If there is one word to describe the current world situation, it is “surreal.” One of the problems has been that for more than two-hundred years the idea has been gaining ground that “humanity” (an abstraction) is far more important than humans. That sort of thinking is the basis of capitalism, socialism, “ultrasupernaturalism” (what Msgr. Ronald Knox defined as an excess of charity that causes disunity), and “New Age” thinking. Many people today think they can create truth rather than work to discover it. It’s so much easier to impose your created truth on others rather than do the hard work of conforming to reality. Maybe that’s why people still haven’t caught on to the Just Third Way . . . it’s too much work.
• Too Much Cash. According to yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, “Business Piles Up Record Unused Credit” (08/05/21, A-1, A-6), U.S. Businesses have so much cash on hand that they are not borrowing enough, and banks are not able to make money. AT the same time, the federal government is creating trillions of dollars to stimulate the economy, that is, spend money so that businesses can can make enough profits to invest in more capital and create jobs. You see the problem here? Businesses already have so much cash they’re not spending that they aren’t borrowing money to spend, so the government is creating money and spending it like a drunken sailor on leave so that businesses will have even more money they won’t spend! Here’s a crazy idea: why not distribute the unused cash to the stockholders who allegedly own it, then they can spend it instead of having the government print up new money to spend? To encourage businesses to pay dividends, make them tax deductible at the corporate level, and treated as ordinary income at the personal level. Then, at such time as corporations need financing for expansion, they can sell new shares in ways that make new owners who will use their dividends first to pay for the shares, then for consumption income. There is no need for the government to create more money backed only by its own debt when all they have to do is reform the system so that it works properly, as with the Economic Democracy Act.
• Justice University. Justice University has now started its third in an ongoing series of educational programs to orient people in the Just Third Way, with Saturday Justice University sessions now in their second week. Of course, JU has been having informal programs for some time, since about 2010, in fact, with “teams” from CESJ/JU making special presentations on a more or less regular basis. One of the better “informal programs” (in our humble opinion) has been the weekly podcast, which has covered subjects that really should be covered in much more depth in a much more formal setting, but which we have managed to present something every Monday since November 2017. To date we have almost 200 — yes, two hundred — podcasts, so just listening or watching the series is quite an education, and like all JU courses (so far) are 100% free. Where else could you get Mortimer Adler, Louis Kelso, Norman Kurland, and others, and not have to pay a cent for your education?
• Student Debt Crisis. One of the things Justice University could resolve is the student debt crisis,. Part of the problem, of course, is that people are spending incredible amounts of money to qualify themselves for jobs that don’t exist, and that would not in some cases pay for the education even if they did exist. So what’s the solution? Is it forgive all student debt as many are demanding, thereby sticking the taxpayer with the bill for something from which they received no benefit? Or do we insist on people paying debt they incurred for an education from which they derived little or no benefit? Well, it might be feasible to pass the Economic Democracy Act, enabling people to generate substantial income without necessarily having a “job,” and enabling them both to pay for an education without borrowing, and to pay down debt if they did.
• LeVar Burton and Jeopardy. We’ll take “No Justice in the World” for $2,000.” “After all the hype and tryouts for a new host for the game show Jeopardy!, this is what they’re doing.” “What is ‘Going with a producer of the show after stringing all the fans along for months?’” “That’s absolutely correct.” So the guest host who in our opinion is the best choice, LeVar Burton, didn’t have any more of a chance than anyone else, despite being one of the top fan choices.
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| The Second Great Awakening |
• Getting Woke. It turns out that getting “woke” isn’t exactly new or original. “The Great Awakening” of the mid-eighteenth century, “the Second Great Awakening” of the early nineteenth century, and the (disputed) “Third Great Awakening” of the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries stimulated the spread of socialism, utopianism, messianism, spiritualism, and kinds of other things that Pope Gregory XVI called rerum novarum (“new things”) back in 1834. There were some good things, too, but on the whole the Great Awakenings were striking examples of what Msgr. Ronald Knox called “enthusiasm” or “ultrasupernaturalism,” which he defined as an excess of charity that leads to disunity. Maybe we’re going through the Fourth Great Awakening with the Great Reset?
• Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It’s time for the annual round of commentary from People Who Never Would Have Used The Bomb If They Had Been In Charge. They would have sat in the White House having received information about the estimated 17-20,000,000 exterminated in the Nazi death camps, the utter devastation of much of Europe from conventional warfare and the numbers of civilian and military casualties, including the London Blitz, known of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, the Rape of Nanking, the invasion of Manchuria, the 1,000+ per day U.S. casualties on Okinawa, the mass suicides of Japanese civilians in Okinawa, and the estimate of 1,000,000 casualties (lowball) that a conventional invasion of the Japanese mainland would cost . . . and would have taken the high moral ground that the war must not end as quickly as possible. It must go on until the last Imperial soldier dies fighting and the last Japanese civilian has committed suicide. It is a crime against humanity to use atomic weapons. Isn’t it easy to be virtuous when you don’t have to do anything except condemn someone else?
• Hortense and Her Whos. In case you’ve been wondering how you might advance the Just Third Way by introducing it to legislators at any and all levels of government, we’ve made it easy for you, with the “Hortense Hears Three Whos” initiative. Visit the explanatory website, and consider downloading the postcard to send to people in government. Don’t worry if you think they won’t be open to it, as the postcard is intended to get them to open their eyes.
• Economic Personalism Landing Page. 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 series of videos for Sensus Fidelium are doing very well, with nearly 150,000 views in total. The latest Sensus Fidelium video is “The Principles of Economic Justice.” The video is part of the series on the book, Economic Personalism. The latest completed series on “the Great Reset” can be found on the “Playlist” for the series. 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, edging up to 150,000 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.
• 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 32 different countries and 32 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, and India. The most popular postings this past week in descending order were “News from the Network, Vol, 14, No. 30,” “A Systematic Diffusion of Power,” “Is There a Third Way?” “JTW Podcast: Review of Adler’s ‘The Great Ideas,” and “Corporatism Versus Distributism.”
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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