JTW Podcast: The Economic Plight of Gen-Z

This week’s podcast is another episode of The Front Line with Joe & Joe featuring Dawn K. Brohawn and Michael D. Greaney from CESJ.  This episode asks the eternal (or at least this week’s) question, what are we to do about the economic plight of “Gen-Z” . . . or any other generation, for that matter.  The response, of course, is to adopt the Economic Democracy Act (EDA).

JTW Podcast: The Great Ideas VII, The Kinds of Work and the Dignity of Labor

    This week’s podcast is the seventh episode in Mortimer Adler’s television show, The Great Ideas and is a follow-up on “The Distinction of Work Play and Leisure” which we had last week.  As described in the YouTube blurb for this episode, “Dr. Adler explains the different kinds of work in a human life. He then makes a distinction between productive and non-productive labor, liberal and servile work.”

JTW Podcast: The Great Ideas VI, The Distinction of Work, Play and Leisure

This week’s podcast is the sixth episode in Mortimer Adler’s television show, The Great Ideas and is a follow-up on “The Parts of Life” which we had last week.  As described in the YouTube blurb for this episode, “In this program, Dr. Adler, aided by questions submitted to him by Dean Luckman, deals with labor in relation to leisure, and leisure in distinction from play or recreation.”

JTW Podcast: The Great Ideas V, The Parts of Life

This week’s podcast is the fifth episode in Mortimer Adler’s television show, The Great Ideas and is a follow-up on “The Forms of Government” which we had last week.  As described in the YouTube blurb for this episode, the full title of which is “The Parts of Life: Sleep, Work, Play, Leisure, Rest,”

JTW Podcast: America Needs the “Just Third Way” in our Economy!

This week’s podcast is an episode of The Front Line with Joe & Joe featuring Dawn K. Brohawn and Michael D. Greaney from CESJ.  As the description of the show has it, “Welcome to Joe & Joe — two guys at the kitchen table from New Jersey bringing you bold Catholic commentary, faithful discussion, and honest conversations about the issues shaping our world today.

JTW Podcast: The Great Ideas IV, The Forms of Government

    This week’s podcast is the fourth episode in Mortimer Adler’s television show, The Great Ideas and is a follow-up on “The Powers of Government” which we had a couple of weeks ago.  As described in the YouTube blurb, “In his concluding discussion of government, Dr. Mortimer Adler sums up past discussions and deals with the forms of government. In this lecture he emphasizes the difference between despotism and constitutional government.”

JTW Podcast: Economic Personalism

Although the blurb for this podcast says, “Join Dr. Robert Moynihan for this live stream with Michael Greaney and Dawn Brohawn, authors of Economic Personalism: Property, Power and Justice for Every Person,” there is a lot more than advertised in the program, but evidently a lot less, too, since Greaney and Brohawn have been invited back for future podcasts.

JTW Podcast: The Great Ideas, III, The Powers of Government

 This week’s podcast is the third episode in Mortimer Adler’s television show, The Great Ideas and is a follow-up on last week’s podcast on “The Nature of Government.”  As described in the YouTube blurb, “Dr. Adler explains the difference between the ideal of a limited government and the impossibility of a government with limited powers.”

JTW Podcast: The Great Ideas, II, The Nature of Government

    This week’s podcast is the second episode in Mortimer Adler’s television show, The Great Ideas and is a follow-up on last week’s podcast on “The Necessity of Government.”  As described in the YouTube blurb, “Again, Dr. Adler, with the assistance of Dean Luckman, who presents questions sent in by the audience, explores the fundamental ideas of government. In this program he seeks to correct the truth that might makes right by the addition of the truth that right makes might.”

JTW Podcast: The Great Ideas, I, The Necessity of Government

This week’s podcast is the first episode in Mortimer Adler’s television show, The Great Ideas.  As described in the YouTube blurb, “This program seeks to provide the answer to the anarchist and near-anarchist who think that government is not necessary or at best is a necessary evil. Dr. Adler discusses the necessity of government, particularly in a complex society. He is assisted by Dr. Lloyd Luckman, Dean of the San Francisco City College.”

JTW Podcast: Zombie Capitalism?

