Solving the Greek Debt Crisis, V: Presenting the Solution

So now we have the solution to the Greek (or any other) debt crisis: if you want to pay down debt, have enough to meet your current consumption needs, and set aside enough for a rainy day, you have to produce enough to cover what you have consumed on tick (i.e., on credit), are consuming on a daily basis, and a store on which to draw if you suddenly become unable to produce.

Solving the Greek Debt Crisis, IV: Consuming What Isn’t Produced

What is the sound of one hand clapping?  How can you consume when you don’t produce?  Well, as we noted yesterday, you can’t.  Not unless you seize control of the language so that you can make words mean what you want them to mean.

Solving the Greek Debt Crisis, III: The Sound of One Hand Clapping

Absent a rich uncle conveniently dying or a fairy godmother waving a magic wand to grant three wishes (neither of which, for various reasons, is something we should count on), there is only way to get out of debt: produce enough to cover your current consumption needs, make up for what you consumed in the past that you didn’t produce, and put something aside for a rainy day . . . which means a year’s worth of income to cover yourself because rain spoiled the annual harvest.

Solving the Greek Debt Crisis, II: The Solution in Brief

Last Thursday we said there is a viable solution to the Greek debt crisis, and it isn’t austerity.  What we didn’t say was that the solution is either simple or easy.  It is, in fact, pretty harsh if you’re a politician, government worker, or anyone receiving government benefits, especially in the beginning, and probably for three to five years until the program kicks into high gear and starts generating significant income in and of itself.

News from the Network, Vol. 8, No. 27

What on earth are you supposed to report on when the world ends, i.e., the stock market is closed, and won’t reopen until Monday?  And that is after the vote in Greece.  Still, there are a few items that appear to be noteworthy:

Solving the Greek Debt Crisis, I: The Scope of the Problem

It’s déjà vu all over again.  We may have mentioned once or a dozen times the last time the problem was “solved” that it wasn’t actually solved, just swept under the rug until it grew big enough to crawl out again and this time eat the entire house.  For starters.  Then move on to the rest of the European Union for the main course.  We’re not even going to speculate what’s for dessert, at least openly, but if a tasty little morsel like Switzerland thinks it can stay out of it when the rest of Europe is crashing and burning, it might have another think coming.

Religion and Science, II: What Really Happened

Yesterday we saw that, despite his sincere faith that his theory of tidal motion proved heliocentricism, Galileo’s proof was seriously flawed.  Heliocentric theory was not, in fact, actually proved until the nineteenth century — regardless of the fact that many people accepted it for centuries before that . . . on faith, not because it was proved.

Religion and Science, I: What Galileo Proved

In one of his earliest and, for many readers, least favorite books, The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933), C.S. Lewis’s protagonist from “Puritania” —very closely modeled on Lewis himself — meets with “Mr. Enlightenment,” who takes him up in his pony-drawn cart and asserts that there is no “Landlord,” the God-persona in the allegory.  “John,” the protagonist, ponders this a moment, then asks —

Man and Superman, II: The Supernatural Order

Last Thursday we noted that acquiring and developing the natural virtues (that is, the virtues the capacity for which is built into human nature itself) makes us fully human — but nothing more.  This makes sense, for the capacity to acquire and develop the natural virtues of temperance, fortitude, prudence, and (above all) justice, are what define us as human — but nothing more.

News from the Network, Vol. 8, No. 26

We realize we’re completely out of touch with reality by ignoring such controversies as whether the Greek debt crisis should make the stock market go up or down (or down or up, or even sideways), or whether to have fish, or beans and rice for lunch, but we just thought the following might be of more real interest to people seeking solutions instead of more problems:

Man and Superman, I: The Natural Order

It may have been George Bernard Shaw, the irascible pacifist and Fabian socialist who wrote a play entitled “Man and Superman.”  [Note: we just checked.  It was.]  Now, we are not interested in Shaw’s proposals to attain the perfection of human character by means of simple living, pacifism, and vegetarianism, i.e., the program of the Fabian socialists, derived in large measure from the agrarian socialism of Henry George and the theosophy of Madame Blavatsky.

Philosophical Mistakes Revisited

We’ve been getting a lot of commentary on our article on Homiletic and Pastoral Review, “Pope Francis and the Just Third Way.”  The basic issue under discussion seems to be not that our understanding of Catholic social teaching is flawed, but that the whole idea that a religion has a social teaching is flawed.  We’re basically arguing not about what the Catholic Church teaches, but whether it should be teaching it.

