With most of the news this week
focused on people saying and doing things that are of little or no interest to
the Just Third Way of economic personalism, this week’s news items may seem a
trifle removed from reality . . . at least for those readers who think that
what the media report has any resemblance to reality. For a small dose of the real thing, then, we
present this week’s news items:
• Hong Kong. It is
difficult to get any real news from the media these days, but Hong Kong does
seem to be the place to watch if you’re interested in something that could
develop along Just Third Way lines. It
is, of course, essential that the protestors demand the right things. That does not mean abandoning their current
demands, but in getting a little more explicit about what they want. For example, if they demand — and get — a
democratization of “money power,” political power will follow. When every child, woman, and man can gain an
independent income from labor, capital, or both, the hold of the Communist
Party will be loosened, perhaps permanently, as it was by the rise of Solidarność in
Poland. It is essential to have a
unified vision of the desired goal, however.
For Solidarność, this
was provided by the Catholic Church, with the election of Karol Józef Wojtyła as Pope
John Paul II the trigger that set off the downfall of the Soviet Union. In Hong Kong, the trigger event is currently
taking place. What they need now is a
clear and consistent vision to follow through with, which the Just Third Way
just might provide.
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| John Henry Newman and the Just Third Way? |
• John Henry Newman. Pope
Francis’s July 1, 2019 announcement that he would “canonize” John Henry Newman
on Sunday, October 13, 2019 set off a flurry of speculation about Newman by
individuals and groups anxious to use Newman to endorse their particular
positions. (By the way, “canonization”
does not make anyone a saint. Canonization
means “adding to the list.” It is an
official recognition by the Catholic Church that someone is believed to be a
saint. It does not turn him or her into
one.) Both liberals and conservatives
are trying to stake out a claim, so it seems reasonable that we should,
also. Judging from Newman’s writings and
the events of his life, we think he would have been very open to the Just Third
Way. After all, a lot of the trouble he
experienced in his life came from the socialists and the modernists, all of
whom had an ax to grind against anyone who preferred to reason things out
rather than react emotionally. For
example, did you know that Newman’s troublesome (and expensive) brother Charles
was a socialist, as was Charles Kingsley, whose vicious and unprovoked attack
on Newman led to Newman’s defending himself in his best-known work, Apologia
Pro Vita Sua (1864)?
• Questions on Credit. Many people today are still confused about the
different kinds of credit. Capital credit
and consumer credit are two very different things. Capital credit is credit
used to purchase productive assets that pay for themselves out of their own
future earnings and then yield income for consumption. Consumer credit (credit
cards) is credit used to purchase goods that are consumed, and that do not pay
for themselves. Consumer credit must be paid for out of other income, not
income generated by what was purchased.
• Dignity, Freedom, and Power. You may or may not recognize the
latest incarnation of the manuscript that started out as A New Personalist
Manifesto, and became An Introduction to Economic Personalism, Power
and Justice, Power Through Justice, Scotch With Just Ice, Dignity,
Power, and Justice, and a few others we’ve forgotten. The latest iteration is Dignity, Freedom,
and Power, and we may be in the final stretch, at least for the first draft
before it goes to our mentor and guide on all things relating to Karol Józef Wojtyła/Pope
John Paul II and Solidarność. With luck, copies may be available by the end
of October. Of this year.
• 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 30 different
countries and 47 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this
blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, Spain, India,
Canada, and the United Kingdom. The most
popular postings this past week in descending order were “Is
Liberty Diabolical?,” “News
from the Network, Vol. 12, No. 38,” “Solving
Homelessness with Louis Kelso,” “Thoughts
on Money,” and “The
Purpose of Production.”
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.” Due to imprudent
language on the part of some commentators, we removed temptation and disabled
comments.
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