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:
• 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.
• People Baffled By Inflation. The sudden rise in inflation is astounding many people. They can’t understand why, after pumping trillions of dollars “worth” of counterfeit money into the economy, the price level is rising faster than it has for over thirty years! Of course, a few basic facts about economics and finance, not to mention monetary theory, would resolve their bafflement, but it might also increase the level of anger directed at academics and politicians determined to take what was once the strongest economy in the world down before Communist China. The simple fact that even John Maynard Keynes admitted — although he tried to explain it away — is that when you flood an economy with mega-amounts of worthless cash (i.e., backed only by the government’s promise to pay), the price level is going to rise. Then, the moment people realize that the government cannot make good on its promises, the price level starts rising faster than the money can be created, and you have hyper-inflation. At that point, you usually have someone like Hitler come in to restore order.
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| Tulips! Witch Hunts! Beanie Babies! |
• Beanie Baby Bubble Bursts! In a surprise development that should surprise no one, there appear to be insufficient supplies of Beanie Babies from China to meet the demand for these essential products. There are also projected shortages of other, less critical goods, but we need to keep our priorities in order. Of course, if countries were able to meet all of their domestic needs with domestic productions — which they could do with the Economic Democracy Act — necessities like Beanie Babies could be made in the U.S.A., as well as non-essential luxuries like food, clothing, shelter, education and healthcare at affordable prices.
• And LeVar Burton is Still Not Jeopardy Host? Nothing against Ken Burns, but the new Jeopardy! co-hosts can’t seem to avoid controversy and why is that even an issue and who cares? Anyway, it’s quite understandable why the whole thing may have left a bad taste in LeVar Burton’s mouth, but he’s still being polite about it. Burton will be hosting a show, Trivial Pursuit, currently in development. It’s not clear if it will be on network television.
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| Dr. Harold G. Moulton |
• A Better Way to Fund Relief and Stimulus. If you wanted another reason for monetary reform, it’s the California couple who stole millions in COVID-19 relief funds. This is a problem when your idea of financing involves first getting a lot of money and then spending it. There is no fool-proof metheod of tying the money to the project. As Dr. Harold G. Moulton, ten-president of the Brookings Institution, proved in 1935 with his book, The Formation of Capital, there is a much better way to finance economic growth and development, and — as Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler showed in 1961 in The New Capitalists — it can be done in a way that benefits every child, woman, and man directly, rather than letting them drown in the rising tide that is lifting boats when they don’t even have a life preserver. It’s really quite simple. You ONLY create new money when there is a project to be financed, AND you back the new money with the present value of the project itself. You NEVER, REPEAT NEVER, create money for consumption, only for financing future production. (What about the “money market” you ask? When central banks “create” money to buy from the money market to increase the amount of money in circulation, they’re not really creating new money. What they’re doing is breaking big pieces of money into little pieces of money that are more useful in commerce. After all, who is going to carry around even one $1 million banknote and expect to be able to buy a cup of coffee? Remember Mark Twain’s story, “The £1 million Bank Note”?)
• 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 155,000 total views. The latest Sensus Fidelium video is “The Five Levers of Change.” 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 31 different countries and 33 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Brazil. The most popular postings this past week in descending order were “News from the Network, Vol. 14, No. 45,” “The Church of Saint-Simon,” “That Old Black Magic,” “Activism v. Leadership,” 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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