News from the Network, Vol. 5, No. 43

As the election in the United States gets closer, it becomes increasingly evident that neither candidate for president has a vision that will establish and maintain a just and humane future for all. Special interest groups continue to be targeted as if the fate of the world depended on them having their personal and individual concerns addressed to the exclusion of all else, while the need for real and substantive economic reform that would secure genuine choice to people instead of ineffectual rhetoric is ignored.

Nevertheless, there are some very good signs that real people, that is, people living outside the Washington, DC beltway, are starting to wake up to the need for something substantially different from what has been peddled in the past:

• Thanks in large measure to the efforts of Father Cassian J. Yuhaus, C.P., of St. Ann's Monastery and Shrine Basilica and CESJ Counselor, who sent a copy of CESJ's paper, Affording Universal Healthcare: A Private Sector Alternative to Mandates, His Eminence, Timothy Michael Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York, sent CESJ a note with the following comment: "In a special way, I found the paper imbued with many elements of the Church's social teachings, particularly the principle and application of subsidiarity." This is a gratifying recognition of CESJ's efforts to conform to the precepts of the natural law discernible by reason and thus universally applicable, whatever your faith or philosophy. It also echoes the personal encouragement given to the work of CESJ by His Holiness, Blessed John Paul II in a private audience with representatives of CESJ and members of Polish Solidarity in 1987.

• This week the CESJ research library obtained a copy of James William Gilbart's 1851 book on banking theory, The Logic of Banking.



• Dave Hamill of the Coalition for Capital Homesteading has contributed an article on his journey to Capital Homesteading to the Huffington Post.

• As of this morning, we have had visitors from 60 different countries and 49 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this blog over the past two months. Most visitors are from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and India. People in Slovenia, France, Taiwan, Estonia, and Australia spent the most average time on the blog. The most popular postings this past week were "Thomas Hobbes on Private Property," "Aristotle on Private Property," "The Theory of Quantitative Easing," "What Really Happens in Quantitative Easing," and "The Strange Case of the Ignored Encyclical."

Those are the happenings for this week, at least 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." If you have a short (250-400 word) comment on a specific posting, please enter your comments in the blog — do not send them to us to post for you. All comments are moderated anyway, so we'll see it before it goes up.

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