Justice University

Misunderstanding of the development of the concept of social justice to counter the “new things” of socialism, modernism, and the New Age is pervasive in our day.   Briefly, many people confuse the act of social justice with measures directed to the good of individuals, not to the common good.   The act of social justice is not, however, a substitute or supplement for individual justice or charity, but a corrective intended to restructure institutions to make it possible for the individual virtues to function so that individuals can meet their own needs through their own efforts.

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).

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.

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,

There is a problem with having government pay for infrastructure . . . especially when we expect government to pay for everything else!   Of course, what is really at issue is that “the government” doesn’t actually pay for anything.   Either it collects taxes or borrows money . . . which it is supposed to repay by collecting taxes.

Many people think that replacement of human labor by capital and the alienation and social disintegration that results is a new thing.   It is not.    Economic and social alienation due to advancing technologies or changing economies has been around since the dawn of time.   It is just that the rate at which change occurs started accelerating about five hundred years ago.   For this, two factors are responsible.

The other day someone referred to the Just Third Way as “utopian.”    It was one of those occasions when you realize that some people might not know exactly what they are talking about.   Quite a large number of people seem to think that a utopian scheme is one for an ideal society.   Not quite.

According to Dr. Lawrence Ball on a recent episode of “Squawk Box Europe,” inadequate regulation will bring about the next financial crisis.   Dr. Ball, an economics professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of the book, The Fed and Lehman Brothers: Setting the Record Straight on a Financial Disaster , getting rid of regulations such as the Dodd-Frank Act lays the groundwork for an economic meltdown of cosmic proportions.

Last week in the Wall Street Journal Walter Russell Mead gave his opinion that the “Crisis of Democracy” in the modern world is a bit exaggerated (“The “Crisis of Democracy” Is Overhyped,” WSJ , 08/28/18, A-13).   According to Mead, the democracies are, if not precisely doing-just-fine-thank-you, at least doing better than the non-democracies.

Answering the question What is liberalism? is key to understanding the life and times of John Henry Newman, particularly since what has baffled many Newman scholars is the fact that he claimed to be against all forms of liberalism and yet held many opinions and took many positions that people today regard as liberal.   Part of this may be due to the possibility that Newman seems to have had trouble viewing this world as anything other than a temporary stopping place on the way to the next.

We’ve been looking at Woodrow Wilson and his role in eliminating the vestiges of what was once known as “Lincoln Republicanism,” i.e. , a political philosophy that viewed government as being of the people, by the people, and for the people.   The Progressive Party was pretty much the last gasp of the type of Republicanism that replaced the Whig Party and ran Abraham Lincoln for president back in the day.

The failure of the progressive movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to address the issue of widespread ownership of capital resulted in a quarrel between Roosevelt and one of his “trust busters,” Judge Peter S. Grosscup.  As a result, the ownership issue was sidelined during Roosevelt’s administration.   It never became a part of the progressive platform, despite ongoing efforts by Grosscup to focus people’s attention on the critical need to spread out ownership of America’s productive capacity.

Back in 1913 during his first year in office as president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson published a book, The New Freedom .   Concerned about the growing power of corporations and trusts and the abuses of human rights that accompanied it, Wilson contended that the power of the giant organizations must be reined in.   After all, he needed something to convince the electorate that they hadn’t made too big of a mistake in electing him instead of Theodore Roosevelt. . . .