An ordinary action, performed through obedience and love of God, is more meritorious than extraordinary works done on your own authority--VEN. LOUIS DE BLOIS.
One does not ask of one who suffers: What is your country and what is your religion? One merely says: You suffer, that is enough for me...
The path of virtue is painful to nature when left to itself; but nature, assisted by grace, finds it easy and agreeable.--VEN. LOUIS OF GRANADA.
She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.
The uneasy ghost of Marx must suffer the torments of the damned at the truth glaring from the pages of history that one does not abolish property by transferring it to the state.
I’m a secret nonmember of the establishment. This isn’t a grubby kind of revolution I’m talking about. This isn’t Che Guevara stuff. I don’t want to live on berries in the woods — I don’t think anybody does.
Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.
My grandfather always said that living is like licking honey off a thorn.
The Government, on its side, was taking observations. It observed with its hand on its sword. Four squadrons of carabineers could be seen in the Place Louis XV. in their saddles, with their trumpets at their head, cartridge-boxes filled and muskets loaded, all in readiness to march; in the Latin country and at the Jardin des Plantes, the Municipal Guard echelonned from street to street; at the Halle-aux-Vins, a squadron of dragoons; at the Greve half of the 12th Light Infantry, the other half being at the Bastille; the 6th Dragoons at the Celestins; and the courtyard of the Louvre full of artillery. The remainder of the troops were confined to their barracks, without reckoning the regiments of the environs of Paris. Power being uneasy, held suspended over the menacing multitude twenty-four thousand soldiers in the city and thirty thousand in the banlieue.
[Louis Kelso’s] Second Income Plan is a method for heightening at one time, both the industrial power of the people to produce wealth, and their legitimate power to consume it…. Capital-owning workers can engage in the production of wealth through both their labor and their capital ownership. [ Saturday Review , April 6, 1968.]
Far away in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.
If thou wouldst glory, let it be in the Lord, by referring everything to Him, and giving to Him all the honor and glory.--VEN. LOUIS DE GRANADA.
Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight, or the open apple-blossom, the toiling work-horse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds, over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law. Where function does not change form does not change. The granite rocks, the ever brooding hills, remain for ages; the lightning lives, comes into shape, and dies in a twinkling. It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law.
Le grand monarque=--The grand monarch, Louis XIV.
Thus, the capital owner is not a parasite or a rentier but a worker — a capital worker. A distinction between labor work and capital work suggests the lines along which we could develop economic institutions capable of dealing with increasingly capital-intensive production, as our present institutions cannot. There is another consideration. Economies can no longer solve their income distribution problem through full employment, even if this ever retreating and questionable goal were entirely achievable. Where capital workers replace labor workers as the major suppliers of goods and services, labor employment alone becomes inadequate because labor’s share of the income arising from production cannot provide the progressively better standard of living that technology is making possible. Labor produces subsistence at best. Capital can produce affluence. To enjoy affluence, all households must engage to an increasing extent in capital work. [Kelso and Hetter, Op. cit. , p. 7.]
Do not disturb yourself with vain curiosity concerning the affairs of others, nor how they conduct themselves, unless your position makes it your duty to do so.--VEN. LOUIS DE BLOIS.
That man is successful who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much, who has gained the respect of the intelligent men and the love of children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who leaves the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who never lacked appreciation of earth's beauty or failed to express it; who looked for the best in others and gave the best he had.
Let me tell you the secret that has lead me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity.
"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."
I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.
The first degree of humility is the fear of God, which we should constantly have before our eyes.--VEN. LOUIS DE BLOIS.
No one has a right to mercy who can not himself show mercy.--VEN. LOUIS DE GRANADA.
Some say this world of trouble Is the only one we need But I’m waiting for that morning When the new world is revealed. Oh, when the saints go marching in, When the saints go marching in, Oh Lord, I want to be in that number, When the saints go marching in!
Marius had hardly made this scene at her with his eyes, when some one crossed the walk. It was a veteran, very much bent, extremely wrinkled, and pale, in a uniform of the Louis XV. pattern, bearing on his breast the little oval plaque of red cloth, with the crossed swords, the soldier's cross of Saint-Louis, and adorned, in addition, with a coat-sleeve, which had no arm within it, with a silver chin and a wooden leg. Marius thought he perceived that this man had an extremely well satisfied air. It even struck him that the aged cynic, as he hobbled along past him, addressed to him a very fraternal and very merry wink, as though some chance had created an understanding between them, and as though they had shared some piece of good luck together. What did that relic of Mars mean by being so contented? What had passed between that wooden leg and the other? Marius reached a paroxysm of jealousy.--"Perhaps he was there!" he said to himself; "perhaps he saw!"--And he felt a desire to exterminate the veteran.
