As has become usual, this week Putin’s War on Ukraine is the focus of the Just Third Way. Frankly, not only is the Just Third Way pretty much the only game left in town when it comes to what’s going to happen after the war, it is becoming increasingly obvious that had it been in place before the war, there would not even have been a “before” to talk about, as the war very likely would not have happened in the first place. In any event, here are this week’s news items:
Today we have Part II of II of Jeff “the Regular Catholic Guy” Garrett’s interview on The Greater Reset: Reclaiming Personal Sovereignty Under Natural Law from TAN Books, featuring co-authors Michael D. Greaney and Dawn K. Brohawn. Ironically, given that today is Putin's Victory Day celebration, while the book was not written with Putin’s War in mind, the solution given in it to counter the “Great Reset” of Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum applies just as well — if not better — to the problems Putin has created:
. . . in a general way, of course. To paraphrase the military aphorism, no business plan survives contact with reality. A business plan, like a book outline or a military campaign, must be flexible and readily adaptable to new conditions as they change. If, on the other hand, a plan, outline, or operation is followed rigidly regardless of reality, only by chance will disaster be averted.
Today we have Part I of II of Jeff “the Regular Catholic Guy” Garrett’s interview on The Greater Reset: Reclaiming Personal Sovereignty Under Natural Law from TAN Books, featuring co-authors Michael D. Greaney and Dawn K. Brohawn. Again, while the book was not written with Putin’s War in mind, the solution given in it to counter the “Great Reset” of Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum applies just as well — if not better — to the problems created by Putin’s insane lust for power:
The quick and easy answer to the question as to whether distributism can be used to rebuild Ukraine is yes — if the current keepers of the flame can either be convinced that their understanding of distributism might be a little off (or others can see it for themselves), some of the flaws in distributism as it has often been presented are corrected, and the authentic vision of G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc is implemented. To do that, of course, we need to know what distributism really is, not what it was transformed into even before Chesterton’s death.
Today we present Part III of III of David Battistella’s interview on The Greater Reset: Reclaiming Personal Sovereignty Under Natural Law from TAN Books, featuring co-authors Michael D. Greaney and Dawn K. Brohawn. While the book was not written with Putin’s War in mind, the solution given in it to counter the “Great Reset” of Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum applies just as well — if not better — to the problems created by Putin’s insane lust for power:
We think it might have something to do with the fact that we consistently give a Just Third Way perspective on the current situation in Ukraine — and advocate a proposal that would help resolve things in the immediate, short, mid, and long-term, viz., the Economic Democracy Act — but this blog has experienced an extreme rise in readership this past week, with the number of “visits” by separate individuals increasing by roughly 4,250% (yes, 4,250%) above our weekly average, and the number of different countries represented rising by roughly 250%, with Russia and Ukraine (more from Ukraine) being a significant chunk of that.
One rule-of-thumb definition of insanity people use is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results. In light of that, one has to question the sanity of what appears to be a new Russian offensive in Ukraine. The Russian armed forces appear to be making the same mistakes they did in their drive for Kiev in the first offensive. Now, with demoralized troops and an increasingly stiff resistance from Ukraine, they seem to be attempting the same thing all over again.
As David Battistella states in the subtitle of his podcast, The Focusing Way, “The Way is Love.” Is love just a feel-good emotion, or is there something more involved? Is there a way to turn economics from “the dismal science” into something that can deliver hope and a better life for all consistent with the demands of justice and charity? Is this question answered in The Greater Reset: Reclaiming Personal Sovereignty Under Natural Law from TAN Books. Tune in and see the second part of the interview with Dawn K. Brohawn and Michael D. Greaney:
To give you an idea of the sort of news we’ve been getting since Putin’s War started, the latest weirdity (to coin a term) is that Putin is threatening Finland and Sweden to deploy nuclear weapons in the region . . . which has already been done. In other news:
Watching the news reports and videos coming out of Ukraine, one thing that strikes the observer is the utterly baffled response of the people of Ukraine: “Why are you here?” they say to the Russians. “What have we done to you?” Our personal contacts in that country say the same thing: Why did the Russians invade? What do they really want? Why are they killing people indiscriminately?
