In this week’s news notes, we go from the less than sublime to the more than ridiculous. We will only allude to the SpaceX IPO in the first news item, but the rest of the gleanings from this week aren’t much better, at least from the standpoint of human dignity. The only real question is when the powers-that-be are going to get their collective acts together and push for adoption of the Economic Democracy Act:
• The Oligarch of Mars. Over a hundred years ago, Edgar Rice Burroughs — ERB to those in the know — published his first great work in a pulp magazine. The story was so weird, so legend has it, he signed the story “Normal Bean,” which a typesetter changed to “Norman Bean.” It was published in book form as “A Princess of Mars” (original title, “Under the Moons of Mars”). This was followed over the years by ten more books, with all but one of them having titles with “of Mars.” Now, we have a potential twelfth book in the series, “The Oligarch of Mars,” which may be weirder than anything ever penned (or typewritten) by ERB. According to an article in Fortune magazine, Elon Musk gets a billion shares of SpaceX if he can get a million people on Mars. As the article states, “When SpaceX published its S-! on May 20, investors got what they expected: a landmark filing for a company planning the largest IPO in history. What they may not have been ready for was the compensation structure buried inside it, which reads less like a corporate pay package and more like science fiction. The SpaceX board will grant CEO and founder Elon Musk 1 billion restricted shares of Class B common stock on one condition: He has to hit 15 market capitalization milestones up to $7.5 trillion and establish a ‘permanent human colony on Mars with at least 1 million inhabitants.’” Okay . . . at a time when it was easier to get from Europe to America, it took approximately 135 to 140 years for the American colonies to reach a population of one million European inhabitants. Starting from permanent English settlements like Jamestown in 1607, the white European population crossed the 1 million threshold in the early 1740s. Does Musk know something we don’t know? Or is this all as crazy as it sounds? Would so many people have poured money into SpaceX if we had the Economic Democracy Act (EDA)?
• Is the Minimum Wage Approaching the Maximum? Is it the Year of Jubilee when the Kingdom of God on Earth is finally established? Or is it just another self-defeating effort that adds to costs at a time when the economic value of human labor is dropping dramatically in competition with advancing technology — notably AI — and more and more people are being replaced with robots of one kind or another? We ask, because according to an article in Stateline, more than twenty U.S. states are enacting higher minimum wages laws July 1 . . . making it increasingly likely human workers will be replaced by robots at the first opportunity. If that were not enough, according to the Washington Post, a bill to increase the national minimum wage to $25 per hour will soon be introduced in the U.S. Senate. Again, this would be a terrific incentive to get rid of human labor altogether . . . and the income that goes along with it. Think about it: the typical work year is 2,000 hours, meaning someone on minimum wage would pull down $50,000 a year . . . assuming he or she isn’t replaced by an it. A $50,000 wage means a total cost to an employer of a bit under $75,000 per year. A typical small or casual restaurant has 5-15 employees, so call it ten. That means a labor cost of $750,000 per year. Now consider that to completely automate a restaurant can cost as little as $200,000, with custom jobs starting at $750,000 — and that’s typically spread out over five to ten years, given the robots’ useful life. Suddenly it becomes incredibly cheaper to automate and get rid of human labor altogether. Of course, that leaves the question of where people are to get their consumption income, but the Economic Democracy Act (EDA) can answer that.
• Could Deflating Oil Grease the Skids to Inflating Prices? It seems more than a little counterintuitive, but according to an article in the Business Insider, the fact that the price of oil is coming down could lead to a boost in inflation. How is that? As the article explains, “High oil prices driven by the war led to a resurgence of inflation worries in the last few months, but Apollo Global Management’s top economist says that cheaper oil isn’t necessarily a reason to expect disinflation. ‘The narrative in markets is changing from “lower oil prices mean lower inflation” to “lower oil prices mean more demand in an already overheating economy, which means higher inflation,”’ Torsten Sløk wrote on Wednesday.” Yes, while it seems counterintuitive and even paradoxical, Dr. Sløk is probably correct. Ironically, if the economy were to be restructured in accordance with the Economic Democracy Act (EDA), there probably wouldn’t be the inflation, and there probably wouldn’t have been an Iran War in the first place. Congress, which represents the people, would have the power, not the president or the Supreme Court, because people would have property, and (as Daniel Webster noted more than 200 years ago), “Power naturally and necessarily follows property.”
