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:
• Call for Unity. In the Wall Street Journal of Saturday/Sunday, February 6-7, 2021, in the Review section, Francis X. Rocca, Vatican correspondent for the Journal, opined, “Can Catholic Social Teaching Unite a Divided America?” (C-1-2.) We believe the answer is “yes” . . . IF (and only if) the understanding of Catholic social teaching combined with the binary economics and economic justice principles of Kelso and Adler are the basis for applying the paradigm. This is outlined in Economic Personalism, which all of these people should be reading. It helps distinguish between what the Catholic Church calls “modernism” (which is probably not what you think), liberalism (ditto) and socialism (yeah, ditto, ditto, ditto to the max, and toss in capitalism for good measure), and actual, genuine, orthodox Catholic (or other Christian, or Jewish, Islamic, and even Pagan) understanding of the natural law and thus social ethics.
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| Dr. Anthony Fauci |
• April Vaccination?. According to Yahoo! News, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s prediction of April for the general availability of the Covid vaccine is not unrealistic. This could be very good news . . . assuming that the Biden administration puts a realistic economic recovery program into operation, such as the Economic Democracy Act. To insist on issuing gargantuan amounts of government debt in the belief that it will “stimulate” economic recovery flies in the face of both common sense and thousands of years of human history. Massive issues of fiat money backed only by government debt or nothing at all (as in the hyperinflation in Germany in the 1920s) has always either caused disaster, or made an existing bad situation worse.
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| Keynes: Absolute power to the State |
• Economic Irony. The amount of the most recent economic stimulus package, funded by increases in government debt backed by future tax collections that might never happen, is roughly equal to twice the amount originally proposed to fund “the Capital Homestead Act” (now the Economic Democracy Act) backed by private sector hard assets that are reasonably expected to generate their own repayment. The irony is that financing the government stimulus package(s) is purely inflationary and only by chance actually stimulates growth, while EDA financing is neither inflationary nor deflationary and directly finances growth. The Economic Democracy Act would also assist everyone to become productive through both labor and capital, thereby (consistent with Say’s Law of Markets) bringing consumption and production into balance naturally, without having to manipulate the currency à la Keynes in a self-defeating effort to circumvent nature.
• Economic Personalism Landing Page Launched. A landing page for CESJ’s latest publication, Economic Personalism: Property, Power and Justice for Every Person, has been created and can be accessed by clicking on this link. Everyone is encouraged to visit the page and send the link out to their networks.
• Economic Personalism. When you purchase a copy of Economic Personalism: Property, Power and Justice for Every Person, be sure you post a review after you’ve read it. It is available on both Amazon and Barnes and Noble at the cover price of $10 per copy. You can also download the free copy in .pdf available from the CESJ website. If you’d like to order in bulk (i.e., ten or more copies) at the wholesale price, send an email to publications@cesj.org for details. CESJ members get a $2 rebate per copy on submission of proof of purchase. Wholesale case lots of 52 copies are available at $350, plus shipping (whole case lots ONLY). Prices are in U.S. dollars.
• Sensus Fidelium Videos, Update. CESJ’s new series of videos for Sensus Fidelium contrasting economic personalism and the Great Reset is off to a good start, although we missed this past week due to unforeseen circumstances. The latest Sensus Fidelium video is “The Just Third Way with Norman Kurland.” The latest completed series on “the Great Reset” can be found on the “Playlist” for the series. We expect to begin a new series on Economic Personalism next week, but the previous series of sixteen videos on socialism is available by clicking on the link: “Socialism, Modernism, and the New Age,” along with some book reviews and other selected topics. For “interfaith” presentations to a Catholic audience they’ve proved to be popular, with over 101,000 views to date. They aren’t really “Just Third Way videos,” but they do incorporate a Just Third Way perspective. You can access the playlist for the entire series The point of the videos is to explain how socialism and socialist assumptions got such a stranglehold on the understanding of the role of the State and thus the interpretation of Catholic social teaching, and even the way non-Catholics and even non-Christians understand the roles of Church, State, and Family, and the human person’s place in society.
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| "C'mon, lay a big wet one on me!" |
• 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 29 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, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Israel. The most popular postings this past week in descending order were “News from the Network, Vol. 14, No. 5,” “The Wrong Idea of Infallibility,” “A New Idea of Religion,” “Evelyn Waugh on Vatican II,” and “Appearances Can Deceive.”
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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