On Distributism

Answer to John Cort
An Excerpt
By Dorothy Day
The Catholic Worker, December 1948

"Yes, we are quite willing to think in terms of immediate needs, the immediate struggle and I think we show that willingness to deal with the actual and the concrete in every issue of our paper which reach, we remind you, 65,000 people every month. That is the number of papers which go out. As to how many people see them, that is another matter. Oftentimes statisticians think in terms of so many readers to each paper, so that circulation figures are not too certain.

We deal with conditions of work, with wages, with housing, and the existence of our Houses of Hospitality in New York, for men and for women, in Rochester, in Harrisburg, in Pittsburgh (there it has been taken over by the diocese, but we started it), in Cleveland and Detroit testify to that. Our breadlines become longer. In New York, where jobs are scarce in spite of full employment in the rest of the country, we serve 800 meals a day at least. We have our feet in the gutters. Louis Murphy, of the Detroit house, says that we are the gutter sweepers of the diocese.

Just the same, I'd like to call our farm at Newburgh, The Ivory Tower. It is a title of the Blessed Mother, you will recall.

But we plead with our readers to keep a long view, a long range program of action. Hilaire Belloc, in his Restoration of Property, gives a good blueprint for action. He talks about large-scale machinery, what must come under common ownership (and he endorses communal as against state ownership) and what can be broken up into smaller units. His book is short, is factual, is practical, and it is just republished by Sheed and Ward, for two dollars in this country, and there is a seventy-five cent paper covered edition published in England.

One of the saddest things about this whole controversy is that our opponents look upon agrarianism as visionary. Here is what Chesterton said about such a criticism:

"They say it (the peasant society) is Utopian, and they are right. They say it is idealistic, and they are right. They say it is quixotic, and they are right. It deserves every name that will indicate how completely they have driven justice out of the world; every name that measure how remote from them and their sort is the standard of honorable living; every name that will emphasize and repeat the fact that property and liberty are sundered from them and theirs, by an abyss between heaven and hell."

This sounds pretty harsh from the gentle Chesterton, but we, who witness the thousands of refugees from our ruthless industrialism, year after year, the homeless, the hungry, the crippled, the maimed, and see the lack of sympathy and understanding, the lack of Christian charity accorded them (to most they represent the loafers and the bums, and our critics shrink in horror to hear them compared to Christ, as our Lord Himself compared them) to us, I say, who daily suffer the ugly reality of industrial capitalism and its fruits--these words of Chesterton ring strong."

Starbucks illustrates the weakness of global economy

by Athanasius

A little tidbit in the news caught my attention today, apparently Starbucks is going to raise its prices. The article identified the following as the main reason:

Starbucks Corp will raise U.S. prices on coffee, lattes and other drinks by an average of 9 cents a cup next week to help offset soaring costs for milk and other commodities, a spokesman said on Monday....U.S. milk prices have soared recently amid strong global demand for dairy products and higher production costs.

This is interesting to me. It has been argued by our Capitalist opponents that not only does economic liberalism provide us with more efficiency (which is false) but it provides us with lower prices too. The latter claim is sometimes true. Yet let us look at this situation. Because of the increasingly nationalized and globalized economy, one off set in one place potentially can raise costs in other sectors. Because the costs of milk production are going up (due to national diversion of corn toward worthless bio-fuels and high gas prices) the national market price goes up, and consequently anything made which uses milk by say, restaurants. So, in spite of the efficiency and low prices we are supposed to get with Capitalism, the prices are going up.

Now I will contrast this with a local example. Not far from my small abode, there is a coffee shop, privately owned, which produces brewed coffees, lattes and blended whipped drinks much like Starbucks. Personally I think they are better than Starbucks, but we'll leave that aside, that is scarcely the point. They get local milk from local farmers, coffee from local roasters, and their prices are lower than Starbucks by more than 20 cents for every comparable product. Why? Simply because a local market is not as subject to national trends as a national market is, and is therefore much more efficient, reducing the number of hands and the resources used to ship, and therefore lower the prices. This is why Distributism focuses on creating local markets, because they more effectively control prices and create more efficient markets than Capitalism does.

To buttress this point about local markets, we should also consider the health effects, or defects of large global markets. One need only reference the tainted food coming from China that we keep hearing about in the news. Closer to home, the average McDonald's hamburger has meat from hundreds of cattle all over the country. If an infection of any kind occurred in one of the steers, it could taint a huge amount of meat! On the other hand, if your meat comes from a local butcher, with steers that are identifiable, it is that much easier to identify and contain outbreaks of disease among cattle.

A local market helps to attain more efficiency and more control over costs and ownership, by eliminating the number of hands capital must pass through before it is produced into wealth or consumed, and consequently, spreads ownership far and wide through numerous local economies rather than concentrating all wealth in the hands of a few owners located in diverse locations around the world.

Darwin to the Left, Darwin to the Right

By Gen Ferrer

Distributists argued amongst themselves about...distributism. Their opinions varied. Because of this fact, today there still abound suspicions in many circles, particularly by conservative and progressive elements in the Church who do not understand distributist thought due to prejudice. Appropriation of values by historically recent economical thinking has deflated what were once timeless qualities.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton himself published a response to former socialist turned distributist Arthur Penty in his famous newspaper. Penty was a terrific writer in regards to the guilds, however failing to shed all of his prior ideological baggage, once accused Chesterton of Laissez-faire capitalism. Chesterton responded amusingly:

Laissez-faire was in theory a proposal to let anybody do what he liked. But it was in practice a proposal to let anybody do what he could. And the proposal was never even proposed, until it was perfectly plain that the rich were the only people who could do anything.

What the peasant has is exactly what the Individualist never has and the Socialist never has; common sense. That is, he has a sense of proportion - and disproportion. He knows where to draw the line; instead of loosening all law at one end of the argument, or forbidding all liberty at the other.

(G.K.'s Weekly August 21, 1926)

It is true Chesterton was attempting to make a valid point. Man is real, not mechanical. He is neither a chaotic beast, nor a member of egalitarian fiction. Distributists, a product of these truths, will differ in certain applications but their goals will be the same:

Two writers like Mr. Kenrick and Colonel Acland might differ very much; but they agree that property ought to be distributed and one might think one method and one another. But it is nonsense for me to tell the Socialist that my way of scattering property is a more practical way of concentrating property. It is nonsense for him to tell me that I ought to accept the abolition of ownership as the only really practical establishment of ownership. In other words, the word "practical" is meaningless between us.

(G.K.'s Weekly June 13, 1929)

Distributists believed in the family as the matrix of society. Ownership is meant to serve man in his daily life so he may in turn dedicate his life to family, community and above all, salvation. They rejected the progressives for their abolishing private property. These instituted regulations only serve the State. Likewise, the conservatives accepted progressive policies looking the other way at property accumulation by the wealthy (to the detriment of the peasantry) and continue to eye the State as an obstacle to this objective. What the current economic models offer is not as different as we may suspect. While they reject each other’s methods, they employ the same intrinsic materialist portrait of mankind. For the socialist, man is simply an animal without rights to anymore quality or quantity as another. If man is an animal, capitalists retort, we must fight to survive leaving only the weakest animals to their own devices through natural selection. Beyond moral criticism, we must bow to the irresistible and neutral mechanism just as natural as the laws of physics. In either case, the ends justify the means. Man is reduced from the dignity of God's creation to a pile of genetic uncertainty.