As David Battistella states in the subtitle of his podcast, The Focusing Way, “The Way is Love.” Is love just a feel-good emotion, or is there something more involved? Is there a way to turn economics from “the dismal science” into something that can deliver hope and a better life for all consistent with the demands of justice and charity? Is this question answered in The Greater Reset: Reclaiming Personal Sovereignty Under Natural Law from TAN Books. Tune in and see:
It’s still too early to talk about financing the rebuilding of Ukraine (although plenty of other places in the world need it as well, albeit to a somewhat lesser degree . . . such as all of it), but it’s probably a good idea to get a place at the table before the usual thing starts to get discussed and then implemented. With that in mind, here are this week’s news items:
Just as individual sovereignty requires that someone have control over what he or she and his or her dependents needs to live in a manner befitting the demands of human dignity, each country needs to secure the means to secure national sovereignty. In crude terms, as Henry C. Adams pointed out in 1898, that means not getting into debt to other countries, just as at the individual level indebtedness destroys personal sovereignty.
It seems that President Zelenskyy of Ukraine admires U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paull II . . . both of whom spoke very favorably of the Just Third Way of Economic Personalism. This is interesting, as the program is probably the very best proposal for how to rebuild Ukraine ·or anywhere else, including Russia) once Putin’s War has been brought to an end. Today we feature President Reagan’s speech to the Presidential Task Force on Project Economic Justice:
At the top of this week’s news, of course, is Putin’s War, and how Just Third Way principles might have prevented it, and offer a better way of rebuilding Ukraine (and even Russia) once this “special military operation” is brought to a close:
This week we have an interview by Jesse Romero — the Jesse half of the Terry and Jesse Show — of the authors of The Greater Reset, the new book by Dawn K. Brohawn, Director of Communications of the interfaith Center for Economic and Social Justice (CESJ), and Michael D. Greaney, CESJ’s Director of Research. If you’re not Catholic (or even if you are) you might find the first quarter hour a little outside your area of interest, but either hang in there or fast forward, whatever suits your mood at the moment:
Depending on who you’re talking to, President Biden and other world leaders are either doing ’way too much or nowhere near enough about Ukraine and one or two . . . million other problems. Of course, from our perspective, world leaders don’t lack the goodwill and the resources so much as the right framework of analysis, an obvious reference to the fact that few if any world leaders seem to be aware of the Just Third Way of Economic Personalism. President Zelensky would, we believe, be enthusiastic about it if we could get it to him, while Putin would (in our opinion) view it as an even greater threat to his wealth and power than NATO, as you can see from the first of today’s news items:
It will soon (we hope) become a pastime of armchair generals and amateur historians to discuss endlessly whether there has ever been a more vicious, psychotic, or incompetent military operation — special or otherwise — in the history of the world than Putin’s War. If the current president of Russia wanted to ensure that his name would always be remembered as a byword for pure evil, he has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
This week we present Ukrainian President Zelenskyy’s speech to the United States Congress:
What happens when a country cannot or will not pay its sovereign debt (government bonds and other obligations of the State) or even the interest on it? Similarly, what happens if a government pays off its debts with its own worthless currency, despite the fact that the debt is denominated in that of another country?
Today is the official launching of The Greater Reset which, unlike all other books on the subject that we've been able to find, offers a solution to the problems instead of just criticizing. Get yours today:
Remember the Florida Land Boom of the 1920s? If you do, you’re one of the oldest people on Earth. You may, however, have seen the Marx Brothers film based on it, The Cocoanuts (1929), which may actually not be quite as insane as the boom itself. Why bring this up? It turns out that the alarming Chinese economic dragon may be as hollow as the fearsome Russian military bear — able to do a lot of damage, even on an apocalyptic scale, but something that will ultimately collapse in on itself . . . after causing massive damage on a global scale.
Obviously, Putin’s War in Ukraine is at the top of the list of what’s in the news this week, but there are one or two other items of interest:
As we saw in “Putin’s Problems,” the previous posting on this subject, the Ukrainian “Special Military Operation” (a.k.a. “Putin’s War,” “Invasion,” “Assault,” “Genocide,” etc.), Vladimir Putin, the Autocrat of All the Russias (and anywhere else that won’t stand up to him), consists largely of what can only be called “applied knavish imbecility.”
Thursday, March 10, 2022
2:00 pm EST (U.S.)
“You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy”
Here is an interesting take from German television, Deutche Welle News (in English), on why Russian president Vladimir Putin decided to wage an undeclared war on Ukraine for transparently specious reasons.