A Social Question

Or, more accurately, a question about society — what is it?  The article we had published last week in Homiletic and Pastoral Review, “Pope Francis and the Just Third Way,” has excited quite a bit of discussion on the HPR website.  Running down the list of their fifteen most recent articles and editorials, there were (as of yesterday morning) exactly thirty comments total on all of them, ranging from zero (three articles) to six (one article) and seven (one article).  For those of you not up on higher math, the average is two comments per article, exclusive of ours . . . which as of yesterday morning had twenty-one, including three republications or “trackbacks.”

How Long?

Last week we got a very good question from a faithful reader.  It involved how long before we would start to realize the benefits of a Capital Homesteading program one it is enacted, and some of the details.  Pretty quickly, all things considered, as you’ll see from our response.  First, however, the question:

News from the Network, Vol. 8, No. 25

There has been a great deal going on this week, mostly in the “Getting the Word Out” Department.  It’s not even worth the time commenting on the ups and downs in the stock market.  The wild swings have gotten rid of some of the real investors, leaving the field to the speculators . . . helping us set the stage for a return to sanity with Capital Homesteading and the reversion of the secondary market to a genuinely secondary role in the economy:

Putting Pope Francis in Perspective

If you’ve been following matters on this blog, you will have noticed the uniformly positive comments on the recent publication of “Pope Francis and the Just Third Way” in Homiletic and Pastoral Review this past Saturday.  Now, we know what you’re thinking.  We’ve only been telling you about the positive comments and ignoring the negatives.

Sharing the Tech Threat, IV: Up From Savery

No, we spelled that right.  Combine “slavery” and “savings” and you get “savery.”  What Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler called “the slavery of [past] savings” is at the root of a great many problems that could easily be solved if people weren’t stuck in the assumption that the only way to save to finance new capital formation is to cut consumption in the past.

Pope Francis and the Just Third Way

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programing to bring you an important news bulletin.  This past Saturday the venerable Homiletic and Pastoral Review (the oldest magazine for Catholic clergy in the United States) published “Pope Francis and the Just Third Way,” an examination of the principles of economic and social justice in light of Pope Francis’s expressed concerns.

Sharing the Tech Threat, III: Sharing Effectively

Last week we saw how, as advancing technology displaces people at an accelerating rate even from jobs formerly believed to be immune to that sort of thing, “the Millennials” are trapped in a situation in which they are forced by circumstances into divvying up a decreasing amount of production allocated to labor.

News from the Network, Vol. 8, No. 24

The stock market has been so volatile that even the experts are starting to get worried.  The increasingly wild swings are not “normal,” even within a Keynesian framework.  Nor is it the case that this has never happened before.  The same thing was going on right before the Crash of 1929.

Sharing the Tech Threat, II: The Sharing Economy

Yesterday we looked at an article about an Al Jazeera documentary about technology replacing “middle” workers, that is, people in traditional white collar occupations.  We didn’t look at the Al Jazeera documentary, we just went with the premise, one that should be obvious to anyone who understands the effects of technology and grasps the fact that both labor and capital produce marketable goods and services . . . but that capital’s productiveness (understood in binary economics as the relative proportion of production) is far outstripping that of labor.

Sharing the Tech Threat, I: The Shoemaker and the Machine

A couple of days ago one of our faithful readers sent us links to two very interesting articles.  One was on the “Naked Capitalism” website, “People and Power: The Technology Threat.”  The other was from the Washington Post Magazine, “The Post Ownership Society: How the ‘sharing economy’ allows Millennials to cope with downward mobility, and also makes them poorer.”  Taken together, they paint a very grim picture indeed.

What to Do?

Yesterday — or it could have been the day before or even earlier — somebody commented on the Synod on the Family the Catholic Church is holding in October, right after the World Meeting of Families in September in Philadelphia.  Someone (else) had sent around an e-mail containing a link to an article about how the Synod was going to be hijacked and used to advance an agenda at odds with the teachings of the Catholic Church.

Yet More on Property, II: Hudock’s Alleged Errors

Last week we noted that we had received a link to a three-year-old article in U.S. Catholic, “How Much Do You Really Own?” by Barry Hudock, sent to us in refutation of our contention that the right to be an owner (the right to property) pertains to the natural law, while the rights of ownership (the rights of property) come under human positive law, custom, and tradition — as long as these do not nullify the underlying right to be an owner in the first place.  This posting was originally titled, "Hudock's Fatal Errors," but we have since discovered that the individual who sent us the link asserting that it disproved our position may have been a little mistaken, and might have slightly misunderstood Hudock's position as well as our own.  We (mistakenly) assumed that our commentator could substantiate his interpretation of Hudock's article, which he could not.  We've taken this opportunity to correct this, and (incidentally) get rid of the bold typeface that somehow sneaked into the last two paragraphs.  And screwed up the rest of the formatting, of course.