The soul of man, as our Church teaches, is not only worth saving but necessitates salvation.

Yet it is not rash by any means to say that the whole scheme of social economic life is now such as to put in the way of vast numbers of mankind most serious obstacles which prevent them from caring for the one thing necessary; namely, their eternal salvation

(Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno)

People differ in capacity, skill, health, strength; and unequal fortune is a necessary result of unequal condition. Such inequality is far from being disadvantageous either to individuals or to the community.

(Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum)

These words from Pope Leo XIII display his understanding both of the true nature of man, as well as man’s real contribution to society. Man is unique, man will live in variable environments, and individual success will not harm the community at large but rather would prove a benefit. A synthesis between individualism, the social nature of property and business must exist.

Finally, Pius XI certainly understood the pitfalls of what we today call "rugged individualism" or the usurping of individual property to the absorption of the State through socialism. His words, as authoritative as they were prophetic, describe the proper order of man and his relation to society versus the Darwinian cloud on the left and right.

For, as one is wrecked upon, or comes close to, what is known as "individualism" by denying or minimizing the social and public character of the right of property, so by rejecting or minimizing the private and individual character of this same right, one inevitably runs into "collectivism" or at least closely approaches its tenets.

An Englishman's house is his castle

by Leo

"... An Englishman's house is his castle. This is honestly entertaining; for as it happens the Englishman is almost the only man in Europe whose house is not his castle. Nearly everywhere else exists the assumption of peasant proprietorship; that a poor man may be a landlord, though he is only lord of his own land. Making the landlord and the tenant the same person has certain trivial advantages, as that the tenant pays no rent, while the landlord does a little work. But I am not concerned with the defense of small proprietorship, but merely with the fact that it exists almost everywhere except in England. It is also true, however, that this estate of small possession is attacked everywhere today; it has never existed among ourselves, and it may be destroyed among our neighbors. We have, therefore, to ask ourselves what it is in human affairs generally, and in this domestic ideal in particular, that has really ruined the natural human creation, especially in this country.

Man has always lost his way. He has been a tramp ever since Eden; but he always knew, or thought he knew, what he was looking for. Every man has a house somewhere in the elaborate cosmos; his house waits for him waist deep in slow Norfolk rivers or sunning itself upon Sussex downs. Man has always been looking for that home which is the subject matter of this book. But in the bleak and blinding hail of skepticism to which he has been now so long subjected, he has begun for the first time to be chilled, not merely in his hopes, but in his desires. For the first time in history he begins really to doubt the object of his wanderings on the earth. He has always lost his way; but now he has lost his address.

Under the pressure of certain upper-class philosophies... the average man has really become bewildered about the goal of his efforts; and his efforts, therefore, grow feebler and feebler. His simple notion of having a home of his own is derided as bourgeois, as sentimental, or as despicably Christian. Under various verbal forms he is recommended to go on to the streets-- which is called Individualism; or to the work-house--which is called Collectivism. We shall consider this process somewhat more carefully in a moment. But it may be said here that Hudge and Gudge, or the governing class generally, will never fail for lack of some modern phrase to cover their ancient predominance. The great lords will refuse the English peasant his three acres and a cow on advanced grounds, if they cannot refuse it longer on reactionary grounds. They will deny him the three acres on grounds of State Ownership. They will forbid him the cow on grounds of humanitarianism.

And this brings us to the ultimate analysis of this singular influence that has prevented doctrinal demands by the English people. There are, I believe, some who still deny that England is governed by an oligarchy. It is quite enough for me to know that a man might have gone to sleep some thirty years ago over the day's newspaper and woke up last week over the later newspaper, and fancied he was reading about the same people. In one paper he would have found a Lord Robert Cecil, a Mr. Gladstone, a Mr. Lyttleton, a Churchill, a Chamberlain, a Trevelyan, an Acland. In the other paper he would find a Lord Robert Cecil, a Mr. Gladstone, a Mr. Lyttleton, a Churchill, a Chamberlain, a Trevelyan, an Acland. If this is not being governed by families I cannot imagine what it is. I suppose it is being governed by extraordinary democratic coincidences."

-G. K. Chesterton, What's wrong with the World.."

A glimpse of the past, and a peek at the future, Chesterton described what is common American practice, not only has the common man lost his way and his address, but has also completely forgotten why he is on his way and has now fallen prey to the predators on the road, i. e. the industrial capitalist, who preys on his capital with the use of big industry. This model of a man owning his own home and making it his "castle" is the ideal for every man, no matter how meager it may be, for in his own home a man is truly free. We note above that it is stated that this ideal is attacked almost everywhere, yet I daresay that had our man lived in contemporary times, he should say that it is lost to the capitalist bankers, and that now the common man merely rents his home from the bank for a monthly or yearly fee, and that these bankers now deny a man his 3 acres & cow for still the same reasons if only under a new name, the current denial of private property is still being advanced by the plutocracy of the ruling families of America, in England's footsteps.

Vintage Distributism

The Hopeful One
By G.K. Chesterton



I could fill this book with examples of the universal, unconscious assumption that life and sex must live by the laws of "business" or industrialism, and not vice versa; examples from all the magazines, novels, and newspapers. In order to make it brief and typical, I take the one case of a more or less Eugenist sort from a paper that lies open in front of me- a paper that still bears on its forehead the boast of being peculiarly an organ of democracy in revolt. To this a man writes to say that the spread of destitution will never be stopped until we have educated the lower classes in the methods by which the upper classes prevent procreation. The man had the horrible playfullness to sign his letter "Hopeful". Well, there are certainly methods by which people in the upper classes prevent procreation; one of them is what used to be called "platonic friendship," till they found another name for it at the Old Bailey.

I do not suppose the hopeful gentleman hopes for this; but some of us find the abortion he does hope for almost as abominable. That however, is not the curious point. The curious point is that the hopeful one concludes by saying, "When people have large families and small wages, not only is there a high infantile death-rate, but often those who do live to grow up are stunted and weakened by having had to share the family income for a time with those who died early. There would be less unhappiness if there were no unwanted children." You will observe that he tacitly takes it for granted that the small wages and the income, desperately shared, are the fixed points, like day and night, the conditions of human life. Compared with them marriage and maternity are luxuries, things to be modified to suit the wage-market. There are unwanted children; but unwanted by whom?

This man does not really mean that the parents do not want to have them. He means that the employers do not want to pay them properly. Doubtless, if you say to him directly, "Are you in favor of low wages" he would say, "No." But I am not, in this chapter, talking about the effect on such modern minds of a cross-examination to which they do not subject themselves. I am talking about the way their minds work, the instinctive trick and turn of their thoughts, the things they assume before argument, and the way they faintly feel that the world is going. And, frankly, the turn of their mind is to tell the child he is not wanted, as the turn of my mind is to tell the profiteer he is not wanted. Motherhood, they feel, and a full childhood, and the beauty of brothers and sisters, are good things in their way, but not so good as a bad wage. About the mutilation of womanhood and the massacre of men unborn, he signs himself "Hopeful." He is hopeful of female indignity, hopeful of human annihilation. But about improving the small bad wage he signs himself "Hopeless".

Distributism and the Web

by John Médaille

Distributism is about giving as many families as possible the means of production. In the past, this largely meant land and tools, the space and means of making one's own living in cooperation with others. These days, there is a new kind of space, cyber-space, and new means, computers and networks. And while these new things, these rerum novarum, will never displace the old, they can augment them, providing a new center of resistance to the capitalist tendency to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a few at the expense of the many. Don Ward has written an interesting article on this topic, Distributism and Web 2.0. Check it out!

