Another “Snowmageddon” or “Snow Event” is prophesied for the U.S. east coast, so the store shelves should be stripped bare of milk, bread, toilet paper and orange juice, not to mention cheap liquor. Be that as it may, here are the news items from this week:
• 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.
Jean-Baptiste Say
• Falling Retail Sales. Much to no one’s surprise except the politicians and other experts, the drastic rise in inflation (that of course couldn’t possibly be due to printing up trillions of dollars of counterfeit money backed only by the government’s increasingly dubious ability to tax) is causing a sharp drop in consumption across the board. In Keynesian terms, this is impossible. There is far from full employment, so of course the rise in the price level isn’t “true inflation” — according to the World’s Greatest Defunct Economist™, true inflation can only occur after reaching full employment . . . of course, Keynes confused cause and effect — but is due to “other factors” (stupid us; we thought a rise in the price level is inflation). What no one sees is that a restoration of Say’s Law of Markets (Keynes and Marx rejected Say’s Law of course) would do more to restore a sound economy than anything being done now. Make everyone productive with either capital, labor, or both, and consumption and production will (everything else being equal) always be in balance. That’s because in Say’s Law, production equals income, therefore, supply generates its own demand, and demand its own supply . . . if you open up democratic access to money and credit through the Economic Democracy Act so that people can purchase capital with future savings and become productive with capital as well as labor.
• Savings v. Investment. Anyone who has taken an economics course knows that “savings = investment.” That is why the focus of the experts on saving for retirement instead of investing for retirement seems more than a little off-base. Here’s how it works. When you save for retirement, it means that somebody else is investing your money. In the best-case scenario, you invest your own savings in “growth stocks” while you’re working and shift to “income stocks” when you retire. The general strategy recommended by many advisors and followed by many people is a combination of savings and investment, with the goal of the perfect scenario being that you die without owing or owning a single cent. The Just Third Way strategy is a bit more realistic, not to say financially sound: first, get rid of the whole concept of “retirement.” Begin accumulating self-liquidating assets the day you’re born and stop the day you die. The goal is to accumulate a capital ownership stake sufficient to generate an adequate and secure income sufficient to meet all ordinary (and a few extraordinary) domestic needs, such as food, clothing, shelter, education, health care, and everything else, for your entire life without having to worry whether you’re cutting consumption enough now to be able to survive after you “retire.” That is the goal of the Economic Democracy Act.
• Church and State. Reading the daily newspaper, it becomes obvious that accepted forms of organized religion and political arrangements are not meeting people’s needs. Increasing numbers of people are almost completely alienated from the mainline churches and the current political orders. How else can you account for what happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, or the massive numbers of people leaving the Catholic Church in Brazil, the world’s largest “Catholic country” (meaning number of Catholics, not an established church)? What neither the politicos nor the religios (if that’s a word) see is that current forms of politics and religion are not anywhere near their original or traditional forms in many cases, and the leaders in both Church and State have been sending people mixed signals for a couple of centuries, ever since socialism and moral relativism became widespread, and the goal of both Church and State became to create a perfect world in this life as an end in itself. Completely forgotten was the traditional goal of organized religion and politics: assist people in becoming more fully human, not to mandate desired results and force them on people to impose someone else’s concept of the perfect life in this world. In an effort to establish a terrestrial paradise, leaders in both Church and State have mixed natural and supernatural elements (did you think that some of those government programs were somehow natural?) to develop what can only be called the Servile State in which as many people as possible are dependent on the government and religion is solely concerned with supporting government efforts.
• 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 34 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, United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, and Sweden. The most popular postings this past week in descending order were “News from the Network, Vol. 15, No. 01,” “JTW Podcast: The Bob’s Red Mill ESOP Story,” “Did C.S. Lewis Approve of Socialism?” “More Than an Individual Problem,” and “Making the Best of a Bad Situation.”
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.
#30#
