A Certain Personality

    A short time ago we got into an incredibly pointless argument on FaceBook which began when someone made the somewhat “interesting” remark that because Jesus, whom Christians regard as a divine person, was a convicted felon, then no one should have any problems with the current president of the United States.

What Would Trajan Do? Part II

 As we saw last week, Ancient Rome had a problem with slaves convicted of crimes doing the work of honest municipal slaves, receiving pay and benefits, and generally causing scandal by taking jobs from other slaves and foreigners.  Still, rather than simply get rid of the illegal slaves (which would have exacerbated the chronic labor shortage), the Emperor Trajan came up with a solution.

“A Decent Place to Live”

In the United States, people are witnessing cities and states carving out spaces separate from the federal government.  Some cities reaffirm their commitment as sanctuaries and develop policies to direct local officials to defuse irrational and unjust conflicts, but that’s just the beginning.

“Just, Thriving, and Sustainable Communities”

The objectives of the “Heart of America” project are to eradicate the economic roots of poverty, war, and racism.  This can be done by promoting justice and democratization of ownership for every person through equal access to private property rights in productive capital. In the words of R. Buckminster Fuller, the goal is “[t]o make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”

A City Divided, Part II

In the previousposting on this subject, we noted that despite whatever efforts had been made, St. Louis, Missouri is a city divided along economic, cultural, and racial lines, and it’s not accidental.  “There are two reasons St. Louis looks the way it does today,” noted Michael Allen, director of the Preservation Research Office. “There’s been this perpetual, successive fight of whites and middle-class people from the core of the city, and the same relationships tended to reconstitute themselves across a wide swath of geography.”

A City Divided, Part I

Why did Eugene Gordon choose St. Louis for the Heart of America Project?  Apart from being a resident, it can be argued — as Gene does — that no place needs it more.  In St. Louis, segregation, whether geographic, cultural, or economic, is normal. The typical descendant of American slaves lives in a neighborhood that is 45 percent black, 35 percent white, 15 percent Hispanic and 4 percent Asian.

A Breakthrough for Democracy

On Friday, July 1, 2022, the Republican Governor of Missouri, Michael Parson signed a bill that is designed ultimately to reduce poverty, racism, and a host of other problems in an area encompassing some of the most economically disadvantaged neighborhoods in St. Louis.  The initial phase is to form a commission funded by the state of Missouri to study the problem and develop recommendations for implementing what Eugene Gordon of the Descendants of American Slaves for Economic and Social Justice calls “the Heart of America Project.”

A New Look at Reparations

There has been more talk in the Unites States of reparations for slavery recently.  Ironically, this is at a time when the foundations of the economy and therefore of the tax base are rapidly eroding for everyone except the rich and those who have political power — usually the same people, as has often been the case throughout history.

Double Trouble in the Bubble

As we saw in the previous posting on this subject, how the British government chose to finance the Napoleonic Wars embodied what amounts to legal counterfeiting as a primary source of financing government operations — something Ebenezer Scrooge, pre- and post-reformation would have had a hard time swallowing.  Had the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come shown Scrooge where John Maynard Keynes would take the bizarre belief that government can actually create wealth out of nothing, maybe he would have been inspired to do something about preventing the spread of such an insane idea.

The Very Model of a Modern Chestertonian

Our previous posting on this subject was an expansion of a comment we made on an article, “Catholics and Race in American History,” on the website of the Catholic World Report, a Catholic webzine.  We thought we were agreeing with the author, Kevin Schmiesing, but adding a few interesting tidbits we’ve uncovered in our research as well as a little analysis of our own.

Slavery and Moral Relativism

Recently an article appeared on Catholic World Report, “Catholics and Race in American History,” the point of which seemed to be to excuse a presumed lack of action by the Catholic Church in failing to condemn slavery while it was legal, and present a sterling record of condemning racism ever since.  The problem with the article was that it missed certain things that would have made the institutional Catholic Church look a lot better than it did, while making individual Catholics look a lot worse.

A Better Alternative

      

As we noted in yesterday’s posting, there is a much better alternative to the proposed “Billionaire Tax” or the minimum corporate tax, which would tax corporations whether or not they made any income — another instance of taxing something that doesn’t exist.  It starts to sound as if the game plan for the U.S. economy was drawn up by the Greeks . . . the modern Greeks, not those like Aristotle who knew that economic life centers on being productive and supporting human dignity and sovereignty with equality of opportunity and access to the means.  He just didn’t work it out very well, but at least he had the right idea.

The Problem of the Human Person

If you want to develop a solution to what’s going on in the world today, you have to start with the human person.  If something — such as a “Great Reset” — does not tend to the good of a human being as a human being, then it cannot be said to be good.

Something Wild and Crazy

Given that virtually the whole of the global media are focused today on the outcome of the as-of-this-writing undecided U.S. presidential election, we thought we’d do something so wild and crazy that everybody will want to read it.  And contribute their lives, fortunes, and their sacred honor to promoting the Just Third Way of Economic Personalism.

A Judicial Pascal's Wager

As we saw in the previous posting on this subject, there appears to be a bit of a bruhaha (but no one is laughing . . .) following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg and a possible successor.  In an age focused on mindless prejudice to the point of obsession, it’s interesting that the objections to the possibility of a practicing Catholic being appointed to the United States Supreme Court seem virtually unchanged from the rhetoric of a number of fringe groups from the late 1700s down to the 1950s.

Need for a Strategic Plan

In the previous posting on this subject, we discovered that using the United States Supreme Court to create law and impose the views of one group on everyone else in the country is something of a double-edged sword.  Specifically, when the slave-owning “interests” in the American South succeeded in making human chattel slavery a federal issue instead of confining it to the individual states, they got what they wanted — legal justification to extend slavery anywhere in the United States, regardless whether or not it was legal in a specific state.

Whence This Chaos?

 

In a recent article in Catholic World Report (“Why We Are Where We Are“), George Weigel opines that the increasing chaos we see around us these days is the result of the United States having lost its way after being cut loose from the liberal principles of its founding.  There is a good deal of merit in Weigel’s argument, but it doesn’t really explain how the U.S. lost its anchor.  As he says in this edited-for-length extract (since you can read the entire article by clicking on the link; it’s not long):

Job Security for (Personalist) Revolutionaries

A while back in response to an item touting Capital Homesteading as a possible way to bring people together and turn the economy around in our weekly Just Third Way news roundup, someone posted a comment to the effect that the original 1862 Homestead Act was (wait for it) . . . racist!  As a way of refuting our promotion of Capital Homesteading as a way of possibly establishing a little racial harmony and putting the economy back on a sound footing, the Righteous One went on to explain that the 1862 Act was “Whites Only,” and Black homesteaders were completely unheard of.

Was the State Made for Man, or Man for the State?

In the previous posting on this subject, we addressed the question whether the United States was founded as a “Christian nation,” and came up with the non-answer that it depends on what you mean by “Christian nation.”  We decided — that’s us, not you — that, yes, you could use that term if you didn’t mind saying something misleading, but it would be better to say that the United States was founded as a country that — with certain rather key exceptions — embodied respect for the dignity of the individual human person.

What Do You Mean By “Christian Nation”?

A couple of weeks ago an article appeared in The Christian Post on how America was departing from the values of the Founding Fathers of the United States.  The idea was that the principles espoused by the Founders were essentially Christian, and that therefore the United States is properly a “Christian nation.”