The rising productivity of labor is a myth, a statistical illusion created by measuring combined output in terms of labor input.
There is nothing more unreasonable than to estimate our worth by the opinion of others. Today they laud us to the skies, to-morrow they will cover us with ignominy.--VEN. LOUIS OF GRANADA.
I am utterly convinced that Science and Peace will triumph over Ignorance and War, that nations will eventually unite not to destroy but to edify, and that the future will belong to those who have done the most for the sake of suffering humanity.
While no inference is intended here, it is worth noting, in connection with Milton Friedman’s comment that “Kelso just turned Marx upside down,” that it is not necessarily amiss to turn a fellow upside down if that in fact straightens out his thinking. [Handwritten note on flyleaf of a copy of C. H. Douglas’s Social Credit , June 27, 1973.]
When the sky is free from clouds we can see more clearly the brightness of the sun. In like manner, when the soul is free from sin and the gloom of passion, it participates in the divine light.--VEN. LOUIS DE GRANADA.
When capital owners are few, the private-property conduits of necessity create vast savings reservoirs for those few. If there were many owners, the same conduits would broadly irrigate the economy with purchasing power.
When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.
This is as revolutionary a book as Karl Marx’s Das Capital, only this has a message of hope. The Kelsonian theory would create a world-wide revolution, but it is neither impossible nor necessary to have bloody encounters in order to carry it out. [Review of Louis Kelso and Patricia Hetter’s Two-Factor Theory in the San Francisco Chronicle , September 8, 1968.]
Two things, Christian reader, particularly excite the will of man to good. A principle of justice is one, the other the profit we may derive therefrom. All wise men, therefore, agree that justice and profit are the two most powerful inducements to move our wills to any undertaking. Now, though men seek profit more frequently than justice, yet justice is in itself more powerful; for, as Aristotle teaches, no worldly advantage can equal the excellence of virtue, nor is any loss so great that a wise man should not suffer it rather than yield to vice. [ The Sinner’s Guide (1556).]
There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world.
Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.
Look not to the qualities thou mayest possess, which are wanting to others; but look to those which others possess and which are wanting to thee, that thou mayest acquire them.--VEN. LOUIS DE GRANADA.
Strive always to preserve freedom of spirit, so that you need do nothing with the view of pleasing the world, and that no fear of displeasing it will have power to shake your good resolutions.--VEN. LOUIS DE BLOIS.
Take Milton Friedman, he sits at his desk pontificating about such bunk as the monetary system being the answer to our problems. The monetary system is a legal contrivance. Property, not money, is real wealth. It’s physical, not legal.
Hard-core structural poverty has a counterpart at the apex: hard-core structural affluence.
This is not a utopian concept….The prospects for unleashing economic development and eliminating “give away” under the technique of [Louis Kelso’s] Second-Income Plan has enormous possibility for developing countries. [ A New Focus on Economic Development , El Universo, Guayaquil, Ecuador, April 1, 1969.]
Take this to heart: Owe no man anything. So shalt thou secure a peaceful sleep, an easy conscience, a life without inquietude, and a death without alarm.--VEN. LOUIS DE GRANADA.
We gain nothing by trading the tyranny of capital for the tyranny of labor. Edited by Solomon Goldman, 1954.
I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.
Rather than providing him with economic opportunity, the Act of that name seems designed to make the poor man do penance all his life for the sin of being born into a non-capital-owning family… .One searches it in vain for measure designed to provide economic opportunity to the capital owner. But nobody proposes to educate, train, or rehabilitate either him or his children, even when their “unemployment” is notorious.
If you aren't rich you should always look useful.
The sole missing link is the recognition that the acquisition of capital ownership by the millions is an indispensable goal. That is the turning point — our recognition of the proper goal.
In the eyes of M. Gillenormand, Catherine the Second had made reparation for the crime of the partition of Poland by purchasing, for three thousand roubles, the secret of the elixir of gold, from Bestucheff. He grew animated on this subject: "The elixir of gold," he exclaimed, "the yellow dye of Bestucheff, General Lamotte's drops, in the eighteenth century,--this was the great remedy for the catastrophes of love, the panacea against Venus, at one louis the half-ounce phial. Louis XV. sent two hundred phials of it to the Pope." He would have been greatly irritated and thrown off his balance, had any one told him that the elixir of gold is nothing but the perchloride of iron. M. Gillenormand adored the Bourbons, and had a horror of 1789; he was forever narrating in what manner he had saved himself during the Terror, and how he had been obliged to display a vast deal of gayety and cleverness in order to escape having his head cut off. If any young man ventured to pronounce an eulogium on the Republic in his presence, he turned purple and grew so angry that he was on the point of swooning. He sometimes alluded to his ninety years, and said, "I hope that I shall not see ninety-three twice." On these occasions, he hinted to people that he meant to live to be a hundred.
