The goal of moral values is to shine like constellations in our lives, lighting the path toward the perfection of our character. The word perfection traces back to the Latin perfectio, meaning to complete or finish. In a wider sense, it calls us to bring something to its fullest bloom, much like a life ripening into maturity. The Latin perfectus means to have acted or finished, mirroring the perfect tense in grammar, which marks something fully realized.
For ancient philosophers, perfection was the music of harmony, order, and proportion. Plato saw perfection as the flawless fit, where nothing was out of place.
In Christian philosophy, Jesus established perfection as a fundamental standard: “Be perfect as your Heavenly Father is.” While Matthew uses “perfect,” Luke uses “merciful,” reflecting early Christians’ belief that mercy best represents God’s character. St. Augustine, in De perfectione iustitiae hominis (PL 44 c. 233 n.), discusses the pursuit of perfection, defining a perfect person not as one who has achieved perfection, but as one who strives for it. Moral values guide this journey.
Here, we invite you, our esteemed reader, to explore perspectives on these values that have been shared by humanity for centuries, and to discover stories of remarkable individuals—especially from the Indo-Pacific—who have brought these ideals to life.
Few own the productive wealth that displaces millions of jobs worldwide. Most people are dependent on these owners, or the government, for their job or welfare incomes. Widespread capital ownership, on the other hand, is the keystone of the social doctrine … The necessity of universal citizen access to equal opportunity, and the means to acquire and own capital, becomes increasingly evident in today’s global, high-tech world. Social justice promotes laws to extend access to bank-financed capital credit to all citizens as a fundamental human right, like the right to vote. Therefore, everyone would be able to purchase capital by promising to pay for the capital once it becomes profitable, assuming that the promise is good, and the capital does, in fact, make a profit.
Mr. Kurland was a lawyer and economist, pioneer of employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) and a leading global advocate for “the Just Third Way,” a post-scarcity development model that transcends both capitalism and socialism by combining free markets with the democratization of economic power and capital ownership. He was as President of the all-volunteer Center for Economic and Social Justice (CESJ), a non-profit think tank headquartered in Arlington, Virginia that he co-founded with Fr. William Ferree and other economic and social justice advocates in 1984. Mr. Kurland also founded and heads Equity Expansion International, Inc., an “investment banking firm He was a co-founder of Global Justice Movement and the American Revolutionary Party launched in April 2005. He has taught binary economics and binary policy reforms in privatization seminars at the International Law Institute in Washington, D.C.
.