Everyone seems to be agreeing that we are headed into a recession (Keynesian newspeak for depression), but nobody seems to know what to do about it except keep repeating the same things that got us into this mess in the first place. No one is considering something different, like the Economic Democracy Act:
Saturday, March 25, 2023, saw an astonishingly stupid article appeared in the Washington Post. “The Dollar is Our Superpower, and Russia and China are Threatening It.” by Fareed Zakaria (p. A18), while no doubt well-intentioned, reinforced some very bad, even extraordinarily dangerous ideas about money. These have not only the potential to destroy every economy in the world, including that of the United States, they have gone a long way toward doing it.
This is not the talk that we heard, which was a few years later, but is interesting and in a sense prophetic, as it was given on May 10, 1984, a month after the founding of CESJ on April 7, 1984. Kelso’s vision was far beyond the ESOP, and he viewed the ESOP as just a necessary first step. It has gotten the idea of widespread worker ownership into the culture. What we’re working on and aiming toward now is capital ownership for everyone, as proposed in the Economic Democracy Act:
Everyone is still trying to figure out what to do about the war in Ukraine and the bank failures (as well as everything else), but it should be increasingly obvious that one thing that could be done to everyone’s advantage is to adopt the Economic Democracy Act:
In the previous posting on this subject, we closed by noting that the financier J. Pierpont Morgan saved the country from the “Panic of 1907” . . . which he had caused in the first place. Observant readers of this blog will not be slow to realize that a similar thing has happened with the recent bank failures. The federal government has been quick to assure the public that it will guarantee that the rich people who had money in the bank will be rescued from wanting to have their cake and eat it, too . . . and coincidentally take more control over the financial system.
Usually when we talk about economics, what we really mean is political economy, the science of production, distribution, and consumption of marketable goods and services. Most authorities divide political economy into macro- and microeconomics, a distinction that does not exist in binary economics, at least not as generally understood. In Economic Personalism, microeconomics refers to the individual and family, while macroeconomics refers to everything else.
If you happen to be at least 150 years old, you will recall the Panic of 1907, a.k.a., “the Bankers’ Panic,” and not be surprised at the current spate of bank failures. If you don’t happen to have reached the century and a half mark, you will, of course, be stunned and amazed, as well as baffled, that such a thing could happen on the eve of the Utopia that Keynes promised if we would just lie to ourselves for a century. Of course, if we adopted the Economic Democracy Act, we wouldn’t have to lie at all, and could probably avoid problems like these:
The recent bank failures have once again raised questions not only about the safety of the financial system, but its role in the economy. What goes on in the world’s financial centers seems to have no connection to people’s daily lives and the need to secure food, clothing, shelter, and the other essentials of life. What happens on Wall Street, stays on Wall Street . . . except when it seeps out to the real economy and destroys lives.
Today we feature a short piece on Thomas Aquinas and natural law theory. Although we might not agree with everything that the presenter says or how it’s said, Thomist (Aristotelian) natural law theory is the foundation of the Just Third Way of Economic Personalism as applied in the Economic Democracy Act:
As usual, reports and predictions of economic disaster are coming as fast as glowing reports of economic health and growth. What’s the real story? Paradoxically, both reports and predictions could very easily be true . . . depending on who you are. Like “the Great Reset” of Klause Schwab and the World Economic Forum which has capitalism for the rich and socialism for the poor, today’s economic growth benefits the rich, while the recession/depression affects the non-rich. Of course, the Economic Democracy Act would benefit everyone, but no one seems to think of that.
Banking for most people is a little like pornography. There is something not quite right about it, but a lot of people seem to like it and can’t seem to function without it, and they can’t define it, but they know it when they see it.
What, Notre Dame wasn’t good enough? Just kidding, although we’d like to see something truly revolutionary come out of Academia instead of the increasing emphasis on “job training” at a time when AI is replacing even top professionals, leaving very little to do for the rest of us. The obvious solution is the Economic Democracy Act, but nobody is or was discussing it, which leaves it up to the will bes:
Recently we saw a video in which a retired British major general kept insisting that we must appease Putin and allow him to keep Crimea and everything else he had managed to grab. He was then honest enough to admit that if Putin were appeased in this fashion, it would probably be necessary to fight him or his successor again in five or ten years, but that was the price that had to be paid for peace. Over a year ago people were saying Putin could not be stopped from taking all of Ukraine and so must be allowed to have it, now they are saying Russia will never surrender Crimea and must be allowed to have it. Apparently, nothing succeeds best for a tyrant than people afraid to stand up to him.
News from the Network, Vol. 16, No. 09
News from the Network, Vol. 16, No. 09
Frequently, we have made the statement that, where the so-called mainstream schools of economics (the Keynesian, Monetarist/Chicago, and the Austrian) are based on the “Currency Principle” and belong to the “Currency School,” the binary economic of Louis Kelso is based on the “Banking Principle” and belongs to the “Banking School.” What does this mean?