Liberty is closely connected with property; this is true philosophically, not only in our bills of rights. It is common theory that the idea of property follows immediately from the idea of person. It is philosophically a necessary consequence of it. The right to property is simply an enlargement of the person, and the right of liberty is realized in the right of property. Therefore the institution of property, the suum as related to things, is presupposed by the legal order. The bills of rights do not create it, even as they are not competent to destroy it. The institution of property is like a dowry of the personality. Today this truth is easily proved. Where the institution of property is completely abolished, as in Soviet Russia, man has ceased to be a person and has become a mere tool of the superstate, a mere cog in a non-personal machine. Rightly, therefore, Leo XIII ( Rerum Novarum ) speaks of a slavish yoke that has been imposed on the propertyless modern proletarian. (1) It is morally impossible to exist as a free person without property. The sphere of freedom increases directly with the sphere of property, or contrariwise, as Linsenmann (2) so ably put it, the man who has no property easily becomes himself the property of another man. (3) It is, therefore, a conclusion from the principle of natural law that the institution of property ought to exist. The positive legal order guarantees the pre-existent right to property; it may regulate the use of property; it may constitute certain things to be public property, and so on. The capitalist and the feudalist property orders are but transitory; the institution of property is perennial. We may thus see that there exists a perennial kernel in the concept of suum which precedes its concrete determination in positive law. “Natural Rights of the Person and of the State”, The State in Catholic Thought, St. Louis, Missouri: B. Herder Book Company, 1947, I.vii.ii, pp. 188-189.
We have an economic policy that is just about 10,000 years out of date.
Armed with prayer, the saints sustained a glorious warfare and vanquished all their enemies. By prayer, also, they appeased the wrath of God, and obtained from Him all they desired.--VEN. LOUIS DE GRANADA.
It is one of the greatest economic errors to put any limitation upon production…. We have not the power to produce more than there is a potential to consume. [Testimony, U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations, 1915.]
What happens after you die?" "Lot's of things happen after you die - they just don't involve you.
The best of all prayers is that in which we ask that God's holy will be accomplished, both in ourselves and in others.--VEN. LOUIS DE BLOIS.
As Cardinal Fesch refused to resign, M. de Pins, Archbishop of Amasie, administered the diocese of Lyons. The quarrel over the valley of Dappes was begun between Switzerland and France by a memoir from Captain, afterwards General Dufour. Saint-Simon, ignored, was erecting his sublime dream. There was a celebrated Fourier at the Academy of Science, whom posterity has forgotten; and in some garret an obscure Fourier, whom the future will recall. Lord Byron was beginning to make his mark; a note to a poem by Millevoye introduced him to France in these terms: a certain Lord Baron. David d'Angers was trying to work in marble. The Abbe Caron was speaking, in terms of praise, to a private gathering of seminarists in the blind alley of Feuillantines, of an unknown priest, named Felicite-Robert, who, at a latter date, became Lamennais. A thing which smoked and clattered on the Seine with the noise of a swimming dog went and came beneath the windows of the Tuileries, from the Pont Royal to the Pont Louis XV.; it was a piece of mechanism which was not good for much; a sort of plaything, the idle dream of a dream-ridden inventor; an utopia--a steamboat. The Parisians stared indifferently at this useless thing. M. de Vaublanc, the reformer of the Institute by a coup d'etat, the distinguished author of numerous academicians, ordinances, and batches of members, after having created them, could not succeed in becoming one himself. The Faubourg Saint-Germain and the pavilion de Marsan wished to have M. Delaveau for prefect of police, on account of his piety. Dupuytren and Recamier entered into a quarrel in the amphitheatre of the School of Medicine, and threatened each other with their fists on the subject of the divinity of Jesus Christ. Cuvier, with one eye on Genesis and the other on nature, tried to please bigoted reaction by reconciling fossils with texts and by making mastodons flatter Moses.
Live always in the certainty that whatever happens to you is the result of divine Providence; because nothing hard or laborious falls to your lot without the Lord permitting it.--VEN. LOUIS DE BLOIS.
There is more to life than material well-being. Who would claim that the wholly wage-dependent family enjoys the dignity, the security, the range of choice and the autonomy (not to mention the leisure and freedom) of the family even partially supported by capital ownership?