On Pilgrimage

Excerpt from
On Pilgrimage
Dorothy Day

"...The alternatives are not capitalism or socialism. We must take into consideration the nature of man and his needs, not just cash [for] commodities, food, and clothing, but a home, a bit of land, and the tools with which to work, part ownership in workshops and stores and factories.

Distributism does not mean that everyone must be a farmer. The Distributist thinks in terms of the village economy, and as for the size of the CITY (the city of God) which Cardinal Suhard talks of our building, that is a matter of situation. It may be five hundred, it may be five thousand, it may be fifty thousand population. The main thing to do is to distribute the cities before the atom bomb does it. We are not suggesting that it be done by force but by education. If that seems too slow a method, probably depression, war, hunger, and homelessness will play their part. We only know it is not human to live in a city of ten million. It is not only not human, it is not possible. "Cities are the occasion of sin," Father Vincent McNabb said, and of course any theologian will say that we should flee the occasions of sin. Pope Pius XII pointed out that it was difficult for modern youth to live in the cities without heroic virtue. (And it was never intended that the good life should demand heroic virtue.)

Distributism does not mean that we throw out the machine. The machine, Peter Maurin used to say, should be the extension of the hand of man. If we could do away with the assembly line, the slavery of the machine, and the useless and harmful and destructive machines, we would be doing well.

In the psalms it says, "Lord, make me desire to walk in the way of Thy commandments." Daniel was called a man of desires, and because he was a man of desires, the Lord heard him.

Cardinal Suhard of Paris and Father de Lubac, S.J., both cry out against the refusal of some traditionalists to be co-creators with God and use the tools which science has put in mans hands. But Father de Lubac also writes (in The Dublin Review), "Does not the discovery of new values involve the depreciation of other, perhaps more fundamental ones? And does it not breed, even while the discovery is still modest and tentative, a kind of intoxication, so that the passionate interest it arouses tends to make men oblivious of everything else, even of essentials? And so ambiguous situations pile up, leading inevitably to crises whose outcome no one can safely prophesy."

But the essentials are food, clothing, and shelter. The essential is ownership, which brings with it responsibility, and what is more essential than the earth from which we all spring, and from which comes our food, our clothes, our furniture, our homes?

It is as a woman, a mother, speaking for the family and the home, that I protest the work of "priest-sociologists," who in their desire to help the worker are going along with him in his errors and are accepting the easy way of capitalist industrialism, which leads to collectivism and the totalitarian state.

The warning is there, [in] Isaiah 26:56:

He shall bring down them that dwell on high; the high city he shall lay low. He shall bring it down even unto the ground; he shall pull it down even to the dust. The foot shall tread it down; the feet of the poor, the steps of the needy.

[So] "strengthen ye the feeble hands, and confirm the weak knees. Say to the fainthearted, Take courage and fear not. Behold, your God will bring the bread of recompense. God Himself will come and save you.""

Vintage Distributism

The Three Foes of the Family
by G.K. Chesterton

It was certainly a very brilliant lightning-flash of irony by which Mr. Aldous Huxley lit up the whole loathsome landscape of his satirical Utopia, of synthetic humanity and manufactured men and women, by the old romantic quotation of "Brave New World". The quotation comes, of course, from the supreme moment of the magic of youth, nourished by the magic of old age, when Miranda the marvellous becomes Miranda the marvelling, at the unique wonder of first love. To use it for the very motto of a system which having lost all innocence, would necessarily lose all wonder, was a touch of very withering wit. And yet it will be well to remember that, in comparison with some other worlds where the same work is done more weakly and quite as wickedly, the Utopia of the extremists really has something of the intellectual integrity which belongs to extremes, even of madness. In that sense the two ironical adjectives are not merely ironical. The horrible human, or inhuman, hive described in Mr. Huxley's romance is certainly a base world, and a filthy world, and a fundamentally unhappy world. But it is in one sense a new world; and it is in one sense a brave world. At least a certain amount of bravery, as well as brutality, would have to be shown before anything of the sort could be established in the world of fact. It would need some courage, and even some self-sacrifice, to establish anything so utterly disgusting as that.

But the same work is being done in other worlds that are not particularly new, and not in the least brave. There are people of another sort, much more common and conventional, who are not only working to create such a paradise of cowardice, but who actually try to work for it through a conspiracy of cowards. The attitude of these people towards the Family and the tradition of its Christian virtues is the attitude of men willing to wound and yet afraid to strike; or ready to sap and mine so long as they are not called upon to fire or fight in the open. And those who do this who write in the most respectable and conventional Capitalist newspapers. It cannot be too often repeated that what destroyed the Family in the modern world was Capitalism. No doubt it might have been Communism, if Communism had ever had a chance, outside that semi-Mongolian wilderness where it actually flourishes. But so far as we are concerned, what has broken up households and encouraged divorces, and treated the old domestic virtues with more and more open contempt, is the epoch and power of Capitalism. It is Capitalism that ahs forced a moral feud and a commercial competition between the sexes; that has destroyed the influence of the parent in favor of the influence of the employer; that ahs driven men from their homes to look for jobs; that has forced them to live near their factories or their firms instead of near their families; and, above all, that has encouraged for commercial reasons, a parade of publicity and garish novelty, which is in its nature the death of all that was called dignity and modesty by our mothers and fathers. It is not the Bolshevist but the Boss, the publicity man, the salesman and the commercial advertiser who have, like a rush and riot of barbarians, thrown down and trampled under foot the ancient Roman statue of Verecundia. But because the thing is done by men of this sort, of course it is done in their own muggy and muddle-headed way; by all the irresponsible tricks of their fouls Suggestion and their filthy Psychology. It is done for instance by perpetually guying the old Victorian virtues or limitations which, as they are no longer there, are not likely to retaliate. It is done more by pictures than by printed words; because printed words are supposed to make some sense and a man may be answerable for printing them. Stiff and hideous effigies of women in crinolines or bonnets are paraded, as if that could possibly be all there was to see when Maud came into the garden, and was saluted by such a song.

Fortunately, Maud's friends, who would have challenged the pressman and photographer to a duel, are all dead; and these satirists of Victorianism are very careful to find out that all their enemies are dead. Some of their bold caricaturists have been known to charge an old fashioned bathing-machine as courageously as if it were a machine-gun. It is convenient thus courageously to attack bathing-machines, because there are no bathing-machines to attack. Then they balance these things by photographs of the Modern Girl at various stages of the nudist movement; and trust that anything so obviously vulgar is bound to be popular. For the rest, the Modern Girl is floated on a sea of sentimental sloppiness; a continuous gush about her frankness and freshness, the perfect naturalness of her painting her face or the unprecedented courage of her having no children. The whole is diluted with a dreary hypocrisy about comradeship, fare more sentimental than the old fashioned sentiment. When I see the family sinking in these swamps of amorphous amorous futility, I feel inclined to say "Give me the Communists." Better Bolshevist battles and the Brave New World than the ancient house of man rotted away silently by such worms of secret sensuality and individual appetite. "The coward does it with a kiss, the brave man with a sword."

