The Federal Government – including its Treasury Department – and the Federal Reserve Bank are We The People. Whether blundering or competent, they constitute We acting upon and among ourselves by their agency. They are not purely independent third parties.
Just a brief comment on the “third party” reference.
If I understand you correctly, a similar problem occurs in the narratives we often see in education. Pervasive is the idea that PUBLIC education is on the same plane with private and so-called charter schools which are ordered around a variety of capitalist principles often dressed up in pubic service and ”STUDENT’S FIRST” language. Public schools are often portrayed as unfair competitors, carrying along the assumption that they are grounded in capitalist rather than public service principles.
The general public in the US, and so many parents and even teachers, I am sorry to say, doesn’t understand the massive difference, having been rendered brain dead by a lack of civics and history education, and by a generation saturated with me-first and capitalist-only ideas. (If you think “Orwell,” you probably should.)
There is evidence over the last 20 years, (at least) if not before, of the systemization of such ideas by those who really don’t want, and will work against, anything that looks like democratic principles at work, as are remote but present in the foundations of We the People reference above, and in those of us who bring them rightly to an objectivist economic theory.
Before you put me in the wrong camp of thought, as I see it, Lonergan’s theory is truly scientific and so not intrinsically political. However, as intrinsically related to human beings, it has many political uses and implications, some of which are quite raw, being available for use (once understood) by all sorts of political genres and distorted mentalities. That’s why education is so important to us “Lonergan people.” (As you must know, there is a huge spiritual/political virus on the land.)
BTW, who are you? Do put some of your own names on this site besides just the list. And I’m not the only one who wonders about this. Catherine Blanche King