Friday, July 11, 2014

News from the Network, Vol. 7, No. 27


The financial and political powers-that-be throughout the world remain baffled by the fact that you can’t get out of debt by spending more money that you don’t have, and you can’t consume what is not produced in the first place.  We think that the Just Third Way might have a few answers to this odd situation, but the problem is getting people to open doors for us so that we can surface leaders to carry the message:

• CESJ has made a number of potentially valuable contacts among people interested in the Unite America Party platform and the potential of the Just Third Way to provide a new model of business within the framework of existing law.

• CESJ’s new fellow from Belgium will be arriving within the next two weeks.  She is looking forward to enjoying the beautiful weather in Washington, DC.

• We have made great strides in understanding the point of departure of the Just Third Way from both the liberal and the conservative assumptions that underpin socialism and capitalism, respectively.  It appears that, aside from the Just Third Way and the orthodox understanding of Catholic social teaching, few (if any) theories take into account that natural rights such as life, liberty, and property are truly inherent in the human person, and are not a gift subsequent to existence by either God or the State — we believe that God built natural rights into human nature, and did not grant them later.

• CESJ is preparing a proposal to go to a potential funding source for Justice University, which can be refined and replicated to approach other potential funding sources.

• As a point of information, when we talk about door-opening, we mean someone who can get us to a prime mover or to someone who has access to prime movers, not suggestions that we should be in contact with someone.  We need that “third party endorsement” so we can sell the message instead of ourselves.

• As of this morning, we have had visitors from 51 different countries and 50 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, the Philippines, Australia, and India. The most popular postings this past week were “Aristotle on Private Property,” “Distributism, Neo-Distributism, and the Just Third Way, II: The Slavery of Past Savings,” “The Purpose of Production,” “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property,” and “Pope Francis, Capitalism, and War, I: Can Capitalism Stop War?”

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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