Congress and the President are still floundering about the gigantic budget that is getting whittled down day by day as the desperation increases, but nobody has any real answer or alternative . . . except the Just Third Way of Economic Personalism and the Economic Democracy Act:
• Help Joe Walk Again for Economic Justice. Just a reminder, if you haven’t already done so, to visit the GoFundMe campaign and consider making a contribution and spreading word out among your social media networks. It’s off to a good start, but it’s still just a start.
The Workers Paradise, it worked before, right?
• Biden’s Big Budget Abated. President Biden’s big push for the expansion
of the Progressive Welfare State far beyond anything seen in the United States keeps
getting reduced as economic and political reality keeps putting barriers in
the way of achieving the Kingdom of God on Earth the Workers’ and
Welfare Recipients’ Paradise. What no
one seems to be considering is the simple fact that if you want to redistribute
something, there must first be something to redistribute . . . and if you want
something to redistribute, you must first produce it . . . and the best way to
produce something is . . . well, to produce it!
And the best way to produce is not to wave a magic wand, pass a law, or
print money backed by government debt.
No, the way to produce marketable goods and services is by means of
human labor, land and other natural resources, and technology (i.e.,
tools or capital instruments). The
problem, of course, is that these days advancing technology is displacing human
labor at a tremendous rate, and the amount of land is fixed for all practical
purposes. The obvious thing to do, then,
would be to make as many as possible of the people capital owners, so that they
can produce for themselves and their dependents, and leave redistribution for
those who cannot produce for whatever reason.
And the mere money? That’s the
easiest thing of all. Commercial
(mercantile) and central banking were invented to create money exclusively for
projects that pay for themselves out of their own future profits — to ensure
that a good productive project would not fail or remain undone due to lack of
money. That is why the Economic
Democracy Act calls for a complete overhaul of the money and tax system to
make it favorable for production and to make everyone a capital owner.
 |
| A Catch-22 |
• Rethinking Saving for Retirement v. Investing for Life. Congress is once again looking at ways to help workers save for retirement and encourage people to retain savings in qualified plans. Currently, participants in most qualified plans are required to take a distribution after an appropriate Break in Service, whether or not they have reached retirement age. There is a provision in retirement law that permits recipients to “rollover” a distribution into another qualified plan such as an IRA or 401(k), but many people receiving a distribution will often just spend it. One proposal is to permit Plan Participants to remain in a plan as long as they like . . . which means that, even if no additional contributions go into the Participant’s account, the sponsor (usually the company) still pays the administrative cost for somebody who isn’t even employed at the company, adding to costs without generating revenue. This also comes up against the need for people to spend the bulk of their income for current consumption instead of investing and reinvesting for retirement. It’s a Catch-22 situation that can only be resolved if the paradigm shifts from “saving for retirement” by reducing current consumption, to “investing for life” by providing a way that everyone can purchase self-liquidating capital assets that generate an adequate and secure income for current and future consumption needs — the Economic Democracy Act.
• It’s Do or Die for Socialism — and It’s Completely Unnecessary. If President Biden really wants to be a unifying force for the United States, he should stop being so divisive by making the socialist agenda the defining theme of his presidency. It’s almost as if he wants to alienate most of the people in the country permanently instead of finding a way to bring people together. President Biden seems to be becoming almost desperate as virtually every action could have been dictated by the 2024 Trump campaign. It’s almost as if he wants Trump to retake the White House. Yet President Biden could go from Zero to Hero very quickly. The Economic Democracy Act would turn things completely around within a very short time, and restore not only the U.S. economy, but American prestige as it showed the rest of the world the way to go. Of course, it would also give moderates and conservatives the ability to resist the progressive agenda . . . and the progressives the ability to resist the moderate and conservative agendas, but that seems to be a small price to pay.
• 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 over 150,000 total views. The latest Sensus Fidelium video is “The Four Pillars of a Just Market Economy.” 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 30 different countries and 36 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, Kenya, the United Kingdom, Canada, and India. The most popular postings this past week in descending order were “Time for a Tax Reality Check,” “The Purpose of Production,” “News from the Network, Vol. 14, No. 42,” “Judgment at Nuremberg,” and “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property.”
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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