For Economic Justice

From the Center for Economic and Social Justice (www.cesj.org) News From The Network: College Free Tuition In the same issue of the Washington Post on the sam...e page, in fact another article says that College Leaders Praise Biden’s Free Tuition Plan. We’ve written about this before. While many people praise countries in Europe that have universities with free tuition, they leave out the rest of the story. What they don’t tell you is that the free tuition is always made up in other ways, such as the endless and costly fees for everything that was formerly covered by tuition. Also, it often happens that tuition per se is not the problem, but the other costs of living, books, and everything else. Free tuition is like the marketing loss leader to get you into the store where you buy other, more expensive items, or the inexpensive Barbie doll with the high-priced accessories. See more

From the Center for Economic and Social Justice (www.cesj.org) News From The Network: American Families Plan According to a Washington Post article of April 29,... 2021, Details of Biden’s $1.8 Trillion American Families Plan (A-21), the idea is to vest America’s families with consumption power of one form or another, allegedly to be funded by increased taxes on the wealthy. There are a number of problems with this, not the least of which is that making families dependent on outside sources for their consumption needs destroys families instead of restoring them. When both parents worked at home on the farm or in a family owned business, families tended to be strong. With the Industrial Revolution and at least one parent working away from home, the family was considerably weakened, but generally held together by the increased economic dependency on the primary breadwinner, a new concept that substantially changed the relations between men and women as women changed from being partners to support staff. With the increase in government assistance, the primary breadwinner status began shifting from one or both of the parents, to the State, and the decay of the family accelerated. The move to making families primarily dependent on the State for consumption income will inevitably weaken family bonds still further. If President Biden really wants to help families, he should shift focus from consumption to production, making it possible for everyone to be productive through both labor and capital ownership, making it more advantageous for families to stay together to aggregate resources than to make them dependent on others. The Economic Democracy Act would go a long way to restore families instead of tearing them further apart. See more

From the Center for Economic and Social Justice (www.cesj.org) News From The Network: Growth and Recovery The media keep touting growth, but very little of the ...benefit seems to flow to anyone but the currently wealthy, whose riches have expanded enormously over the past year. What no one points out is that the bulk of the so-called growth is in the stock market and increased government spending, neither of which is geared toward producing marketable goods or services the stock market is a secondary market that produces nothing, but buys and sells existing debt and equity, while government services are not (or shouldn’t be) marketable. The whole purpose of economic activity (and thus economic growth) is the production for consumption of marketable goods and services. This is the whole point of Adam Smith’s first principle of economics and Say’s Law of Markets. Production for any other purpose is waste. See more

Michael D. Greaney, Center for Economic and Social Justice (www.cesj.okrg): A Short Treatise on Sovereignty As we noted in the previous posting on this subject, the political doctrine that all government revenue should come only from taxation is based on the fundamental principle of the sovereignty of the human person. Whoever pays the costs of government controls government, unless politicians can figure out a way to hide the fact of who is really paying, as is the case when...Continue reading

From the Center for Economic and Social Justice (www.cesj.org) News From The Network: Universal Basic Income Even before the pandemic, there was a strong push t...o disconnect consumption income from the wage and welfare system so that people could be assured of a basic income whether or not they qualified for a job or welfare. On paper, it seems to work: if technology can produce everything people need, then why not simply tax away enough from producers (capital owners) to distribute among everyone so that everyone has a basic subsistence? Everything evens out. In reality, of course, it’s been historically the case that only in extraordinary circumstances can tax revenues exceed approximately 20 percent of GDP, and then only for a short time. In practical terms, then, redistributing wealth through the tax system to provide a basic income would mean that consumption income equal to 20 percent of GDP is supposed to clear production equal to 100 percent of GDP which is impossible. The answer (or so many of today’s economists and politicians believe, thanks to Lord Keynes) is to issue government debt to make up the difference. This, however, soon results in a gargantuan public debt that bankrupts the country issuing it when the bill comes due. See more