But there is, curiously enough, a third thing of the kind, which I am really inclined to think I dislike even more than the other two. It is not the Communist attacking the family or the Capitalist betraying the family; it is the vast and very astonishing vision of the Hitlerite defending the family. Hitler's way of defending the independence of the family is to make every family dependent on him and his semi-Socialist State; and to preserve the authority of parents by authoritatively telling all the parents what to do. His notion of keeping sacred the dignity of domestic life is to issue peremptory orders that the grandfather is to get up at five in the morning and do dumb-bell exercises, or the grandmother to march twenty miles to a camp to procure a Swastika flag. In other words, he appears to interfere with family life more even than the Bolshevists do; and to do it in the name of the sacredness of the family. It is not much more encouraging than the other two social manifestations; but at least it is more entertaining.

The New Laws

by Gen Ferrer

One of the pop criticisms launched against Distributism is the one of enlarging the State or allegedly supporting further government intervention in the lives of it's citizens through the implementation of laws curbing Big Business. Their claim is that Distributism would only create increasingly bureaucratic avenues limiting the rights of the entrepreneur and robbing the consumer of value (value defined as quantity at low cost, not quality).

The State, they say, has no right to take away freedom of choice.

There is certainly a little irony in those words, especially coming from Catholics.

Truth is uncomfortable. In modern society, truth is pushed to a distance, forgotten or better yet ignored for the sake of choice. But choice does not change the intrinsic nature of anything. I may choose to believe fetuses are not living organisms but it does not change the fact they are living. I may choose to believe an undeveloped organism is less worthy of life than an organism in its 30's and ignore that I, a 33 year old, am still not fully developed.

This leads us back to the original criticism. Is it true Distributism seeks to generate a larger State than we already have in the Western World? Is it like socialism, looking to micro-manage the market and eliminate the choices of the average consumer?

All of us can recognise our local and federal laws could feed a nation with all the pork found in them. There are laws for just about everything, from what constitutes a drug to what districts may permit variance in home architecture. Distributism doesn't seek to peddle more laws into the books, but rather to remove most of the laws we have and institute laws to protect its citizens from abuses found in minority citizenry with the majority wealth. Majority wealth, as found in post-Revolution countries, while the rest of its citizens stood in line at the bread market.

This was the great prophecy of Gilbert Keith Chetserton. He could see capitalism slipping into socialism and depending on federal control for its very existence. What greater example of this than the exportation of our manufacturing and services? No longer can the capitalist hide behind the mantra of exporting capitalism to communist nations when anyone can open their eyes to see the capitalists need these nations to remain communist.

Those who choose to believe Distributism creates an obstacle to economic growth (while we freely admit economic growth is secondary to man's spiritual growth) fail to view laws and/or incentives promoting self-ownership liberate the stimulation of the economy. It creates self-sustainment even if its primary focus isn't the GNP. Laws that are on the side of the small business owner, government encouraging private ownership (versus public ownership) and inheritance are beneficial to the sustainment of the family, which is the cornerstone of society.

Today most citizens of the West insist laws only benefit the common man by allowing vendors, who consider employment a matter of cost to be reduced, to sell necessary goods at the lowest price without acknowledging the direct hit to labour, whether white or blue collar. There is a cemented refusal to see the consumer and labourer is one and the same. The greatest failure of foresight has been our own, the average citizen so bent on the short term we purposely ignore the long. A small few have literally banked on this intentional blind faith and for a taste of leasing cheap replicas of wealth we have surrendered.

Distributism believes only local regulation and local economics is the future of mankind because it isn't afraid to look to the past. Certainly this requires new laws, but it also means the restoration of old laws and cutting away the majority of ones we currently have.Distributists realise the global economy is only vital to the (minority) wealthy. Those who control the sweatshops, the day labourers, and the natural resources of this earth gab about how important this shift in focus is for Westerners, yet local economy matters to the majority struggling to afford a house, spend time with their kids, take the family to Mass and offer their creativity to God through self-ownership

Inefficiency and modern retail

by Athanasius

"If a peasant can grow a cabbage himself, cook it himself, and eat it himself, he has so far attained the maximum of efficiency and certainly the maximum of economy. Organization means that he must trust the cabbage to strangers on a train, strangers on a trolly, strangers in a shop, until by infinite financial complications he can get it exchanged for a turnip or a cauliflower; and at every one of those stages it is in danger from every one of those strangers. I am not saying that he should not change his cabbage for a cauliflower, or that the exchange could be made without some organization. What I say is that if there is some organization there will be some inefficiency; and if there is more Organization there will be more inefficiency..... That luckless vegetable has been lost in a forest of men, as trees walking; of men of the sort summarized as mostly fools; of human trees which are at least tolerably green. It is almost a wonder that the peasant does not preserve the vegetable in a shrine instead of putting it on a dish."

-Chesterton, On Organization and Efficiency

It seems to me a strange thing, that in our day in age people identify bigger production and business with more efficiency. The truth is, as anyone on the inside will tell you, it brings exactly the opposite.

For example, since my exodus from education, after a short stint as a secretary I ended up in retail, and now work as an assistant manager in a large retail organization, not by choice but by necessity. Now the belief is that large grocery stores and large retail operations such as Walmart and Target get more goods into their shops than the small time grocer or hardware store of old and carry more variety, and do so more efficiently. It is a belief about as firmly rooted in reality as Santa Clause or the Tooth Fairy. Behind the receiving doors of huge stores, waxed floors and massive displays of toilet paper, there is money lost left and right, squashed underneath the boots of receivers, rotting in unopened boxes, destroyed by carelessness, not stocked through sloth, and a dozen other things which cause the profit margin of the store to go down. Let's take Walmart, the company I am unfortunate to find my employment with at this time. There are stores that do over a million dollars in sales each week yet lose money! The second problem is of course what Chesterton described, the forest of human hands that a thing must pass through before it gets to your cabinet at home. Many of the people who work under me are good people, in as much as they know their own business. Yet they don't see the big picture, and if they have no role in the bigger scheme they couldn't conceive of it if you explained it to them. Stockers do not understand that they are creating profit for the department, as I do who run that whole side of the store. They understand cookies come out of box and onto shelf. If some get damaged along the way, oh well. Likewise in the warehouses that supply stores such as Walmart. They do not look at the sales figures that I do every Monday morning and plan displays, and carefully handle merchandise so it arrives intact. It is crammed onto a truck, often labels are incorrect so the store is billed either too little or too much for the merchandise it is not receiving (which messes up counts and ordering and causes sales to be missed) and lots of things are broken. The only way for this process to be more profitable were if I were to load the truck myself, taking care that the right labels are on the right products, then to speed ahead of the truck and unload it myself so items don't get damaged or lost or sent to the wrong department which causes innumerable problems, then to stock the shelves myself and not eliminate displays which have been carefully planned as the stockers do in order to put up a pallet of canned corn that was mis-sent. All of this on top of my other duties of ordering, etc. As we know, the laws of physics and human anatomy make this impossible!

Chesterton's point is equally valid today as it was in his own time, and arguably as valid in any time. Even if all of the stockers, all of the receivers and warehouse clerks were equally as competent and knowledgable about how their pay checks are written as I, and all worked well, there would still be inefficiency simply due to the size of the operation. Waste would still occur, product would still be broken, misplaced, dropped, and stores would still be "shrinking" (losing money) by the hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions at the end of the year. I know of one Walmart in our district that lost over 2 million dollars from the process I have just described, before we count theft. (There is also the sheer waste of resources and products which is almost inhuman, but that should be left for another time). Increase the size of the operation and you only increase the inefficiency and waste. When you calculate the expenses involved in running the business, salaries, electric bills, construction, taxes/rent, and innumerable other expenses, the store just barely pays for itself in many cases, and the profit margin is small. If one takes that profit and starts doling it out for all of the errors I mentioned above from the inefficiency of the supposedly efficient big business, the profit shrinks considerably.

