As the last month of the year
approaches — it’s only a few hours away as of this writing — it’s easy to get
depressed about the number of people who have not heard about the Just Third
Way rather than satisfied about the increasing number of people who have. That’s understandable, because until a
determinant number of people even know about the Just Third Way and start
urging their leaders to do something positive instead of the Same Old Thing,
things are going to stay pretty much right where they are. There are, however, signs of hope:
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| You never call, you never write, would it kill you to pick up a phone? |
• Catholic Social Media Bishop?
In today’s Wall Street Journal
there is an interesting piece about Auxiliary Bishop Robert Barron of the Archdiocese
of Los Angeles, “The Bishop of Catholic Social Media,” A-17. According to the article, only Pope Francis
has more media followers than Bishop Barron, although it is hard to say which
has the more attacks . . . probably Pope Francis wins that, hands down. Be that as it may, what His Excellency is
reported as saying is very close to the Just Third Way, with one exception: the
implicit assumption that a political party that embodies Catholic social
teaching would necessarily be a “Catholic political party.” Our contention is that as Catholic social
teaching is based on and derived from natural law, it is common to every human
being. In that sense, there is no such
thing as Catholic social teaching
distinct from Protestant social teaching, Jewish social teaching, Islamic
social teaching, Hindu social teaching, or anything else. The natural law is “written in the hearts of
all men,” and thus applies to every human being regardless of faith,
philosophy, or lack thereof. That being
the case, we have good news for Bishop Barron . . . if he’s not afraid to hear
it. There is a “political party” (if you
want to call it that) that has a platform with everything he says he wants: the “Unite America”
platform, which can be found here. So
to address Bishop Barron directly, and with all due respect, Your Excellency,
are you willing to put your money where your mouth is? After all you did say, “If you can espouse all of those positions, you’d be in
the party I’d happily be involved with.”
There it is. Pick up the phone
and give Dr. Norman Kurland, president of CESJ a call, contact information is here
on the CESJ website. What are you
waiting for? You were serious, weren’t
you? It’s relatively safe. We haven’t bitten anyone, at least lately. And other readers, what’s stopping you from
asking His Excellency to check out the Just Third Way? Suggest it to him. He can be reached
here (it’s a general email and mailing address, but might get to him, you never know).
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| Reuther: "Sorry, guys, that's not what I had in mind." |
• GM Plant Closings. The big
news this week in the non-expanded capital ownership world is that General
Motors, which just announced it was closing five plants in the United States
and Canada and laying off a few thousand workers. This is after getting a rather large tax
break to retain jobs, which the company apparently spent on a stock buyback and
increasing executive compensation. For
some reason we doubt whether the adage that what’s good for GM is good for the
country. Also, we were wondering whether
the plants would have been closed had workers owned shares and what was left
was spread out among the public rather than a few capitalists. It would have been interesting to see what
the reaction of, say, the late Walter Reuther would have been . . . Oh, wait,
we already know. As Reuther said in his
testimony before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress on the President’s
Economic Report, February 20, 1967, “Profit sharing in the form of stock
distributions to workers would help to democratize the ownership of America’s
vast corporate wealth which is today appallingly undemocratic and
unhealthy. The Federal Reserve Board recently published data from which
it is possible to estimate the degree of concentration in the ownership of
publicly traded stock held by individuals and families as of December 1962.
Preliminary analysis of these data indicates that, despite all the talk of a ‘people’s
capitalism’ in the United States, little more than one percent of all consumer
units owned approximately 70 percent of all such stock. Fewer than 8
percent of all consumer units owned approximately 97 percent—which means,
conversely, that the total direct ownership interest of more than 92 percent of
America’s consumer units in the corporation-operated productive wealth of this
country was approximately 3 percent. Profit sharing in a form that would
help to correct this shocking maldistribution would be highly desirable for
that reason alone.… If workers had definite assurance of equitable shares in
the profits of the corporations that employ them, they would see less need to
seek an equitable balance between their gains and soaring profits through
augmented increases in basic wage rates. This would be a desirable result from
the standpoint of stabilization policy because profit sharing does not increase
costs. Since profits are a residual, after all costs have been met, and since
their size is not determinable until after customers have paid the prices
charged for the firm’s products, profit sharing as such cannot be said to have
any inflationary impact upon costs and prices.”
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| Henry Carter Adams |
• Chinese Monetary Imperialism. According to a report in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, the Republic of the
Maldives and a number of other countries have discovered a downside to Chinese
largesse: creditor conquest. As has been
known for a few thousand years or more, the easiest way to conquer or control another
country is to get them in debt to you.
This, incidentally, is also why it is a very bad thing when governments
figure out ways to stay in power without taxation: it takes away the ability of
the citizens to cut off the flow of funds by withholding taxes. That is also why Henry Carter Adams (1851-1921)
noted, “The facts disclosed permit one to understand how deficit
financiering, carried so far as to result in an interchange of capital and credit
between peoples of varying grades of political advancement, must endanger the
autonomy of weaker states unable to meet their debt-payments. Provided only
that the interests involved are of sufficient importance to make diplomatic
interference worth the while, the claims allowed by international law will
certainly be urged against the delinquent states, and the citizens of such
states may regard themselves fortunate if they succeed in maintaining their
political integrity. (Public Debts, An Essay in the Science of Finance.
New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1898, 28-29.) Just because Keynes said you could increase
debt without danger doesn’t mean it’s true.
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| "And best of all, reading is 100% kosher!" |
• Shop online and support CESJ’s work! Did you know that by making
your purchases through the Amazon Smile
program, Amazon will make a contribution to CESJ? Here’s how: First, go to https://smile.amazon.com/. Next, sign in to your Amazon account. (If you don’t have an account with Amazon,
you can create one by clicking on the tiny little link below the “Sign in using
our secure server” button.) Once you
have signed into your account, you need to select CESJ as your charity — and
you have to be careful to do it exactly this way: in the
space provided for “Or select your own charitable organization” type “Center for Economic and Social Justice
Arlington.” If you type anything
else, you will either get no results or more than you want to sift through. Once you’ve typed (or copied and pasted) “Center for Economic and Social Justice
Arlington” into the space provided, hit “Select” — and you will be taken to
the Amazon shopping site, all ready to go.
• Blog Readership. We have had visitors from 39 different
countries and 37 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this
blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, Brazil, India,
Canada, and Australia. The most popular postings
this past week in descending order were “News
from the Network, Vol. 11, No. 47,” “Stranger
Than Truth,” “A
Change in Tactics,” “Thomas
Hobbes on Private Property,” and “The
Feast of Christ the King?!?!?!?(!).”
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#
