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:
• Help Joe Walk Again for Economic Justice. Just a reminder, if you haven’t already done so, to visit the GoFundMe campaign and consider making a contribution and spreading word out among your social media networks. It’s off to a good start, but it’s still just a start.
• Raising Prices to Lower Prices. The Federal Reserve is considering raising the interest rate, erroneously considered within the flawed Currency Principle schools of economics to be the “price” of money. Actually, interest is a share of profits due a lender of existing savings assuming the money is lent for a productive purpose, but that’s another issue. What we’re concerned with here is the bizarre logic of raising a price to bring prices down. No, if money is a commodity and interest is its price, then all you’ve done is add to the costs of production and raised prices to consumers. If the Federal Reserve really wants to “control” (actually eliminate) inflation, it should assist in creating no-interest (but not “no-cost”) money for new capital investment and production, and let the market set the interest rate for existing money. The monetary and fiscal reforms of the proposed Economic Democracy Act are designed to do just that, and in a way that makes new owners of the new capital to generate mass purchasing power to sustain the economy without government issuing money backed by its own debt.
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| John Maynard Keynes |
• Inflation at Forty-Year High. In what is being described as “the dark side of economic growth” (which depends on how you define “economic growth”) inflation is at the highest rate it has been in forty years. Of course, in the Keynesian economic framework there is a necessary trade-off between employment and inflation. Since this has proven to be a false assumptions, post-Keynesian Keynesians shift it to there being a trade-off between inflation and economic growth. Since that, too, is slightly equivocal, they have been forced to redefine “economic growth” as a rise in the stock market and the rich getting richer while large numbers of people leave the workforce, achieving “full employment” by having fewer people defined as employable. Of course, all of this nonsense would be completely unnecessary if the powers-that-be realized that “money” is not a commodity manufactured by government or anyone else, but a social tool “created” by people engaged in exchanging their productions. To manipulate interest rates or assume that a scarcity or over-supply of a social tool that can be created or cancelled at will by anybody who is a party to an exchange is essential to economic growth is to confuse what you’re measuring with what you’re measuring with. Essentially, as Louis Kelso pointed out, to say that you can’t measure something because you’ve run out of inches is utter nonsense.
• French Fusion Power Breakthrough. We don’t pretend to be nuclear scientists, but the news that came out of France this week is very encouraging. Scientists managed to maintain a controlled fusion reaction for five seconds, and it could have gone longer except that the containment unit would not have lasted more than five seconds. What is needed now is to develop the supporting technology to sustain a fusion reaction, make it commercially viable, and there would be cheap, non-polluting power to run the world without relying on fossil fuels.
• Hortense and Her Whos. In case you’ve been wondering how you might advance the Just Third Way by introducing it to legislators at any and all levels of government, we’ve made it easy for you, with the “Hortense Hears Three Whos“ initiative. Visit the explanatory website, and consider downloading the postcard to send to people in government. Don’t worry if you think they won’t be open to it, as the postcard is intended to get them to open their eyes.
• Economic Personalism Landing Page. A landing page for CESJ’s latest publication, Economic Personalism: Property, Power and Justice for Every Person, has been created and can be accessed by clicking on this link. Everyone is encouraged to visit the page and send the link out to their networks.
• Economic Personalism. When you purchase a copy of Economic Personalism: Property, Power and Justice for Every Person, be sure you post a review after you’ve read it. It is available on both Amazon and Barnes and Noble at the cover price of $10 per copy. You can also download the free copy in .pdf available from the CESJ website. If you’d like to order in bulk (i.e., ten or more copies) at the wholesale price, send an email to publications@cesj.org for details. CESJ members get a $2 rebate per copy on submission of proof of purchase. Wholesale case lots of 52 copies are available at $350, plus shipping (whole case lots ONLY). Prices are in U.S. dollars.
• Sensus Fidelium Videos, Update. CESJ’s series of videos for Sensus Fidelium are doing very well, with over 155,000 total views. The latest Sensus Fidelium video is “The Five Levers of Change.” The video is part of the series on the book, Economic Personalism. The latest completed series on “the Great Reset” can be found on the “Playlist” for the series. The previous series of sixteen videos on socialism is available by clicking on the link: “Socialism, Modernism, and the New Age,” along with some book reviews and other selected topics. For “interfaith” presentations to a Catholic audience they’ve proved to be popular, edging up to 150,000 views to date. They aren’t really “Just Third Way videos,” but they do incorporate a Just Third Way perspective. You can access the playlist for the entire series The point of the videos is to explain how socialism and socialist assumptions got such a stranglehold on the understanding of the role of the State and thus the interpretation of Catholic social teaching, and even the way non-Catholics and even non-Christians understand the roles of Church, State, and Family, and the human person’s place in society.
• 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 28 different countries and 34 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, Kenya, Nigeria, the United Kingdom, and India. The most popular postings this past week in descending order were “The Purpose of Production,” “Binary Economics and Distributive Justice,” “Inflation v. Employment, or, Cotton is King,” “A New Monetary Philosophy,” and “News from the Network, Vol. 15, No. 04.”
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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