When faced with this state of affairs, we have to ask, is big business really better? Would it not be smarter, more efficient and less wasteful to have a number of small grocers who themselves control their stock and ordering rather than 4 Super Walmarts crowding out a 20 mile radius? Let us consider: The small grocer is not prone any less to inefficiency, but it is on a scale ridiculously smaller. He drops a bag of flower and loses 2.50. Walmart or the Supermarket drops a pallet of flower and over a thousand dollars, not just in what was paid but what was not paid, as in the retail markup. The big store loses an astronomical amount of money, paid back to him by open credit and the large debt he is allowed to run. The small grocer loses a small amount easily paid back to him. Likewise, the small grocer, if there is also a local rather than global economy to support him, is dealing with less and less people to bring him produce, meat products, beverages, etc. This allows the individual to control the passage of goods, and when the number of hands it flows through is smaller, the number of accidents and mistakes is smaller, consequently more money is made overall. Secondly the small grocer, being in control of his stock, can meet the demands of customers better. In a large retailer, products are determined at a district level, by a suit in a corner office crunching sales figures and determining what stores ought to carry. The small grocer can place an order for that which he does not normally carry, if not recommend another store entirely.

Lastly, the small grocer has as his aim to provide for his family, and consequently to stay in business. The large retailer, by such names as we know them, namely my employer, has as its aim to put others out of business. There is an owner, who normally lives in another state from where the large business is located, and he wants to expand his market share to unbelievable levels. This is not only true of Walmart, but it is true of Target, it is true of every Grocery Store regardless of whether it is named "Albertsons", or "Kroger", or "Stop & Shop", or, if you live in the southeast "Piggly Wiggly" (note to California readers that is not a joke! That is the largest chain in the southeast). However, for a Catholic that should prevent a problem, not in the least because of Catholic social teaching, but also if we consider an old examination of conscience. One part, under the 7th commandment, admonishes the man considering his conscience: "Have I done anything to knowingly destroy or assist in destroying another man's business so that he can not provide for his family in order to profit myself." That is precisely what Capitalism does, and encourages one to do. Thus, the smaller grocer, concerned for himself and his family, is concerned with his own affairs. The large one with everyone else's and how to destroy them. As such, Distributism, which aims at the smaller quantity, is more efficient for the salvation of the souls, whereas Capitalism is more efficient in creating greed and infinite perils to the soul.

Distributism: More than Just the Farm

By Athanasius

I often find that many people identify Distributism exclusively with going back to the land, rather than a fully Catholic system of Economics that embraces industry as well.

Back to the Land is laudable, and it is overall a good thing. However, it is not for everyone and it is something which is not identical with Distributism. In fact, if I might make a criticism of the Back to the Land movement, there seems to be too much scorn of technology. Technology is neutral and can either be used for good or evil. Too much technology, particularly when it is frivolous is certainly a bad thing and bad to an ordered life. A computer which serves purposes in union with man's end however can be a positive thing, even on a farm. This is what I find admirable about the Amish, they do not reject technology for the sake of being anti-tech, they reject technology that takes away from the simplicity of their lives and the value of their work.

Nevertheless, Distributism makes use of similar ideologies. The emphasis on property being one of them. However, unlike the back to the land ideal, it is not limited to the farm or to traditional trades.

The skeletal model of economics before the Protestant Reformation is often used to help explain Distributism, and consequently makes examples of land and traditional trades, though hat is not the whole story.

Hillaire Belloc in his book "An Essay on the Restoration of Property" for example, makes many notes on how to implement Distributist economics into modern facets of life (modern as the early 1900's when the book was written), utilizing modern inventions. Nevertheless, some Agrarian knowhow is important, since people could cut their grocery bills down a bit by growing certain types of crops right in their backyard, which generally yield enough to feed several families rather than just one.

However, just as medieval economies consisted of more than just farmers, but tradesmen who crafted the tools, built the houses and Churches and merchants, retailers of their time, who sold and traded goods, so the modern society has tradesmen of a different sort, grocers and computer experts, repairmen and those who perform real and legitimate services which are in need. The idea that a man is to be entirely self-sufficient is specifically disavowed by Distributism. It speaks too much of a utopian fantasy to be Distributist, which acknowledges that man is imperfect, and is no less viable for the fact unlike a system like communism. In fact, Belloc wrote:

The family is ideally free when it fully controls all the means necessary for the production of such wealth as it should consume for normal living. But such an ideal is inhuman and therefore, not to be fixedly attained, because man is a social animal. It is not impossible of achievement for a short time, and has been briefly achieved whenever a lonely settler has fixed himself with his family and his stores in an isolated spot. But such complete economic freedom for each family cannot be permanent, because the family increases and divides into further numerous families, forming a larger community. Moreover, even were the isolated free family to endure, it would fall below the requirements of human nature, its isolation stunting and degrading it. For men cannot fulfill themselves save through a diversity of interests and ideas. Multiplicity is essential to life and man to be truly human must be social. (Essay, pg. 26)

Thus the Back to the Land, which as I said before is noble in many of its aims, can not universally satisfy the needs of human nature, because not all men are farmers. Not all men persist in a traditional trade. The needs and desires of man are numerous, and his interests rather diversified.

Now in a Distributist society, as there will necessarily exist farmers, there will also exist tradesmen, there will exist also those in service based jobs, and there will be those in government jobs who get decent salaries, such as the military and those bureaucrats whose work is ordered toward the common good (as opposed to the manifold bureaucracies of today which tend toward the rich and powerful instead of the common good, such as the FDA which foists upon us numerous harmful drugs while trying to regulate natural foods because the growing market for it is threatening multi-million dollar pharmaceutical companies). It is not the case that everyone should start living like medievals, although truthfully, with the exception of the absence of indoor plumbing, I doubt I would mind.

All that Distributism really means, is that the majority of people rather than the minority are economically free and own their means of production. As Chesterton said, the problem with Capitalism is that it produces too few Capitalists. This is where Libertarians and Distributists part ways. Both groups are opposed to excessive government, big government, high taxes, property taxes, minimum wage, American interventionism abroad (and as such any country's interventionism), government fees and excessive taxes and paperwork and the right of man to private property. When it comes down to it however, we disagree with Libertarians as far as the nature of government comes in, the common good, the subordination of the laws of supply and demand to the laws of morality, and what the worker is entitled to. For example, when it comes to something like the intrinsic evil of pornography, a libertarian would say well, it is unfortunate because it is immoral, but nevertheless demand is there, and as such the supply is made available, so therefore there is nothing the government can do about it. The Distributist will say, if there is a demand, that is because of moral corruption among the people, and therefore the supply needs to be suppressed and destroyed so that the demand can be contained until public morality is restored and education about the evils of pornography can be disseminated. Why? Because pornography is intrinsically evil, and destroys all those it comes in contact with, from abusing women to abusing its audience, as well as destroying the family, the basic social unit of society. This is to say, the state has a right to censorship, as I have spoken of before. Another example of this would be with abortion. Catholic libertarians necessarily will acknowledge that abortion is evil, and many like Dr. Thomas Woods rightly join the ranks of the pro-life movement in calling for the overturning of abortion law in this country. However, if we take core libertarian principles, someone like Dr. Woods is in quite a bind, since there is a demand for abortion, to the tune of 1.3 million per year, and there are doctors who rake in quite a profit who are willing to perform it, therefore according to Libertarian principles the state should not get involved. How many who rightly despise abortion could accept such a position?