News from the Network, Vol. 8, No. 23

As can be seen from the news items below, things are starting to move in the right direction.  As can be seen from the number of articles that are getting accepted, we are getting more effective at spreading the word about the Just Third Way.  That being the case, we won’t waste your time with news about Wall Street and other fantasy lands, but get straight to the news —

Yet More on Property, I: Definitions

There’s an old joke that goes “A teacher was trying to impress on his students the idea that doing something right the first time pays off.  He declared, ‘A job well done need never be done again!’  A ‘small, tired voice from the back of the room’ responds, ‘What about mowing the lawn?’”

All Too Real Non-Problems

From the Reuters News Service on Tuesday, June 2, 2015, we have the news that, “Fed's Brainard says U.S. economic slowdown may be more than temporary.”  This is, of course, news to all the people who lost their jobs in 2008, are losing them now, and when new minimum wage laws are making employers look to Robbie the Robot as a source of uncomplaining, non-human, and less expensive labor.  As one of the Fed-Heads put it,

Charlie

This is not a review of the film version of Daniel Keyes’s award-winning Flowers for Algernon (short story, 1958, novel 1966) with the spelling corrected.  No, this is a brief commentary on a “game” that seems to be gaining great popularity among teenagers and adolescents (and you have no idea how old it makes you feel to say something like that).

Is Private Property a Natural Right?

A short time ago we posted a short piece explaining why, because private property is a natural right, socialism has the wrong bull by the horns, or sow by the ear, or however you want to put it.  Naturally, the socialists didn’t take this lying down.  Almost immediately we received a rather sanctimonious comment to the effect that the idea that private property being a natural right was an invention of Thomas Aquinas during the Middle Ages.

News from the Network, Vol. 8, No. 22

As of this writing, the Dow is down more than a hundred points.  It was up over a hundred the other day, just after it was down over a hundred.  This is not a Good Thing for many reasons.  From a historical and psychological point of view, it desensitizes people to fluctuations in the market, increasing what psychologists call “the zone of indifference,” i.e., “Ho-hum.  It’s down a hundred, up a hundred . . . what’s on TV?”

Crisis of Reason, III: Symptoms of Irrationality

Yesterday we looked at the source of today’s “crisis of faith,” which is really a crisis of reason.  How is that?  As every pope since Pius IX (including John Paul I . . . remember him?) has made clear, just as you must base charity on justice, you must base faith solidly on a foundation of reason.  Reason does not replace faith, of course, any more than reason can replace faith.  Faith completes and perfects reason, it does not contradict it.  It’s faith AND reason, not faith OR reason.

Crisis of Reason, II: The Source of the Problem

A few thousand years ago the Roman poet Horace said that you can chase Nature out with a pitchfork, but she always comes back.  The point, of course, is that you can’t really go against nature.  Once the pressure is off, things always get back to normal.

Crisis of Reason, I: Bad News and Good News

Here’s the bad news — and it’s very bad news, not just for Catholics and other Christians, but for adherents of all organized religions, especially the “thinking” religions, such as Judaism and Islam.  While there have always been those who just didn’t fit into the whole religion-thing (a category the Catholic Church covers with its “invincible ignorance” doctrine), an overall decline in the numbers of people who don’t go along with a program has always been a sign of a society in deep trouble.

Why Have Property?

Recently — over the past couple of centuries or so — the idea has grown up that ownership of capital is justified on the grounds that it is the best way to optimize the possibility of an adequate and secure income.  As a bonus, property (the right to be an owner) also confers power.  As Daniel Webster noted almost two hundred years ago, “Power naturally and necessarily follows property.”

News from the Network, Vol. 8, No. 21

The big news this week involves the backlash from the failed coup and political situation in Burundi.  CESJ’s current Fellow is a top scholar from Burundi, bringing events there a little closer to home than is usual for happenings in East Africa.  Despite that, Burundi remains a fascinating place, with great opportunities for implementing the Just Third Way once the situation stabilizes:

Some Comments on Charity (and Justice)

There is massive confusion these days about the difference between justice and charity . . . to say nothing of the bewildered babblings about virtue itself, rights, duties, natural law and supernatural law, individual and social virtue . . . the list seems to be endless. 

Some Comments on Subsidiarity

One definition of subsidiarity is “a principle of social doctrine that all social bodies exist for the sake of the individual so that what individuals are able to do, society should not take over, and what small societies can do, larger societies should not take over.”