Given Vladimir Putin’s unilateral declaration of war against the human race, our lead stories this week are focused on the situation in Ukraine and Russia. As one of our correspondents in Ukraine near Kyiv has expressed complete disbelief even now that it is happening, that because of one deranged lunatic, cities are being bombed and women and children murdered. Still, there is some good news . . . after we give you the bad news.
No, we’re not departing from the general theme of the Just Third Way of Economic Personalism on this blog. Today, however, we’re going to look objectively as possible at the situation in Ukraine, and what has gone wrong with Putin’s grand strategy.
It is interesting to note that Robert Maynard Hutchins believed that federal funding would not turn American academia into a brainwashing factory . . . but at the same time he wanted federal funding of all education, including religious schools. Federal funding is not a danger as long as there is competition, at least according to Hutchins:
Obviously the Ukraine situation is at the top of the news this week. Instead of trying to justify what cannot be justified, however, we prefer to suggest what may be a peaceful way to resolve the situation:
In yesterday’s posting, we looked at a few things Putin might have overlooked in his ongoing — since 2014 — invasion of Ukraine. Of course, there are things that a number of pundits in Europe and the United States are overlooking as they (with great sorrow, of course) declare that if Putin wants to take over Ukraine, or even a little bit here, a trifle there, until he has the whole thing in his new empire, what concern is it of anyone else?
There is an Irish saying that Russian president Vladimir Putin might want to heed: England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity. At last count, there are more than twenty major separatist movements in Russia alone, not to mention the significant number of dissatisfied, even outraged people in the former Soviet republics, such as Belarus and Kazakhstan.
Virtually the whole of economics today assumes that you can only forestall the otherwise inevitable cycle of economic boom or bust by following the prescription of whatever school of economics they happen to belong to. The fact that none of the prescriptions touted today has ever really worked doesn’t seem to matter. As is usual, if something isn’t working these days, it’s because of a hidden conspiracy, people aren’t trying hard enough, not enough (or too much) money is being spent, the dog ate it, or anything else that comes to hand.
This week we have another lecture by Fulton Sheen, author of Freedom Under God, this time on where America is going . . . and in color! Again, this isn’t really a religious episode, although it does mention the G-word and religion a lot. That’s okay; if you’re allergic, just filter it out.
If you can take time from the weekly FPF — Friday Phone Frenzy (that more and more consists of spam calls instead of people making last minute calls before the week ends) — or making a four-day weekend out of a three-day one, you might find this week’s news items of particular interest:
Back in the Stone Age, i.e., 1971 . . . or maybe it was “the Stoned Age” . . . anyway, John Lennon released the bestselling song of his entire career, “Imagine.” Although the song technically gives Lennon (or Yoko Ono, whom Lennon later claimed gave him most of the lyrics and content) a somewhat equivocal “out” by inserting a strategically place “if,” the point of the piece is to get people thinking how peaceful the world would be if there was no materialism, no borders, and no religion. Ho, hum, stop us if you’ve heard this.
In the previous posting on this subject, we noted that the Industrial Revolution made it possible for a few people to produce far more than they could ever consume, while the discovery by politicians that they could finance government operations using newly created money backed only with their own debt made it possible to consume massive amounts of goods and services without producing anything at all.
Today we’d like to look at money. Well, not just look at it, but offer a few random thoughts.
When the subject of money comes up, some people tend to look exclusively at how (other) people who have money use it. Apparently explaining widespread enthusiasm for the Great Reset, inclusive capitalism, and so on, such individuals often believe the wealthy use their money properly when they provide employment for workers or give it directly to the poor.
This week’s podcast is a little heavy on religious stuff (as you might expect from a show done by a couple of priests for their parish), but don’t let that stop you. It started out as being addressed to the Great Reset, but covered a lot of other stuff, too. In any event, consider it a special Valentine for St. Valentine’s Day since we’re not sending out any cards:
Maybe it’s just us, but we can’t understand how people keep complaining about debt, and at the same time insist on going with Keynesian economics that has never worked as promised but which requires massive debt that not only won’t, but in the Keynesian framework should not be repaid! At the same time, simply by going with the Economic Democracy Act, many of the problems people are currently complaining about would become moot:
In the previous posting on this subject, we looked at what happened in the global financial markets as the result of the transformation of government debt from something people were forced into accepting, to a blue chip investment. Not only did this give government control over money and credit, it gave it as much other power as it could get citizens to accept by freeing governments from the necessity of having to ask the citizens for taxes.
