Is it just us, or is the world becoming an ever-more surreal place? Russia parks 140,000 troops on the eastern Ukraine border and claims it is being provoked. The U.S. government creates over $30 trillion in counterfeit money and Keynesian experts confirm that this is funny money by maintaining that the government doesn’t have to make good on any of it because — in common with all counterfeit money — the issuer isn’t really on the hook for it! We could continue, but why go on? This week’s news notes are depressing enough (except for the Fireside Chat notice, of course):
• 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 Greater Reset on Fireside Chat. No, it’s not FDR. Join Michael D. Greaney, CESJ’s Director of Research, Sunday, February 6, 2022, at 7:00 pm Eastern Time (USA) on Fireside Chat, the livestream program of the Catholic Parish of St. Elizabeth of Hungary and St. Anthony of Padua in the Diocese of Arlington, Virginia. Hosts Father Francis de Rosa and Father Eric Shafer will be conversing with Michael about his upcoming book, The Greater Reset, co-authored with Dawn K. Brohawn, Director of Communications of the interfaith Center for Economic and Social Justice (CESJ), to be released March 15, 2022, and currently available for pre-order on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and TAN Books. Facebook viewers will be able to post comments and questions during the livestream. The show can be accessed at www.saintselizabethandanthony.com. Click on the button that says “READ” (it won’t say “WATCH” until after the broadcast). You can also click on the FaceBook tab at the top of the page.
 |
| Buy 'em up, shut 'em down. |
• Chinese Commercial Strategy. This item is based on unverified anecdotal information. We received word from a friend in Germany that “the Chinese” (by which we assume she meant either the government or citizens of the People’s Republic of China) has been buying up or establishing factories in Germany, luring workers away from their current employment, then shutting down the factory or never opening it up in the first place. This has a multiple whammy on the German economy. For one thing, it guts Germany’s productive capacity by taking factories out of production. The idea seems to be that if you undermine German domestic production, the market for Chinese products in Germany and Germany’s former export markets will increase. That’s bad enough, but consistent with Say’s Law of Markets, the only honest and economically sound way to purchase what someone else produces is with what you produce. As Say noted in his first “Letter to Malthus”: “All those who, since Adam Smith, have turned their attention to Political Economy, agree that in reality we do not buy articles of consumption with money, the circulating medium with which we pay for them. We must in the first instance have bought this money itself by the sale of our produce.” If you do not produce anything to trade for what others produce, you must give them your promise to pay in the future. If you do not have the capacity to produce anything in the future to make good on your promise, all you’ve done is prepared the groundwork to surrender your sovereignty, as Henry C. Adams pointed out in 1898. That’s at the national level. On the personal level, it is almost impossible for someone who quits a job in Germany to be hired back, or even taken on at another company. First, laying off or firing someone is almost impossible. Employers are glad to see someone go voluntarily, especially in times like these. As for getting rehired even when the “labor market” is strong is extremely questionable. No one wants to hire someone who has proven his or her disloyalty and it would be cheaper to hire someone younger, anyway. The Chinese tactic, therefore, undermines the national economy and ruins individual lives at the same time. Of course, a program of expanded capital ownership would “create jobs,” strengthen the domestic economy, give unemployed people a source of non-government income, and a large number of other benefits, so Germany and other countries should adopt Economic Democracy Acts immediately . . . at least if they want to retain their national sovereignty.
• Yes, the U.S. Owes $30 Trillion. A recent article by some economic experts asserts that the United States doesn’t really owe $30 trillion . . . because we owe it to ourselves! This delusion, which is rooted in the Keynesian economics that got us into this mess in the first place, was completely demolished in a pamphlet written in 1943 by Dr. Harold Moulton, The New Philosophy of Public Debt. Evidently the truth of the matter still hasn’t sunk in. The Keynesian argument is that since the domestic portion of the debt is held by Americans, and the government represents Americans, the debt cancels itself out! Uh, huh. And if your brother borrows $10,000 from you and spends it, he doesn’t have to pay you back, because you’re both members of the same family . . . right? Most simply put, yes, the government owes every cent of its debt to whoever is the holder of that debt, even if it is the Social Security Administration which is holding massive amounts of government debt in its so-called trust fund. Holders of debt are separate “persons” from the issuer of the debt, even in a socialist economy in which the state or the collective is presumably the ultimate owner of everything. By promising to pay (which is what a debt is) and not paying, the government turns itself into a thief and is illegitimate. To be legitimate, a government must pay all debts it has assumed, and no delusional Keynesian doubletalk can change that simple fact.
• 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 30 different countries and 34 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, India, Kenya, and Ireland. The most popular postings this past week in descending order were “Social Justice IV: The Characteristics of Social Justice,” “News from the Network, Vol. 15, No. 03,” “A New Monetary Philosophy,” “Double Trouble in the Bubble,” and “Financing Economic Democracy.”
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#