From this point we come to why the government has the right to step in to correct certain intrinsic evils that tend to act against the common good. This is a principle which both Pope Leo XIII and Pius XI affirmed in their respective encyclicals, Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno. If you acknowledge it is right and just for the government to outlaw abortion, to destroy pornography, to end the deplorable, demonic and absolutely inhumane evil of child pornography and child rape, you necessarily acknowledge that the government is to be involved in public morality and the common good. The question is what else constitutes the common good?

Distributists contend, that it is towards the common good to make sure every man is "able" to be economically free, that is to be able to own his own means of production. One of the ways to do that is to make sure that competition is done at an equal level, and that one receives remuneration in proportion to the profit he helps create.

Now competition at an equal level is an important concept to understand. There is nothing wrong with competition in and of itself. It is when competition is done at such an unequal level that a small business owner doesn't stand a chance, that something is wrong. If a man runs his own business, and another competes with him, and both possess the same means and the same capital, there is nothing unequal, and if one makes more money than the other, oh well according to a Distributist scheme. If one man is a better salesman than another, he just has talents superior than the other and perhaps the latter needs to find another line of work. If there are two bakeries in town, one prefers the baking of one rather than the other, or such things as that.
However, if the former is operating with an unfair competition, namely he consolidates a large number of shops, or hires people at an unjust wage in another country to flood the market with cheap goods, then that is something which Distributists consider an unequal competition. That is why we speak of the breaking up of monopoly. There are software developers who can not develop their product because they can not compete with the billions of dollars at Microsoft's disposal. Suppose that were equalized, by breaking up the power inherent in monopoly, you would see an increase in innovation rather than a decrease.

As concerns remuneration according to the wealth one helps create, what is meant is that the employee is entitled morally to that which he helps create. Basically, in a just society, if a man helps create $10,000 of profit in a week, he is entitled to a portion of that profit, rather than just a wage. As such it is possible to run grocery stores, and large entities so long as the employees are paid according to that wealth. Off the top of my head I can think of Trader Joe's grocery stores. The employees there, who perform all functions from cashiering, to ordering and stocking are paid somewhere around $40,000 a year, depending on their job and how much profit they create. The stores are small, but have more or less what you need. Since Trader Joe's doesn't have debt because it only builds new stores when it has the money, it can afford to pay employees according to the wealth they create. That is more Distributist friendly. Something like Starbucks or Walmart, has millions of dollars worth of debt, and operates hoping that eventually profit wise they will catch up to their debt. In the mean time employees gain merely a wage, which lacks any relation to the wealth they help create. (Although it has to be admitted, Starbucks at least produces a quality product)

What is critical and essential in Distributism, is not that it is about the farm as much as it is about the family. Capitalism focuses on the individual, while Distributism focuses specifically on the family and man as a social unit. The proof of this is in the following: if today men everywhere were to be more frugal, spend less, conserve electricity, build savings for a rainy day, invest in and own property, spend more time at home with his family instead of working as many hours as he could, and lived a more frugal lifestyle, the American economy would collapse. Again, if people lived a life more in accord with Christian economics and frugality, the economy would collapse. No one would be buying useless junk! How horrible! However, in a Distributist society, if people stopped buying frivolously, lived frugally, and paid for those services which they required, all would be fine, since the survival of the economy is more attuned to the needs of family, local economic growth rather than global and therefore society, instead of feeding the narcissistic wants of the individual, such a collapse is scarcely imaginable since it does not depend on spending but upon the building up of the family. The Distributist perspective is in line with the teachings of seven consecutive Popes, pre and post-Vatican II, from Pope Leo XIII to John Paul II. An application of them into American life today does not involve a rejection of technology, or forcing everyone to adopt farm life, but rather of conforming economics to moral necessity and the strengthening of the family, rather than giving it free reign to service the individual, the banker, or the corporate executive who rewards himself for bankrupting the company with stock options and retirement islands.

Vintage Distributism

Unbusinesslike Business
by G.K. Chesterton
(From the book Utopia of Usurers)

The fairy tales we were all taught did not, like the history we were all taught, consist entirely of lies. Parts of the tale of "Puss in Boots" or "Jack and the Beanstalk" may strike the realistic eye as a little unlikely and out of the common way, so to speak; but they contain some very solid and very practical truths. For instance, it may be noted that both in "Puss in Boots" and "Jack and the Beanstalk" if I remember aright, the ogre was not only an ogre but also a magician. And it will generally be found that in all such popular narratives, the king, if he is a wicked king, is generally also a wizard. Now there is a very vital human truth enshrined in this. Bad government, like good government, is a spiritual thing. Even the tyrant never rules by force alone; but mostly by fairy tales. And so it is with the modern tyrant, the great employer. The sight of a millionaire is seldom, in the ordinary sense, an enchanting sight: nevertheless, he is in his way an enchanter. As they say in the gushing articles about him in the magazines, he is a fascinating personality. So is a snake. At least he is fascinating to rabbits; and so is the millionaire to the rabbit-witted sort of people that ladies and gentlemen have allowed themselves to become. He does, in a manner, cast a spell, such as that which imprisoned princes and princesses under the shapes of falcons or stags. He has truly turned men into sheep, as Circe turned them into swine.

Now, the chief of the fairy tales, by which he gains this glory and glamour, is a certain hazy association he has managed to create between the idea of bigness and the idea of practicality. Numbers of the rabbit-witted ladies and gentlemen do really think, in spite of themselves and their experience, that so long as a shop has hundreds of different doors and a great many hot and unhealthy underground departments (they must be hot; this is very important), and more people than would be needed for a man-of-war, or crowded cathedral, to say: "This way, madam," and "The next article, sir," it follows that the goods are good. In short, they hold that the big businesses are businesslike. They are not. Any housekeeper in a truthful mood, that is to say, any housekeeper in a bad temper, will tell you that they are not. But housekeepers, too, are human, and therefore inconsistent and complex; and they do not always stick to truth and bad temper. They are also affected by this queer idolatry of the enormous and elaborate; and cannot help feeling that anything so complicated must go like clockwork. But complexity is no guarantee of accuracy--in clockwork or in anything else. A clock can be as wrong as the human head; and a clock can stop, as suddenly as the human heart.

But this strange poetry of plutocracy prevails over people against their very senses. You write to one of the great London stores or emporia, asking, let us say, for an umbrella. A month or two afterwards you receive a very elaborately constructed parcel, containing a broken parasol. You are very pleased. You are gratified to reflect on what a vast number of assistants and employees had combined to break that parasol. You luxuriate in the memory of all those long rooms and departments and wonder in which of them the parasol that you never ordered was broken. Or you want a toy elephant for your child on Christmas Day; as children, like all nice and healthy people, are very ritualistic. Some week or so after Twelfth Night, let us say, you have the pleasure of removing three layers of pasteboards, five layers of brown paper, and fifteen layers of tissue paper and discovering the fragments of an artificial crocodile. You smile in an expansive spirit. You feel that your soul has been broadened by the vision of incompetence conducted on so large a scale. You admire all the more the colossal and Omnipresent Brain of the Organiser of Industry, who amid all his multitudinous cares did not disdain to remember his duty of smashing even the smallest toy of the smallest child. Or, supposing you have asked him to send you some two rolls of cocoa-nut matting: and supposing (after a due interval for reflection) he duly delivers to you the five rolls of wire netting. You take pleasure in the consideration of a mystery: which coarse minds might have called a mistake. It consoles you to know how big the business is: and what an enormous number of people were needed to make such a mistake.

