Guy C. Stevenson, Guest Blogger
It is being touted as a groundbreaking achievement . . . it is, however, neither groundbreaking nor really much of an achievement. Recently, Michael and Susan Dell pledged over $6 billion to fund the “Trump Accounts,” as the proposed government-backed savings program for children are being labeled.
Louis O. Kelso is today best known as the inventor of the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). Despite the near-total global hegemony of Keynesian economics which assumes nothing can be done unless wealth is concentrated and government must be in charge of everything, the ESOP remains important to broaden the base of capital ownership.
Pope Leo XIV, the newly elected leader of the Catholic Church, faces many challenges in applying Catholic social doctrine to solving today’s problems such as the growing wealth, income and power gap in every nation; widespread poverty; destruction of the environment; conflict-driven immigration; growth of State power; the decay of families, and many others.
Last week we looked at how a distorted idea of one’s own importance can lead to treating anyone who opposes you as an enemy to be eliminated, and supporters as tools to be discarded once their utility is over. This week we look at the implications of the Ricardian (as opposed to the Smithian) Labor Theory of Value.
Understanding certain of today’s trade policies, while difficult, even baffling at times, is nevertheless possible once one identifies some basic assumptions and ascertains a possible approach to life. Although he didn’t write it, The Art of the Deal (1987) under President Trump’s name exemplifies an orientation which appears widespread today, as do some of his otherwise incomprehensible actions, possibly accounting for his popularity.
Recently we got an enquiry regarding a misunderstanding about our use of the term “Economic Personalism” and some potential confusion with the virtue of justice. Someone (Person A) had expressed disagreement with our using the term Economic Personalism to describe a type of economic democracy and then asked if we were trying to change the name of the Center for Economic and Social Justice to the Center for Economic Personalism. Quick answer: No.
Although tariffs are in the news today, it’s astonishing how many people don’t know what they are or how they work. Briefly, a tariff is a tax a government levies on imports. It is not paid by the people of the country exporting goods, but by the people of the country importing the goods. A tariff is intended to raise — “inflate” — the prices of foreign goods for the presumed advantage of producers in the country which imposes the tariff; it “protects” domestic industry by artificially making foreign goods more expensive.
The halls of justice (or should that be “the howls of justice”?) rang recently with protests to the effect mentioning economic and social justice — at a meeting of the Center for Economic and Social Justice(!) — is “too complicated” and turns people off (“they just roll their eyes”). The complaints got louder when some of us tried to explain why you just can’t say “you’ll have more money” to explain economic justice and ignore social justice altogether as having been hijacked by the socialists.
According to Renaud Foucart, a senior economics lecturer at Lancaster University in a recent article in Business Insider, Putin has put Russia into a “lose-lose” position. In a “tiger by the tail” scenario, the country cannot afford to continue the war against Ukraine, but neither can it afford to stop. According to Foucart’s analysis, the Russian economy has become so dependent on the war that “defense” spending is the only thing keeping up the illusion of viability.
What with the state of the economy and the so-called “woke” culture to which so many people today look for salvation when the solution is already within reach with a little effort, few realize that it was only a few decades ago that matters took a dramatically wrong turn. The Keynesian New Deal, which many believed was supposed to be temporary, became permanent public policy following World War II, even though its disutility was painfully obvious by 1936 and the surreal “Depression within the Depression” that directly resulted from Keynes’s prescriptions.
Today’s posting requires a little explanation. In general, social justice is the virtue that acts directly on the common good and indirectly on individual good. The idea that social justice is simply a replacement for individual charity and justice when those two virtues fail to operate or operate effectively is a complete misunderstanding of social justice.
Today’s blog posting is a selection from the book, Economic Personalism, which you can get free from the CESJ website, or from Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
Today we look at distributive justice, the “out-take principle” that governs distributions from a common endeavor. Distributive justice, in one sense, is an individual virtue built on commutative justice, commutative justice being the most basic form of justice.
Occasionally, we feel the urge to explain a little about social justice. This is usually prompted by a comment or question from a faithful reader or two. This time it was sparked by a comment someone made on FaceBook about how they aren’t interested in helping people one-on-one, but in changing the system that makes it necessary to help people.
Today’s blog posting is a selection from the book, Economic Personalism, which you can get free from the CESJ website, or from Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
It is impossible to say anything about chocolate and America without mentioning the Hershey Company of Hershey, Pennsylvania. Milton Snavely Hershey founded the Lancaster Caramel Company in 1883, having failed at three previous attempts to establish confectionaries in different cities across the country. Although successful in caramel production, he became fascinated with chocolate after seeing modern chocolate making machinery at the Chicago Exposition in 1893.
Recently an article appeared on Catholic World Report, “Catholics and Race in American History,” the point of which seemed to be to excuse a presumed lack of action by the Catholic Church in failing to condemn slavery while it was legal, and present a sterling record of condemning racism ever since. The problem with the article was that it missed certain things that would have made the institutional Catholic Church look a lot better than it did, while making individual Catholics look a lot worse.
In the previous posting on this subject, we looked at the different roles of faith and reason. To oversimplify somewhat, reason takes first place in matters pertaining to the natural world, while faith takes first place in matters pertaining to the supernatural world. At the same time, neither faith nor reason can contradict one another.
We’ll be the first to admit that the term “environmental justice” causes something of a kneejerk reaction in us. That’s because, as some of its more vocal adherents insist, it means that “Nature” or “the Environment,” or “Gaia” or something else is a person and therefore has inherent rights that should not be violated.
In the previous posting on this subject, we looked at a few things that make up “the binary difference”: the three principles of economic justice (participation, distribution, and social justice), and the four pillars of an economically just society (limited economic role for the State, free and open markets, restoration of private property, and expanded capital ownership).
Discussing the factors of production in economics is one thing. Discussing them in the field of political economy is quite another. Common sense, of course, tells us that there is no difference between economics as such, and political economy as such, and in fact some dictionaries use the same definition for both “economics” and “political economy.”