• AI Job Creation. Despite the fact that many so-called experts insist that AI and advancing technology creates far more jobs than it eliminates, reality has a way of intruding. According to a story on the “Autoblog Newsletter” “General Motors cut more than 1,000 workers at its Factory Zero plant in Detroit. It softened its EV commitments and paused production more than once. And then it started installing robots. Around 50 collaborative robots, or cobots, have been added to the assembly line at the facility, working alongside the people who remain to attach body panels to vehicles as they move down the track.” This calls to mind an anecdote President Reagan told in a speech to Young Americans for Freedom on July 20, 1974: “Some years ago, a top Ford official was showing the late Walter Reuther through the very automates plant in Cleveland, Ohio and he said to him jokingly, “Walter, you’ll have a hard time collecting union dues from these machines and Walter said, “you are going to have more trouble trying to sell automobiles to them.” Both of them let it stop there. There was a logical answer to that . . . the owners of the machines could buy automobiles and if you increase the number of owners, you increase the number of consumers. Over hundred years ago Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act. There was wide distribution of land, and they didn’t confiscate anyone’s privately owned land. . . . We need an Industrial Homestead Act.” Call it an Industrial Homestead Act or the Economic Democracy Act (EDA), we still need it.
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| Dred Scott |
• All Means All. Latest news is that the United States Supreme Court has not made a decision on whether President Trump can limit birthright citizenship. This refers to whether Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is subject to reinterpretation to fit a political agenda, specifically, whether the President of the United States has the power to define a “person” as that term is used in the Fourteenth Amendment: “Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” For the record, the Supreme Court does not have a good record on the issue of what “person” means in the Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment was in part adopted to overturn the Court’s decision in Scott v. Sandford (1857) which conflated the terms “person” and “citizen” to keep Dred Scott a slave. The Supreme Court then effectively nullified the Fourteenth Amendment with its decision in the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873) which argued — incorrectly on both sides — the question of whether natural rights are a grant from the states or from the federal government. (Neither: natural rights come from God and cannot be taken away by man, as Justice Stephen White realized twenty years later.) In Roe v. Wade (1973), the Court argued that a pre-born human being might be a human being but is not a person as that term in used in the Fourteenth Amendment. Now the Trump administration is arguing that a post-born human being is not a person as that term is used in the Fourteenth Amendment . . . after getting Roe v. Wade overturned on the implied grounds that a pre-born human being is a person — the issue is about rights, and only persons have rights. Talk about having your cake and eating it, too! Evidently, directly contradicting a fundamental principle of the United States, a human being is only a person if President Trump says so, “Trumping” the clear and unequivocal meaning of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution! Frankly, this sort of thing is going to continue so long as most people lack power — and people will only be empowered if Congress adopts the Economic Democracy Act (EDA).
• Greater Reset “Book Trailers”. We have produced two ninety-second “Book Trailers” for distribution (by whoever wants to distribute them), essentially minute-and-a-half commercials for The Greater Reset. There are two versions of the videos, one for “general audiences” and the other for “Catholic audiences”. Take your pick.
• The Greater Reset. CESJ’s book by members of CESJ’s core group, The Greater Reset: Reclaiming Personal Sovereignty Under Natural Law is, of course, available from the publisher, TAN Books, an imprint of Saint Benedict Press, and has already gotten a top review on that website. It can also be obtained from Barnes and Noble, as well as Amazon, or by special order from your local “bricks and mortar” bookstore. The Greater Reset is the only book of which we’re aware on “the Great Reset” that presents an alternative instead of simply warning of the dangers inherent in a proposal that is contrary to natural law. It describes reality, rather than a Keynesian fantasy world. Please note that The Greater Reset is NOT a CESJ publication as such, and enquiries about quantity discounts and wholesale orders for resale must be sent to the publisher, Saint Benedict Press, NOT to CESJ.
• Economic Personalism Landing Page. A landing page for CESJ’s latest publication (now with an imprimatur), 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., 52 or more copies) at the wholesale price, send an email to info@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 persons place in society.
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 well see that it gets into the next “issue.” Due to imprudent and intemperate language on the part of some commentators, we removed temptation and disabled comments.
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