“In the shadow of the old order, a small, spirited group of Americans campaigned audaciously to construct a new order — the U.S. economy reorganized around Louis Kelso’s revolutionary principle of universal capital ownership. The revolution, these ambitious activists decided, ought to begin right in the nation’s capital — Washington, D.C. — a city mired in financial insolvency, with accelerating social and economic deterioration, with extremes of wealth and poverty as stark as any found in America. Under congressional oversight, the District of Columbia could become the laboratory, they thought, the place where Kelso’s ideas were actually applied. If the concept worked for D.C., every city and region in America would want to emulate it…. The power of Louis Kelso’s vision… has attracted an odd assortment of converts-idealists from right and left and from across the usual racial and religious divides, people who believed Kelso’s thinking held the key for renewing American society. Some of them joined with [Norman] Kurland in his Center for Economic and Social Justice to promote a daring experiment: Congress should designate the District of Columbia a “super empowerment zone” that would launch new enterprises and industries (and privatize some governmental functions) through Kelso’s mechanism of citizen and worker ownership trusts. new economic development would be attracted to D.C., not by tax subsidies or relaxed laws, but because low-interest capital credit would be available to the community trusts-cheap credit provided through the Federal Reserve’s discount lending. [ One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism , Chapter 18, pp. 432-433.]
But would the young do any better under the same circumstances? Will they do any better when their turns come? The answer is that youth would not and cannot, given the financial and economic framework within which the elders are operating. While the moral convictions of individuals are important in the long run, it is institutions that determine the immediate course of events — particularly the institutions of finance. [ Op. cit. , p.163.]
Everyone should own a piece of the wealth-producing capital of this country, but not everyone can be a manager. Or should be.
The works of Louis O. Kelso and Patricia Hetter are an essential starting point for reading on black enterprise. The authors develop the wealth-making techniques of credit leverage as one of the most efficient and direct methods of producing affluence in a poor society. The program is brilliantly creative and specific. [ Black Capitalism: Strategy for Business in the Ghetto .]
Technology plows through history at an accelerating rate, shifting the burden of production off labor onto the nonhuman factor because man uses his highest ingenuity to avoid servile labor.
wife, and he wanted to make sure his son
Paris has an AEsop-Mayeux, and a Canidia, Mademoiselle Lenormand. It is terrified, like Delphos at the fulgurating realities of the vision; it makes tables turn as Dodona did tripods. It places the grisette on the throne, as Rome placed the courtesan there; and, taking it altogether, if Louis XV. is worse than Claudian, Madame Dubarry is better than Messalina. Paris combines in an unprecedented type, which has existed and which we have elbowed, Grecian nudity, the Hebraic ulcer, and the Gascon pun. It mingles Diogenes, Job, and Jack-pudding, dresses up a spectre in old numbers of the Constitutional, and makes Chodruc Duclos.
Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notion of time; effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end…
Private property works like circuitry in electronics, or piping in hydraulics. It conveys wages to the owners of labor power, as well as the various forms of nonwage property income to the owners of capital. In itself, it is no more responsible for maldistribution of purchasing power than the science of bookkeeping is responsible for bankruptcy.
Do not do unto others as you would they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
There is nothing of such force as the power of a person content merely to be himself, nothing so invincible as the power of simple honesty, nothing so successful as the life of one who runs alone.
Before engaging in your private devotions, perform those which obedience and your duty toward your neighbor impose upon you in such a manner as to make an abnegation of self.--VEN. LOUIS DE BLOIS.
The first principle of economic symmetry: building the economic power to consume simultaneously with the industrial power to produce.
The schemes to set up blacks in cleaning stores, gas stations, hamburger stands and fried-chicken franchises, all the low-profit, low-capital enterprises, will rivet the Black man to the least remunerative section of the economy forever. The best such prospects offer are the dissatisfactions of blue-collar life. The big money ain’t in pumping rationed gas in an Amoco station leased in your very own name, but in having stock in Exxon.
The Champs-Elysees, filled with sunshine and with people, were nothing but light and dust, the two things of which glory is composed. The horses of Marly, those neighing marbles, were prancing in a cloud of gold. Carriages were going and coming. A squadron of magnificent body-guards, with their clarions at their head, were descending the Avenue de Neuilly; the white flag, showing faintly rosy in the setting sun, floated over the dome of the Tuileries. The Place de la Concorde, which had become the Place Louis XV. once more, was choked with happy promenaders. Many wore the silver fleur-de-lys suspended from the white-watered ribbon, which had not yet wholly disappeared from button-holes in the year 1817. Here and there choruses of little girls threw to the winds, amid the passersby, who formed into circles and applauded, the then celebrated Bourbon air, which was destined to strike the Hundred Days with lightning, and which had for its refrain:--
He frowned and tutted as he swabbed the vomit from the man's robes, and transferred his irritation to Pelagia's goat, which had entered the room and leapt up onto the table. 'Stupid brute' he shouted at it, and it looked at him impudently with its slotted eyes, as if to say, 'I, at least, am not drunk. I am merely mischievous.
How strange it seems that education, in practice, so often means suppression: that instead of leading the mind outward to the light of day it crowds things in upon it that darken and weary it. Yet evidently the true object of education, now as ever, is to develop the capabilities of the head and of the heart.