Capitalism, as this week’s podcast states, is one of those words you hear a lot but without knowing what it means.  Although talking about capitalism, it makes a number of misstatements of fact and leaves out a system in which most people own capital . . . which might not be a system that capitalists call capitalism. . . .

JTW Podcast: America’s Road Not Taken

The full title of today’s podcast is “America’s Road Not Taken: George Mason, Louis Kelso, and the Means to Own the Future.”  By any title, however, the script traces how George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights adopted June 12, 1776, influenced Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence while not omitting the necessity of grounding liberty in “the means of acquiring and possessing property.”

JTW Podcast: When Too Few Own the Wealth of Nations

Today’s podcast argues that concentrated ownership of productive wealth creates economic, political, and social crises by starving consumer purchasing power, encouraging speculation, and market dominance. and turning economic power into political control. As automation and AI shift gains to a small ownership elite, increasing inequality fuels social breakdown, overwhelms welfare systems, and makes inherited wealth outweigh earned success. Meanwhile, poor countries remain trapped, and trade imbalances worsen.

JTW Podcast: Is Distributism a Genuine Third Way?

    Today’s podcast is a libertarian take on “distributism,” the system promoted by G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.  It raises some interesting points, but (in our opinion) it does so without actually leaving the current paradigm which fails to take future savings into consideration.  It does, however, have a good discussion on private property and the conflict between ownership, use, the absolute natural right to property (the generic right of dominion), and the necessarily limited and socially determined rights of property (the universal destination of all goods) . . . which is not adequately addressed.

JTW Podcast: Ronald Reagan’s Speech on Project Economic Justice

In 1985, Center for Economic and Social Justice (CESJ) members initiated and mobilized bipartisan support for Congressional legislation which established the Presidential Task Force on Project Economic Justice under President Ronald Reagan. Project Economic Justice, which was first conceived in a strategy paper authored by CESJ, offered a revolutionary economic alternative to military solutions to regional conflicts in Central America and the Caribbean.

JTW Podcast: Why Kelso Invented the Leveraged Buyout

Why Louis Kelso Invented the ESOP LBO: Capital Ownership, Jobs, and the Great Depression.  In today’s podcast, Louis O. Kelso (via an AI voice) recounts how witnessing the Great Depression as a teenager led him to investigate why a resource-rich economy could still produce mass unemployment and suffering. He concludes that a key free-market assumption traced to Adam Smith is wrong: real production and income come not only from labor but also from capital, whose technological rise has reduced labor’s relative share while capital ownership remains concentrated.

JTW Podcast: When a Few People Own Almost Everything

    When a Few Own Everything: Can the Economic Democracy Act Restore Broad Ownership?  Today’s podcast argues that extreme wealth concentration creates economic, political, social, and global crises: most people can’t afford what the economy produces as income from assets flows to a small ownership class, automation replaces workers without shared gains, and the wealthy often channel money into speculation rather than productive investment while using resources to dominate markets.

JTW Podcast: The Consequences of Concentrated Wealth

When a handful of people own most of the productive assets in an economy, everyone else pays the price — in stagnant wages, hollowed-out democracy, and a future where AI and automation benefit only those who already own the machines. This video breaks down the consequences of concentrated capital ownership: the demand collapse it creates, the political corruption it enables, and the generational immobility it locks in.

JTW Podcast: Magnifica Humanitas and the Just Third Way

A new “encyclical” provisionally title “Magnifica Humanitas” (ouch!) is scheduled for release this coming Friday.   So . . . what has this got to do with CESJ or the Just Third Way?  Well, plenty.  Although CESJ is not a Catholic or religious organization, and the Just Third Way of Economic Personalism is not a religious movement, the “natural law” foundations of Catholic social teaching and the respect for human dignity are common to people of all faiths and philosophies.

JTW Podcast: William Winslow Crosskey: The Forgotten Originalist

The thought of William Winslow Crosskey (1894-1968) is fundamental to the Just Third Way — and not because CESJ’s president, Norman G. Kurland, was a student of his in the late 1950s at the University of Chicago.  Crosskey took his law degree at a Yale still under the influence of the rigorous Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld (1879-1918, Fundamental Legal Conceptions, 1919) and was brought to Chicago by Robert Maynard Hutchins.