Regular Readers of this blog may have gotten the idea that we’re not exactly enamored of Keynesian economics. If so, they have the right idea: we’re not. And there are a lot of very good reasons for it. For today, however, we’ll confine ourselves to the alleged tradeoff between inflation and employment.
In the previous posting on this subject, we saw that with the way the British financed the war against Napoléon, combined with the Financial and Industrial Revolutions, set up a surreal situation. People who owned capital were able to produce far more than they could consume, while the government, which produces nothing, could consume by manipulating money.
This week’s podcast offers yet another lecture by Fulton Sheen, author of Freedom Under God, this time on building character. As you watch, you can understand how “America’s first televangelist” wasn’t really a televangelist at all, at least as that term is usually meant. He was a guy who happened to be a Catholic prelate giving lectures on subjects of interest to a great many people, not just Christians.
Is it just us, or is the world becoming an ever-more surreal place? Russia parks 140,000 troops on the eastern Ukraine border and claims it is being provoked. The U.S. government creates over $30 trillion in counterfeit money and Keynesian experts confirm that this is funny money by maintaining that the government doesn’t have to make good on any of it because — in common with all counterfeit money — the issuer isn’t really on the hook for it! We could continue, but why go on? This week’s news notes are depressing enough (except for the Fireside Chat notice, of course):
We closed the previous posting on this subject by wondering why, when the history of backing a financial asset with government debt had proved so disastrous in the South Sea Bubble and the Mississippi Scheme (which we didn’t go into), anyone would have been tempted to try it again. After all, one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results — and the one thing Ebenezer Scrooge was not was crazy, either before or after his completion.
Continuing our practice of using answers to some questions as blog postings, we recently got a question about how widespread capital ownership is financed. Specifically, is money given to people so that they can become owners by purchasing existing assets or is there a fundamentally different way. As our questioner questioned,
As we saw in the previous posting on this subject, how the British government chose to finance the Napoleonic Wars embodied what amounts to legal counterfeiting as a primary source of financing government operations — something Ebenezer Scrooge, pre- and post-reformation would have had a hard time swallowing. Had the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come shown Scrooge where John Maynard Keynes would take the bizarre belief that government can actually create wealth out of nothing, maybe he would have been inspired to do something about preventing the spread of such an insane idea.
A few weeks ago, we came across another article bemoaning the fact that the number of people who read in society and have any degree of cultural literacy that stretches back more than a few years has declined greatly. As Dr. Mark Bauerlein said in his interview, a decline in reading has led to a rise in stupidity.
It’s astonishing how many problems can potentially be solved by implementing the Just Third Way of Economic Personalism — which can be done very easily with what amounts to some very minor changes in laws . . . and some very major changes in people’s thinking and assumptions. Be that as it may, here’s what’s been happening on the Home Front of Economic and Social Justice:
As we may have mentioned once or twice, we like to get questions . . . if we can use our answers as blog postings, anyway. The other day we were handed a question that came in over the transom — and believe it or not, we lived for four years at college in rooms that had transoms, so we not only know what a transom is, we know how to submit something over one. Anyway —
You wouldn’t have been able to trip up Ebenezer Scrooge on the subject of today’s posting. He was a banker and worked in the City of London, that is to say, the financial district, sort of the British Wall Street (very sort of). He knew the difference between a mortgage (a past savings financial instrument) and a bill of exchange (a future savings instrument), and it’s doubtful whether you could have persuaded Scrooge to speculate in government debt, especially foreign government debt. He would probably have said “Bah, humbug” to it even after the visits of the three spirits and his completion and reformation.
Even the unreformed Ebenezer Scrooge probably understood money, credit, banking, and finance better than most people today, and certainly better than the monetary mavens of his day. Proving that two wrongs don’t make a right, the experts of Scrooge’s day were responsible for undermining the exclusionary and elitist, but theoretically sound, financial system that existed prior to the British Bank Charter Act 1844 (7 & 8 Vict. c. 32).
We never expected Fulton Sheen, author of Freedom Under God, to mention Robert Maynard Hutchins on his television show, but he did — in this video, today’s podcast, which is about the philosophy of education. It’s not for job training, especially for jobs that don’t exist, or to mortgage your future for eternity by assuming a mountain of debt. No, it’s to seek truth and become more fully human. That’s the whole idea behind “Justice University.”