Some Comments on Rights, Subsidiarity, and Charity

A lot of discussion about economic and social justice brings up such esoteric concepts as “rights,” “subsidiarity,” and “charity.”  The problem is that a lot of people who use the terms don’t really seem to be using the classic definitions of these concepts, but appear to be tailoring them to fit their current wants and needs.

Water on the Brain

Back in 1897 English novelist Louis Tracy (1863-1928) published An American Emperor: The Story of the Fourth Empire of France.  Very briefly, a very rich American (in the popular English fiction of the day, there were two types of Americans: the bold rich entrepreneur, and the bold poor frontiersman, both of which were present in An American Emperor) has the idea, for various complicated and romantic reasons, of spending his millions to benefit humanity, specifically the Republic of France.

News from the Network, Vol. 8, No. 20

Stock Market soar like eagle . . . to suck in all the turkeys . . . We’ve talked enough about the stock market, though, and prefer to report on something most people and all politicians are unaware of: the alternative to the fake economic growth caused by government debt and stock market speculation.  We refer, of course, to Capital Homesteading, and our efforts to tell people about the Just Third Way:

Religion v. Science? Or Faith AND Reason?

It comes as a surprise to many people that the pope is as entitled as anyone else to his opinion on what should be done about climate change.  This doesn’t make it a matter of religious doctrine, nor could it be an infallible declaration.

What is an “Encyclical”?

We’re not really interested in purely religious matters on this blog (although sometimes our opinion as to what constitutes a “purely religious matter” may differ from others in the Just Third Way Gang), but we are trying to get to various prime movers and leaders with vision to get them behind the Just Third Way . . . one of whom happens to be Pope Francis, head of the Catholic Church.

A Few Comments on the Minimum Wage

Back in the late 1960s labor-statesman Walter Reuther testified before Congress on the ideas of Louis O. Kelso, noted as the inventor of the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP).  Reuther noted that if workers relied on raising fixed wage to increase consumption income, they would end up worse off than before.  Raising wages simply adds to the cost of producing marketable goods and services.

The Lost Speech of Peter S. Grosscup, VI: People-izing the Corporation

The first principle of economic justice as defined by Kelso and Adler and refined by CESJ is participation.  The institutions of the common good must be open to participation by everyone.  That is why the principle of participation — participative justice — leads off the three principles of economic justice.  After all, if the system isn’t working the same (or nearly the same within reasonable parameters) for everyone, it really cannot be said to be a just system.

News from the Network, Vol. 8, No. 19

A number of important contacts have been made to advance the “Five for the Family” campaign.  This could result in the campaign starting to generate the essential number of “likes” and “shares” (by the way, you can “like” only once, but you can “share” as many times as you wish (we would have said “as you like,” but that would have been a little confusing.

The Lost Speech of Peter S. Grosscup, V: Financing Widespread Ownership

In yesterday’s blog, we posted the portion of Grosscup’s “long lost” speech that looked at the two primary types of barriers to widespread capital ownership: 1) Those that deny the right of ownership to ordinary people, and 2) Those that deny the rights of ownership to ordinary people — two very different, if closely related things, and very important.

The Lost Speech of Peter S. Grosscup, V: Restructuring the Social Order

Yesterday we posted the portion of Judge Grosscup’s 1907 speech highlighting the fact that, under then-current methods of corporate finance (which still obtain today), most people had no means to obtain ownership of the large corporations, combinations, and trusts.  In today’s portion, Grosscup makes it clear that it is not the size of the enterprise that matters, but the distribution or size of the individual ownership stake.

The Lost Speech of Peter S. Grosscup, IV: Who Shall Own America?

“Power,” as Daniel Webster pointed out nearly two centuries ago in 1820, “naturally and necessarily follows property.”  No one understood this better in the early twentieth century than Judge Peter S. Grosscup of the United States Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Lost Speech of Peter S. Grosscup, III: Bad Legal Principles

The more we find out about Judge Grosscup, the more there is to admire.  For example, Grosscup had a temporary rift with Theodore Roosevelt over some obscure points of law in the Standard Oil rebate case in 1907/1908.  Grosscup found on appeal that the enormous fine ($29 million plus), intended to bring Standard Oil to its knees, had been illegally levied.

News from the Network, Vol. 8, No. 18

The main thing this week (and probably for the foreseeable future) is the “Five for the Family” campaign.  This relies on continuing support — and that doesn’t (necessarily) mean money, but your help in spreading it around your networks.  The more people know about it, the more likely we are to catch the attention of gatekeepers and prime movers to champion the idea of Capital Homesteading for every child, woman, and man.