That is the romance that has been told about the big shops; in the literature and art which they have bought, and which (as I said in my recent articles) will soon be quite indistinguishable from their ordinary advertisements. The literature is commercial; and it is only fair to say that the commerce is often really literary. It is no romance, but only rubbish.

The big commercial concerns of to-day are quite exceptionally incompetent. They will be even more incompetent when they are omnipotent. Indeed, that is, and always has been, the whole point of a monopoly; the old and sound argument against a monopoly. It is only because it is incompetent that it has to be omnipotent. When one large shop occupies the whole of one side of a street (or sometimes both sides), it does so in order that men may be unable to get what they want; and may be forced to buy what they don't want. That the rapidly approaching kingdom of the Capitalists will ruin art and letters, I have already said. I say here that in the only sense that can be called human, it will ruin trade, too.

I will not let Christmas go by, even when writing for a revolutionary paper necessarily appealing to many with none of my religious sympathies, without appealing to those sympathies. I knew a man who sent to a great rich shop for a figure for a group of Bethlehem. It arrived broken. I think that is exactly all that business men have now the sense to do.

Vintage Distributism

Reflections on a Rotten Apple
by G.K. Chesterton

Our age is obviously the Nonsense Age; the wiser sort of nonsense being provided for the children and the sillier sort of nonsense for the grown-up people. The eighteenth century has been called the Age of Reason; I suppose there is no doubt that the twentieth century is the Age of Unreason. But even that is an understatement. The Age of Reason was nicknamed from a famous rationalist book. [Thomas Paine's 1794- 95.] But the rationalist was not really so much concerned to urge the rational against the irrational; but rather specially to urge the natural against the supernatural. But there is a degree of the unreasonable that would go even beyond the unnatural. It is not merely an incredible tale, but an inconsistent idea. As I pointed out to somebody long ago, it is one thing to believe that a beanstalk scaled the sky, and quite another to believe that fifty-seven beans make five.

For instance, a man may disbelieve in miracles; normally on some principle of determinist thought; in some cases even on examination of the evidence. But on being told of the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, he is told something that is logical if it is not natural. He is not told that there were fewer fishes because the fishes had been multiplied. Multiplication is still a mathematical term; and a mob all feeding on miraculous fishes is a less mysterious or monstrous sight than a man saying that multiplication is the same as subtraction. Such a story, for such a sceptic, does not carry conviction; but it does make sense. He can recognise the logical consequence, if he cannot understand the logical cause. But no pope or priest ever asked him to believe that thousands died of starvation in the desert because they were loaded with loaves and fishes. No creed or dogma ever declared that there was too little food because there was too much fish. But that is the precise, practical and prosaic definition of the present situation in the modern science of economics. And the man of the Nonsense Age must bow his head and repeat his , the motto of his time, . ["I believe because it is impossible."]

Or again, the term unreason is sometimes used rather more reasonably; for a sort of loose or elliptical statement, which is at least illogical in form. The most popular case is what was called the Irish Bull; often suspected of resembling the Papal Bull, in being a supernatural monster bred of credulity and superstition. But even this old sort of confusion stopped short of the new sort of contradiction. If any Irishman really does say, "We are not birds, to be in two places at once," at least we know what he means, even if it is not what he says. But suppose he says that one bird has been miraculously multiplied into a million birds, and that in consequence there are fewer birds in the world than there were before. We should then be dealing, not merely with an Irish Bull but with a Mad Bull, and concerned not with the incredible but with the incomprehensible. Or, to apply the parable, the Irish have sometimes been accused of unbalanced emotion or morbid sentiment. But nobody says that they merely imagined the Great Famine, in which multitudes starved because the potatoes were few and small. Only suppose an Irishman had said that they starved because the potatoes were gigantic and innumerable. I think we should not yet have heard the last of the wrong-headed absurdity of that Irishman. Yet that is an exact description of the economic condition to-day as it affects the Englishman. And, to a great extent, the American. We learn that there is a famine because there is not a scarcity; and there is such a good potato-crop that there are no potatoes. The Irishman, with his bull or his bird, is quite a hard-headed realist and rationalist compared to that. Thus, the old examples of the fantastic fell far short of the modern fact; whether they were mysteries supposed to be above reason or merely muddles supposed to be below it. Their miracles were more normal than our scientific averages; and the Irish blunder was less illogical than the actual logic of events.

For it seems that we live to-day in a world of witchcraft, in which the orchards wither because they prosper, and the multitude of apples on the apple-tree of itself turns them into forbidden fruit, and makes the effort to consume them in every sense fruitless. This is the modern economic paradox, which is called Over-Production, or a glut in the market, and though at first sight it sounds like the wildest fantasy, it is well to realise in what sense it is the most solid of facts. Let it be clearly understood, therefore, that as a description of the objective social situation at this instant in this industrial society, the paradox is perfectly true. But it is not really true that the contradiction in terms is true. If we take it, not as a description but as a definition, if we take it as a matter of abstract argument, then certainly the contradiction is untrue, as every contradiction is untrue.

The truth is that a third element has entered into the matter, which is not mentioned in this abstract statement of it. That element might be stated in many ways; perhaps the shortest statement of it is in the fable of the man who sold razors, and afterwards explained to an indignant customer, with simple dignity, that he had never said the razors would shave. When asked if razors were not made to shave, he replied that they were made to sell. That is A Short History of Trade and Industry During the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.

God made a world of reason as sure as God made little apples (as the beautiful proverb goes); and God did not make little apples larger than large apples. It is not true that a man whose apple-tree is loaded with apples will suffer from a want of apples; though he may indulge in a waste of apples. But if he never looks upon apples as things to eat, but always looks on them as things to sell, he will really get into another sort of complication; which may end in a sort of contradiction. If, instead of producing as many apples as he wants, he produces as many apples as he imagines the whole world wants, with the hope of capturing the trade of the whole world - then he will be either successful or unsuccessful in competing with the man next door who also wants the whole world's trade to himself. Between them, they will produce so many apples that apples in the market will be about as valuable as pebbles on the beach. Thus each of them willfind he has very little money in his pocket, with which to go and buy fresh pears at the fruiterer's shop. If he had never expected to get fruit at the fruiterer's shop, but had put up his hand and pulled them off his own tree, his difficulty would never have arisen. It seems simple; but at the root of all apple-trees and apple-growing, it is really as simple as that.

