Perhaps not surprisingly, there is
not much good news this week, or at least we haven’t been able to find it. What little there is seems to be internal,
e.g., some important publications are in the works for CESJ, and there has been
a great deal of interest expressed in the projects. As for the rest of the world:
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| Ain't tariffs a great idea? |
• “Corporate Profits Take Off.” In the Wall
Street Journal of 08/30/18 (pages A-1, A-2), it was noted that corporate profits
have “taken off,” and that this was a sign of a strong economy, fueled by tax
cuts and an overall solid economy . . . in which consumer debt is rising
rapidly to fuel those same corporate profits.
It sounds good to say that profits are up (after all, what does it
profit a man to gain the business and lose the profits?), but Say’s Law of
Markets is predicated on the assumption that what is consumed must first be
produced; consuming without producing is a really bad idea, as the people of Greece
have known for some time. The fact that
consumer debt is rising at the same time as corporate profits should worry a
lot more people than it does. For Say’s
Law to function, every producer should be a consumer, and vice versa, which is what something like Capital Homesteading is
designed to do.
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| Yes, CESJ publishes books. How many do you want? |
• What Happened to Social Justice.
The book is still in editing (quality, after all, takes time), but the
buzz is beginning to build, with a number of people anxious to see what could
easily become a pivotal work in the field of social justice, showing how the
concept developed in response to the growth of socialism, and what happened to “hijack”
the concept so that socialists and modernists were able to turn it to their
advantage. Rest assured as soon as we
have a publication date scheduled we will accept advance wholesale orders (no,
sorry, not individual retail orders; local tax law makes it too complicated for
that, wholesale orders only). Right now
it looks like the cover price of the hardback will be $30 and that of the “trade
paperback” will be $20 — but don’t hold us to that; we’re cutting the margin
thin on this book to achieve wider distribution, and the price may be higher to
be able to cover direct costs and overhead.
At an estimated 450 pages, however, it will be a bargain, completely
aside from the value of the subject matter.
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| Saint-Simon: invented a "New Christianity" |
• Catholic Social Teaching and Socialism, Are They the Same? No — the fundamental principle of socialism, as
articulated in the “the New Christianity” of Henri de Saint-Simon (also called “the
religion of humanity” and “the democratic religion”), is that the material
wellbeing of society, with a special emphasis on the needs of the poor, is to
be accomplished at any cost and by any means necessary. The principle of
Catholic social teaching is that the material wellbeing of society, with a
special emphasis on the needs of the poor, is to be accomplished at any cost
and by any means necessary (and here is the difference that Christian
socialists ignore) within the confines of the natural law. That is, no one’s
natural rights are to be violated, especially life, liberty, and private
property, regardless of the good you hope to achieve; it is not mete that one
man be sacrificed even to save the entire nation. As Fulton Sheen
and others have pointed out, the natural law IS God; we do right not because
God says so, but because God is so. When the socialists declare that God has
commanded that the rich be punished and their goods distributed to the poor,
that is their interpretation of something they take as God’s Will. Reason says
you may not violate the rich man’s rights any more than the poor man’s rights,
or vice versa. Socialism wants to replace justice with charity.
Catholicism wants to fulfill justice with charity; what socialism wants is Hugo
Grotius’s notion of the natural law based on opinion rather than knowledge,
what Sheen called “religion without God.” Socialism insists only the
abstraction of the collective has rights, which may or may not be vested in
actual people, while Catholicism insists that “only man, the human person, and
not society in any form is endowed with reason and a morally free will.” (Divini Redemptoris, § 29.)
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| Why not rebuild in a way that pays for itself. |
• Puerto Rico Rebuilding. Yes,
we’re tempted to ask, What rebuilding? but according to the Wall Street Journal of August 30, 2018 (“Puerto
Rico Creditor Group Starts Talks,” B-10) the possibility of one of the major
groups of creditors rescheduling the debt has raised the price from less than
25¢ on the dollar in January, to more than 50¢ on the dollar. Of course, a program of Capital Homestead
would get the creditors $1 on the dollar, plus interest, as well as put the
Commonwealth on a sound financial footing for the future. This would improve on a proposal Governor
Luis Ferré made back in January 1972 which required people to put up cash to
purchase special growth shares. Capital
Homesteading would require that the assets pay for themselves out of future
profits, thereafter providing consumption income and a restored tax base that would enable the government to pay off
Puerto Rico’s debt in full.
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| Have a cow, man. |
• Plummeting Currencies. The
currencies of Argentina, Turkey, Brazil, and India continue to fall against the
dollar. This underscores the problem of
having currencies without any objective standard of value, such as cattle
(common standard in the ancient world for thousands of years), silver
(virtually the worldwide standard from 750 B.C. until the end of the eighteenth
century), or gold (“king” of the nineteenth century . . . notice how they keep
getting shorter and shorter for each standard as government takes over more and
more control over money and credit?). Today’s
“standard” of government debt depends solely on the ability of a government to
make good on its debt to justify the value it puts on its currency. Maybe it’s time to look into R. Buckminster
Fuller’s idea of the kilowatt hour . . . as soon as the world’s monetary and
tax systems can be put into rational shape.
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| Hambantota Port |
• Retooling the Future. It’s
still in the outline phase, but it’s not too early to start thinking about CESJ’s
planned book, Retooling the Future: How
Justice, Ownership, and Money Could Change the World. The idea is to take a hard look at a systems
approach to social tools such as capital, institutions, money, credit, and so
on. Money, for example, is a way to
carry out transactions and must be directly related to what is involved in any
transaction; money serves to “irrigate” an economy, not run or control it.
• Blog Readership. We have had visitors from 28 different
countries and 42 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this
blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, India, Australia,
Canada, and Peru. The most popular
postings this past week in descending order were “The
Accident of an Urgent Necessity,” “The
Pilgrims of God and Liberty,” “Just
Third Way Podcast No. 31,” “The
Birth of Social Catholicism,” and “The New
Greek Myth.”
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.” 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, so we’ll see it before it goes up.
#30#
