debt.  And the result?  Little actual capital formation, spreading poverty, and massive government debt.  Is there a better way?  Yes.  The Economic Democracy Act.  In the meantime:

Interpreting the Goals of the Great Reset

Whether or not anyone realizes it, everyone has a philosophy of some sort.  To understand the Great Reset, it is essential to know the philosophy behind it.

“All Products Will Have Become Services”

Analyzing the Great Reset is made more difficult by the fact that, like Pope Saint Pius X’s comment about modernism, it is presented “without order and systematic arrangement” (Pascendi Dominici Gregis, § 4) in a loose, even chaotic manner.  Rhetoric plays to the emotions, and goals are stated in vague terms that leave far too much to personal interpretation and imagination on the part of both adherents and opponents.

Goals of the Great Reset

Individuals and groups promoting the Great Reset appear to be motivated by a genuine concern for the future of humanity and of the planet.  In our experience, however, that simply adds to the seriousness of the problem.  It shifts the basis of argument away from knowledge and reason based on the intellect, to opinion and faith based on the will.

JTW Podcast: Church Militant, The Great Reset

This week’s video podcast contains material with which we may not agree, and that CESJ cannot as a non-political/interfaith 501(c)(3) in any way endorse or promote, but the sections on private property are both useful and informative — this is an "informational" not an "advisory" video.  The mention of Fulton Sheen is also interesting:

News from the Network, Vol. 14, No. 07

Although things may seem pretty dark at the moment, some good things are happening . . . if we stop to take a look:

Minimum Wage and the Role of the State

     A few days ago in a “distributist” forum on FaceBook, someone posted a link to an article in Newsweek about fast food workers calling for a nation-wide strike to get a $15.00 minimum wage, “I Work at McDonald’s, Risking My Life Every Day. Don’t Thank Me. Pass a $15 Minimum Wage/Opinion.”

The Best Form of Government

     Possibly as a result of some people in the “distributist community” deciding on a name change for the concept (from “distributism” to “localism”), we recently got a question regarding the form of government that best conforms to the distributist ideal.  For reasons that we hope will become obvious, we won’t address whether the name change was good, bad, or indifferent.

The New Christianity and the Great Reset

     As we saw in the previous posting on this subject, the “new things” (rerum novarum) of socialism and modernism were not merely a new religion.  They constituted a new idea of what religion should be: rejection of what Pope Pius XI would later (misleadingly) call “the Reign of Christ the King” in favor of creating the perfect life here in this life, “the Kingdom of God on Earth.”

JTW Podcast: The Just Third Way with Norman Kurland

This week’s video podcast is a slight change of pace: Steve Cunningham interviews Norman Kurland and they discuss the Just Third Way:

News from the Network, Vol. 14, No. 06

In a not unexpected development, the Biden administration is rushing headlong into pumping money into the economy, thereby making a bad situation worse and creating a spiral that requires continuous emergency measures that never normalize the situation.  Even the much-touted calls for “unity” seem to redefine the term as submission to injustice for the sake of order and peace instead of a genuine development of solidarity:

Appearances Can Deceive

At first it was touted as David versus Goliath — the “GameStop Mania,” which bore a striking resemblance to a number of other events in history chronicled by Charles MacKay in his 1841 classic, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.  The price of the shares of a company pretty much off the map was bid up and down in a speculative frenzy ostensibly intended to teach the Big Money Wall Street Élite (BMWSE) a lesson in humility.

A New Idea of Religion

In the previous posting on this subject, we saw how “the theory of certitude” — essentially a variation on Neo-Platonism (bet you never thought you’d see that term in a blog posting) — gave many people, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, a very wrong and even contradictory understanding of “papal infallibility.”  By assuming the pope has the power to create new truth in all areas instead of discerning existing truth restricted to faith and morals, Félicité de Lamennais and subsequent modernists (both reactionary and radical) set up a Catch-22 for themselves.

The Wrong Idea of Infallibility

As we saw in the previous posting on this subject, Félicité de Lamennais dismissed individual reason and claimed that truth resides only in the general reason as the result of direct revelation from God.  Consequently, something is true because someone believes it; it is not believed because it is true.  This requires a central religious authority — the pope — to determine truth and communicate it to believers.

JTW Podcast: A Meeting with Pope Francis

This week’s video podcast is the fourth and final installment of a four-part series on “Economic Personalism versus The Great Reset”.  Again, this is loosely related to the book, Economic Personalism, but it is more in the nature of a somewhat informal conversation about applying the principles of economic personalism to a specific situation.  Today we look at what we’d like to say to Pope Francis if we happen to have a meeting with him any time soon:

News from the Network, Vol. 14, No. 05

Things continue to move forward surprisingly well, despite some bad news we received this week::

Félicité de Lamennais and the “Theory of Certitude”

As we saw in the previous posting on this subject, l’abbe Hugues Félicité Robert de Lamennais and two friends, Charles Forbes René de Montalembert and Jean-Baptiste Henri Dominique Lacordaire, calling themselves “the Pilgrims of God and Liberty” had gone to Rome in the early months of the pontificate of Gregory XVI to meet with him and get a papal endorsement of their activities.

The Pilgrims of God and Liberty

As we saw in the previous posting on this subject, contrary to the common sense approach that the common good should be structured so that people can meet their own needs through their own efforts, the principle of the New Christian Prophet Henri de Saint-Simon was that the whole of society should be dedicated to taking care of people, that simply because they exist, people have an absolute right to everything they need, and sometimes what they want . . . which effectively abolishes private property in both labor and capital.

“An Excess of Charity”

In working to advance the cause of human dignity and understanding of social justice, it has become increasingly clear over the past several decades (yes, decades) not only that people are a little unclear as to the meaning of human dignity and social justice, they are also more than a little vague about what constitutes charity and justice . . . without which respect for human dignity is only so much noise.

JTW Podcast: Paying the Piper

This week’s video podcast is the third installment of a four-part series on “Economic Personalism versus The Great Reset”.  While this is loosely related to the book, Economic Personalism, it is more in the nature of a somewhat informal conversation about applying the principles of economic personalism to a specific situation.  Today we look at why who pays for something has the right to control it.