Justice University

This week’s video podcast is the fourth and final installment of a four-part series on “Economic Personalism versus The Great Reset”.   Again, this is loosely related to the book, Economic Personalism , but it is more in the nature of a somewhat informal conversation about applying the principles of economic personalism to a specific situation.   Today we look at what we’d like to say to Pope Francis if we happen to have a meeting with him any time soon:

This week’s video podcast is the third installment of a four-part series on “Economic Personalism versus The Great Reset”.   While this is loosely related to the book, Economic Personalism , it is more in the nature of a somewhat informal conversation about applying the principles of economic personalism to a specific situation.   Today we look at why who pays for something has the right to control it.

This week’s video podcast is the second installment of a four-part series on “Economic Personalism versus The Great Reset”.   Again, this is loosely related to the book, Economic Personalism , but is more in the nature of a somewhat informal conversation about applying the principles of economic personalism to a specific situation.

For the video podcast this week, we have the first installment of a four-part series on “Economic Personalism versus The Great Reset”.   This is loosely related to the book, Economic Personalism , but is more in the nature of a somewhat informal conversation about applying the principles of economic personalism to a specific situation.

On today’s video podcast, we bring you a book review/interview on CESJ’s latest publication, Economic Personalism: Property, Power and Justice for Every Citizen.   The book just came out litter over a month aga, but is already beginning to make a splash:

Yet again it looks as if we’re not only getting explicitly religious here, but we’re picking on Pope Francis.   Neither assumption would be correct, however.   The fact is that Pope Francis’s recent encyclical contained some statements regarding private property that appear to be at variance with the natural law, and we want to make certain His Holiness gets a chance to explain them.   Then we can pick on him. . . .

“ It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good wife, must be in want of a job.”   That, of course, is the famous opening line from fictional author Gianny Austin’s apocryphal novel, Property and Prejudice , a comedy of manners in which ownership of the means of production (except for an economic or political élite ) is depicted as being not quite polite, and the characters spend all their time cleverly positioning themselves for higher wages and fixed benefits, and then wondering why prices are so high and why other people keep telling them what to do.

We got into a little argument a short time ago about socialism, capitalism, and Christianity.   Coming across a FaceBook placard or whatever you call ’em that proclaimed, “Capitalism causes socialism”, we made the mistake of putting our two-and-a-half cents in, although you would have thought that by now we would have learned our lesson about trying to argue with people who think assertion is argument and personal insults are proof.

What is the reason for having “core values” in the first place?  There is a link between solidarity and core values.   After all, if solidarity means accepting the principles that define a group as that group and no other, it makes sense that the principles be clearly defined or you won’t know who belongs to that group.

We need to consider the effect two key inventions, the cotton gin and the McCormick Reaper, had on society, whether for good or for ill.   The cotton gin made raising cotton profitable, while the McCormick Reaper made it possible to think about ending world hunger and famine.

A think tank that shall remain nameless recently presented a study, the point of which was that free childcare is more important than free college.   At first glance this seems like heresy.   For around half a century at least, the constant mantra in the United States was to study hard, get into a good college and you’ll get a good job.   That is, assuming that there are any jobs to get, but that’s another issue. . . .

Today we address a problem that most (if not all) economists do not even think of as a problem — which may itself be the biggest problem of all.   How, after all, can you solve a problem that most people will not even agree exists?

On April 14, 1865, an actor by the name of John Wilkes Booth (1838-1865) entered Ford’s Theater in Washington, DC during a performance of Our American Cousin featuring Laura Keene (1826-1873) in the role of “Florence Trenchard.”   Booth, a pro-slavery Confederate sympathizer, shot and mortally wounded President Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) four days after the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia under Robert Edward Lee (1807-1870).

We closed the previous posting on this subject with the comment that “America’s Prince of Cranks” — Ignatius Loyola Donnelly (1831-1901) — had influenced the interpretation and understanding of Catholic social teaching, and thus the natural law “written in the hearts of all men.”   At first glance this seems rather odd, since Donnelly left the Catholic Church and took up spiritualism, was a socialist, influenced theosophy, and may have inspired certain features of Nazi racial ideology.

One of the more interesting things we discover about Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville (1805-1859) and his greatest work, Democracy in America (1835, 1840), is that the author — like Orestes Augustus Brownson (1803-1876) a generation latter in The American Republic (1866) — considered himself a Catholic writing as a Catholic.   What surprises many people is to find out that both de Tocqueville and Brownson considered the American system (slavery excepted) to be the closest to “Catholic” political theory.

In case you didn't know, George Bernard Shaw was as insistent that socialism is the universal panacea for all problems (as long as you don’t eat meat or drink alcohol) and that distributism is just another name for Fabian socialism* as G.K. Chesterton was adamant that Shaw was full of . . . nonsense.

Aristotle In classic Aristotelian philosophy, including that of Aquinas, distributive justice has only ever had one meaning: distribution according to a pro rata share of inputs.   In economic terms, distributive justice is “the most classical form”( Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church , § 201) of the virtue, t he out-take principle.   It is based on the market value of one’s economic contributions.   This is the principle that everyone has a right to receive a proportionate, market-determined share of the value of the marketable goods and services he produces with his labor, capital, or both.

On his death in 1985, Father William J. Ferree, S.M., Ph.D. was eulogized as “the second founder” of his religious order, the Society of Mary.   Father Andrew F. Morlion, O.P., Ph.D., Belgian philosopher and founder and first president of the International University of Social Studies in Rome, referred to Father Ferree as “America’s greatest social philosopher.”   But who was he?

One of the things we find most consistent about socialism is its inconsistency, the ability to say one thing and do another with astonishing regularity.   This was brought forcibly home to us when we came across the writings of Robert Owen, considered the first of the British line of socialism.

Recently we received a quote from a news commentary on an allocution by Pope Francis to the effect that the head of the Catholic Church had abolished the natural law.   Not all of the natural law, of course, just the part that some people disagreed with and needed some credible authority to back them up regarding the alleged abolition of private property by Pope Francis (or any other pope).   Specifically,