While the Russian threat to Ukraine should be more on people’s minds — along with all the other threats at the present time — viable and long-term solutions don’t seem to have a place at the table. Perhaps, however, it’s time to rethink how we approach solving problems, as well as which problems to solve:
As we saw in the previous posting on this subject, there was a movement in the early nineteenth century to broaden the base of capital ownership throughout society. This was justified based on individual human dignity (Cobbett), economic stability (Morrison), and as a counter to the spread of the “New Things” of modernism and socialism (the Catholic Church).
In the previous posting on this subject, we saw that even if ordinary people had sufficient savings during the Industrial Revolution, or even if they had gained access to the commercial and central banking system in England, broad-based ownership of the new industries would have been much too risky under the law of the time to allow it.
As we saw in the previous posting on this subject, there were significant institutional barriers preventing Ebenezer Scrooge from doing the completely right thing by Bob Cratchit and making him a partner instead of a mere employee. For example, anyone who “participated” in any way in a business was considered a part owner, even if he didn’t have legal title to anything. That made him jointly and severally liable for all debts of the business. If the enterprise went belly-up, he could go to debtor’s prison.
A few years ago a friend of ours who teaches philosophy at a relatively small college mentioned that for a good part of every first semester class he had to spend most of the time teaching the students something they had never learned in grade or high school: how to think. After a bit of searching, we found a program the late Fulton Sheen, author of Freedom Under God, gave on “How to Think” . . . which no doubt astounded a large part of his audience that thought it already knew everything. . . .
Another “Snowmageddon” or “Snow Event” is prophesied for the U.S. east coast, so the store shelves should be stripped bare of milk, bread, toilet paper and orange juice, not to mention cheap liquor. Be that as it may, here are the news items from this week:
In the previous posting on this subject, we noted how Dickens took Scrooge about as far as he could go with his reformation and completion as a human person — but no further. Scrooge’s character was expanded individually, and his sense of strict justice was completed and fulfilled by charity, but no more.
As we saw in the previous posting on this subject, life in the early nineteenth century had thrown a lot of curves at most people in the form of massive social, economic and political change, and the institutions of the social order were not keeping up. Instead, radicals were calling for the abolition of all old institutions, such as private property, organized religion, and marriage and family, and their replacement with what was called by many names, but with one substance: socialism.
As we saw in the previous posting on this subject, Charles Dickens’s character Ebenezer Scrooge turns out not to have been so much a bad man, but an incomplete person. Once he accepted grace and “converted” to personalism, as Dickens put it, “He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.”
Two years ago (almost to the day) we went hunting for potato starch to make “karaage,” that is, fried chicken the Japanese way, which requires dredging in potato starch for the very best results. (Trust us. Use potato starch. It’s like a potato chip coating on the chicken.)
What with a couple of paralyzing blizzards in the DC metro area, the year is off to a slow start, which is not made any more interesting, news-wise, by our attempts to avoid partisan politics — we don’t care who does the right thing, as long as somebody does. Be that as it may, here’s what we have for this week:
In the previous posting on this subject, we noted how, in contrast to today’s super-rich, and traditional capitalists and socialists, when Ebenezer Scrooge saw the light (and the three spirits), and became charitable, he didn’t call it “justice” and he used his own money. He also didn’t consciously control Bob Cratchit, despite the fact that the system of the time pretty much forced employees into a condition of dependency, which a master could make burdensome or easy. Naturally, many masters really rubbed their employees’ noses in it, as they knew their employees were inferior beings or they would have been in charge . . . right?
In the previous posting on this subject, we noted that Ebenezer Scrooge, the, er, hero (or maybe “victim”?) of Charles Dickens’s 1843 story “A Christmas Carol” was portrayed as a strictly honest man, despite later dramatic characterizations that made him seem like a minor Robber Baron or major sneak thief. Scrooge’s iron rectitude is, in fact, essential to the plot, as otherwise Dickens’s story could have been dismissed (at least within the context of the fictional world) as a lie or a delusion.
No, really, it’s still Christmas. Despite the common belief that “the Christmas Season” starts the day after Thanksgiving (or, for some, after Independence Day) and runs until 9:00 am on December 25, Christmas actually begins at sundown on December 24 and runs for the next dozen days . . . although we’re off the hook regarding gifts, unless you include or hold off until January 6.
Okay, this week’s podcast is more than a trifle religiously oriented, but that’s not the reason we’re posting it. If you like you can fast forward to around Minute 10 when Guy Stevenson starts bringing in the Just Third Way and binary economics . . . which is the reason we’re using this podcast.