A Slight Problem with Moral Relativism

Okay, a really big problem with moral relativism, which is the philosophical aspect of both capitalism and socialism.  Moral relativism and socialist-capitalism (or capitalist-socialism, not really too much difference atwixt the two) both shift the understanding of the world from what can be proved by logical argument or observed by empirical evidence and go with a “faith”-based personal opinion that ends up being whatever those in power want it to be.

JTW Podcast: The Springfield Remanufacturing Story

In our upcoming book, The Greater Reset from TAN Books, based on our earlier book, Economic Personalism: Property, Power and Justice for Every Person (2020), we talk about the benefits of worker ownership.  One of the more successful (to put it mildly) worker-owned companies is Springfield Remanufacturing, which refurbishes engines, the sort of job that’s been moving out of the U.S. for decades.

News from the Network, Vol. 14, No. 47

As of this writing, the Dow has plunged more 1,000 points on news of a new COVID-19 strain in South America.  In real terms, of course, it doesn’t mean anything, as a gain or loss in the stock market is only “real” when you sell the shares and lock in a loss or a gain.  It does, however, illustrate the fact that we need to get away from obsessing about what is essentially a fantasy world on Wall Street and fovus on the real world of Main Street.  To do that we need the Just Third Way of Economic Personalism and the Economic Democracy Act:

Happy Thanksgiving

 

You Ain’t Heard NOTHIN’ Yet!

If you’ve seen Monday’s podcast and yesterday’s blog posting, you may be starting to wonder if this is serious or if we made it all up.  We can assure you that we’re completely serious and absolutely none of this stuff is made up.  As the great biologist J.B.S. Haldane almost sort of said after the editors and science fiction writers got through with it, “The universe is not only stranger than we imagine; it is stranger than we can imagine.”

We’re NOT Making This Up, You Know!

Whenever the late, great Anna Russell related something so incredibly illogical or totally bizarre in the plot line of some opera or other, she would utter her tag line, which almost always brought down the house: “I’m not making this up, you know!”  Well, neither are we . . . and what we’re saying would absolutely floor anyone who accepts opera plots without batting an eye.

JTW Podcast: America's "Prince of Cranks"

Our upcoming book, The Greater Reset from TAN Books, and  based on our earlier book, Economic Personalism: Property, Power and Justice for Every Person (2020), mentions the rather fantastic Ignatius Loyola Donnelly, who was a primary source for Madame Blavatsky's version of theosophy and a major influence on Msgr. John A. Ryan, whose ideas of distributive justice and private property undermined a natural law understanding of those ancient institutions and substituted socialism and fascism for personalist liberal democracy.

News from the Network, Vol. 14, No. 46

If there’s one thing evident from this week’s news items, it’s that most — if not all — of the experts don’t seem to understand money, credit, banking, or finance.  Or basic human nature, for that matter.  Clearly, if we want to restore sanity, we need the Just Third Way of Economic Personalism and the Economic Democracy Act:

Icarian Communism

Yes, communism.  Although later followers and modern commentators would refer to the system invented by Étienne Cabet as socialism, he insisted that it was communism.  To this day there is confusion regarding any meaningful distinction between the terms. 

That Old Black Magic

If you want to be shunned at the club, tell the truth about a historical falsehood that virtually everyone accepts as unquestionably true.  Take, for instance, the origins of socialism and its link to esoteric thought and the Occult, as demonstrated in the voluminous writings of Dr. Julian Strube of Heidelberg University (the one in Baden-Württemberg, not Ohio).  Nowhere is this more evident than in the career of Alphonse-Louis Constant.

The Church of Saint-Simon

In the previous posting on this subject — the “Democratic Religion” of Socialism — we saw that the ultimate goal of socialism was the complete overturn of traditional society and the implementation of what was usually called “the Kingdom of God on Earth,” a materialist terrestrial paradise.  This was usually put in economic terms, frequently confusing people as to what the goal really was.

JTW Podcast: Five Levers of Change

Today we have the final show in the ten-part series on the book, Economic Personalism: Property, Power and Justice for Every Person (2020).  This episode covers what we call “the Five Levers of Change”: Education, Politics, Money and Credit, Taxation, and Technology.

News from the Network, Vol. 14, No. 45

This week’s news items focus on the value and role of human labor, particularly its replacement by advanced technology or cheaper foreign labor.  The solution is not to raise wages articifically or redistribute, but to institute the Just Third Way of Economic Personalism and the Economic Democracy Act:

What is “Environmental Justice”?

We’ll be the first to admit that the term “environmental justice” causes something of a kneejerk reaction in us.  That’s because, as some of its more vocal adherents insist, it means that “Nature” or “the Environment,” or “Gaia” or something else is a person and therefore has inherent rights that should not be violated.

The Democratic Religion

It seems that His Excellency, the Most Reverend Archbishop José H. Gomez of Los Angeles, and current president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, is creating a bit of a stir.  Last week, on Thursday, November 4, 2021, he made comments (or “railed” or “ranted,” depending on who’s doing the reporting) branding “new social justice movements” as “pseudo religions” and “dangerous substitutes for true religion.”

What is “Social Justice”?

If you google the term “social justice,” you will get a flood of results . . . few (if any) of which have an accurate definition or even description of the virtue.  As a result, people generally go away with the same understanding they started with.  If they thought social justice is another term for socialism, nothing changed their mind.  If they thought that social justice means replacing individual justice with coercive, large-scale “charity” (actually redistribution), little was done to modify their position.

JTW Podcast: (Not So) Secrets of the Fed

       This week’s podcast is an hour-long video on what the Federal Reserve has been doing that’s not exactly within the scope of its intended purposes . . . which hasn’t been the case since the New Deal, and was kind of sporadic before then.

News from the Network, Vol. 14, No. 44

Most of what is happening in the world today is the best advertisement possible for the Just Third Way of Economic Personalism and the Economic Democracy Act.  The problem is that those who think that they are world leaders (or even just ordinary leaders) aren’t really doing leading or much else that is constructive.  What the world needs now is not just love, but a way of realistically implementing justice fulfilled and completed by love:

The Economic Democracy Act

      In the previous posting on this subject, we presented the theory of binary economics, which is the economics of the Just Third Way of Economic Personalism.  Today we’ll present what we think is the best application of the theory, the proposed Economic Democracy Act.

The Un-Capitalist Manifesto

       In the previous posting on this subject, we noted that the Keynesian prescription for financing economic growth was based on a fallacy: the idea that savings must be accumulated before new capital can be financed.  Examining the period from 1830 to 1930, however, Dr. Harold G. Moulton of the Brookings Institution found that in each and every case, periods of rapid economic growth had been preceded not by reductions in consumption to accumulate savings, but by increases in consumption that depleted savings!

The Formation of Capital

       In the previous posting on this subject, we looked at how financing new capital formation works with past savings and with future savings.  To recap, the past savings technique of finance means you accumulate savings by decreasing consumption in the past, while the future savings technique involves increasing production in the future.

JTW Podcast: Canons of Taxation

In view of the rather confused thinking in the U.S. Congress these days over how best to tax and for what reason, we found this video on the “Canons (or Principles) of Taxation.”  The first four are those Adam Smith gave in The Wealth of Nations (1776), while the others were added later by other economists.