It is becoming increasingly obvious to everyone except those in politics and academia that the Same Old Thing isn’t working. To cut to the chase, until and unless governments adopt the Just Third Way of Economic Personalism and the Economic Democracy Act, matters are only going to get worse:
• 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.
• Rising (Official) Inflation. Even the somewhat artificial measure of inflation used by official sources is starting to show the problems. The official “over the year” amount as of November was almost 7% — the highest in almost forty years. What baffles the experts is how, after pumping trillions of dollars “worth”
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| Irving Fisher supported legal counterfeiting |
of counterfeit money into the economy (Irving Fisher called money backed by government debt “legal counterfeiting” . . . and approved of it!) the price level is rising! From the perspective of economic personalism it’s very easy to understand. If you view money and credit as a commodity, then some mystical divine being called the State or the computer creates money, and people use this “money” to produce other wealth. Somehow, however, it never seems to work, and the mystical divine being has to create even more “money” . . . and people wonder why things keep getting worse. If you view money and credit simply as a means by which I exchange what I produce for what you produce, however, then you realize it’s not a commodity at all, and when the State or the computer creates “money,” all it’s doing is creating artificial claims on production that doesn’t exist, so it forces up the prices of actual production.
Louis O. Kelso
• Where Should Money Come From? Under the principles of binary economics, it is not necessary to have money (savings) before financing new capital. Commercial and central banking were invented to create a kind of “self-financing” out of feasible commercial, agricultural, and industrial projects. The proposals of Louis Kelso take full advantage of this. If a project has value, a commercial bank can create money backed by the value of the project. This new money is used to “form” (purchase or build) the new capital. When the new capital becomes profitable, the money is repaid to the bank and cancelled. The borrower pays an additional amount over and above the amount of new money created by the bank that represents the bank’s revenue and that is not cancelled.
Fr. Robert Sirico
• The Greater Reset. Work continues on preparing The Greater Reset: Reclaiming Personal Sovereignty Under Natural Law for its March 1, 2022, release. In an unexpected move, the book may be a unique event in recent publishing history. Endorsements have been received from Father Robert Sirico, co-founder and president emeritus of the Acton Institute, a conservative/libertarian think tank, and from Geoff Gneuhs, former chaplain to Dorothy Day and the New York Catholic Worker. Why is this unique? Because in general — despite Dorothy Day’s “conservative” and even “libertarian” views (she rejected the New Deal and made sarcastic references to “Holy Mother the State”) some individuals and groups who support the Catholic Worker movement make a point of attacking the Acton Institute and Father Sirico (as this recent article by one Thomas Storck demonstrates), while a few supporters of Acton sometimes return the, er, favor, despite
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| Dorothy Day |
the fact that Acton has made many statements in support of Day and the Catholic Worker movement. What’s good about this? Anything that can be endorsed by what some people assume are opposed views has got to have something going for it, and may have the potential to get people working together instead attacking each other.
• 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 37 different countries and 40 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, Canada, Germany, and Sweden. The most popular postings this past week in descending order were “Book Review: ‘A Field Guide for the Hero’s Journey,” “It’s Not Socialism Except When It Is,” “News from the Network, Vol. 14, No. 48,” “What Happened to Distributive Justice?” and “A New Age Economic Program.”
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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