Of course I do not mean that the practice is at present simple; for no practical problem is simple, least of all at the present time, when everything is confused by the corrupt and evasive muddlers who are called practical politicians. But the principle is simple; and the only way to proceed through a complex situation is to start with the right first principle. How far we can do without, or control, or merely modify the disadvantages of buying and selling is quite another matter. But the disadvantages do arise from buying and selling, and not from producing: not even from over-producing. And it is some satisfaction to realise that we are not living in a nightmare in which No is the same as Yes; that even the modern world has not actually gone mad, with all its ingenious attempts to do so; that two and two do in fact make four; and that the man who has four apples really has more than the man who has three. For some modern metaphysicians and moral philosophers seem disposed to leave us in doubt on these points. It is not the fundamental reason in things that is at fault; it is a particular hitch or falsification, arising from a very recent trick of regarding everything only in relation to trade. Trade is all very well in its way, but Trade has been put in the place of Truth. Trade, which is in its nature a secondary or dependent thing, has been treated as a primary and independent thing; as an absolute. The moderns, mad upon mere multiplication, have even made a plural out of what is eternally singular, in the sense of single. They have taken what all ancient philosophers called the Good, and translated it as the Goods.

I believe that certain mystics, in the American business world, protested against the slump by pinning labels to their coats inscribed, Trade Is Good," along with other similar proclamations, such as, "Capone Is Dead," or "Cancer Is Pleasant," or "Death Is Abolished," or any other hard realistic truths for which they might find space upon their persons. But what interests me about these magicians is that, having decided to call up ideal conditions by means of spells and incantations to control the elements, they did not (so to speak) understand the elements of the elements. They did not go to the root of the matter, and imagine that their troubles had really come to an end. Rather they worshipped the means instead of the end. While they were about it, they ought to have said, not "Trade Is Good," but "Living Is Good," or "Life Is Good." I suppose it would be too much to expect such thoroughly respectable people to say, "God Is Good"; but it is really true that their conception of what is good lacks the philosophical finality that belonged to the goodness of God. When God looked on created things and saw that they were good, it meant that they were good in themselves and as they stood; but by the modern mercantile idea, God would only have looked at them and seen that they were The Goods. In other words, there would be a label tied to the tree or the hill, as to the hat of the Mad Hatter, with "This Style, 10/6." All the flowers and birds would be ticketed with their reduced prices; all the creation would be for sale or all the creatures seeking employment; with all the morning stars making sky-signs together and all the Sons of God shouting for jobs. In other words, these people are incapable of imagining any good except that which comes from bartering something for something else. The idea of a man enjoying a thing in itself, for himself, is inconceivable to them. The notion of a man eating his own apples off his own apple-tree seems like a fairy-tale. Yet the fall from that first creation that was called good has very largely come from the restless impotence for valuing things in themselves; the madness of the trader who cannot see any good in a good, except as something to get rid of. It was once admitted that with sin and death there entered the world something that we call change. It is none the less true and tragic, because what we called change, we called afterwards exchange. Anyhow, the result of that extravagance of exchange has been that when there are too many apples there are too few apple-eaters. I do not insist on the symbol of Eden, or the parable of the apple-tree, but it is odd to notice that even that accidental image pursues us at every stage of this strange story. The last result of treating a tree as a shop or a store instead of as a store-room, the last effect of treating apples as goods rather than as good, has been in a desperate drive of public charity and in poor men selling apples in the street.

In all normal civilisations the trader existed and must exist. But in all normal civilisations the trader was the exception; certainly he was never the rule; and most certainly he was never the ruler. The predominance which he has gained in the modern world is the cause of all the disasters of the modern world. The universal habit of humanity has been to produce and consume as part of the same process; largely conducted by the same people in the same place. Sometimes goods were produced and consumed on the same great feudal manor; sometimes even on the same small peasant farm. Sometimes there was a tribute from serfs as yet hardly distinguishable from slaves; sometimes there was a co-operation between free-men which the superficial can hardly distinguish from communism. But none of these many historical methods, whatever their vices or limitations, was strangled in the particular tangle of our own time; because most of the people, for most of the time, were thinking about growing food and then eating it; not entirely about growing food and selling it at the stiffest price to somebody who had nothing to eat. And I for one do not believe that there is any way out of the modern tangle, except to increase the proportion of the people who are living according to the ancient simplicity. Nobody in his five wits proposes that there should be no trade and no traders. Nevertheless, it is important to remember, as a matter of mere logic, that there might conceivably be great wealth, even if there were no trade and no traders. It is important for the sort of man whose only hope is that Trade Is Good or whose only secret terror is that Trade Is Bad. In principle, prosperity might be very great, even if trade were very bad. If a village were so fortunately situated that, for some reason, it was easy for every family to keep its own chickens, to grow its own vegetables, to milk its own cow and (I will add) to brew its own beer, the standard of life and property might be very high indeed, even though the long memory of the Oldest Inhabitant only recorded two or three pure transactions of trade; if he could only recall the one far-off event of his neighbour buying a new hat from a gipsy's barrow; or the singular incident of Farmer Billings purchasing an umbrella.

As I have said, I do not imagine, or desire, that things would ever be quite so simple as that. But we must understand things in their simplicity before we can explain or correct their complexity. The complexity of commercial society has become intolerable, because that society is commercial and nothing else. The whole mind of the community is occupied, not with the idea of possessing things, but with the idea of passing them on. When the simple enthusiasts already mentioned say that Trade is Good, they mean that all the people who possess goods are perpetually parting with them. These Optimists presumably invoke the poet, with some slight emendation of the poet's meaning, when he cries aloud, 'Our souls are love and a perpetual farewell.' In that sense, our individualistic and commercial modern society is actually the very reverse of a society founded on Private Property. I mean that the actual direct and isolated enjoyment of private property, as distinct from the excitement of exchanging it or getting a profit on it, is rather rarer than in many simple communities that seem almost communal in their simplicity. In the case of this sort of private consumption, which is also private production, it is very unlikely that it will run continually into overproduction. There is a limit to the number of apples a man can eat, and there will probably be a limit, drawn by his rich and healthy hatred of work, to the number of apples which he will produce but cannot eat. But there is no limit to the number of apples he may possibly sell; and he soon becomes a pushing, dexterous and successful Salesman and turns the whole world upside-down. For it is he who produces this huge pantomimic paradox with which this rambling reflection began. It is he who makes a wilder revolution than the apple of Adam which was the loosening of death, or the apple of Newton which was the apocalypse of gravitation, by proclaiming the supreme blasphemy and heresy, that the apple was made for the market and not for the mouth. It was he, by starting the wild race of pouring endless apples into a bottomless market, who opened the abyss of irony and contradiction into which we are staring to-day. That trick of treating the trade as the test, and the only test, has left us face to face with a piece of stark staring nonsense written in gigantic letters across the world; more gigantic than all its own absurd advertisements and announcements; the statement that the more we produce the less we possess.

Oscar Wilde would probably have fainted with equal promptitude, if told he was being used in an argument about American salesmanship, or in defence of a thrifty and respectable family life on the farm. But it does so happen that one true epigram, among many of his false epigrams, sums up correctly and compactly a certain truth, not (I am happy to say) about Art, but about all that he desired to separate from Art; ethics and even economics. He said in one of his plays: "A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." [The quotation is from (1892).] It is extraordinarily true; and the answer to most other things that he said. But it is yet more extraordinary that the modern men who make that mistake most obviously are not the cynics. On the contrary, they are those who call themselves the Optimists; perhaps even those who would call themselves the Idealists; certainly those who regard themselves as the Regular Guys and the Sons of Service and Uplift. It is too often those very people who have spoilt all their good effect, and weakened their considerable good example in work and social contact, by that very error: that things are to be judged by the price and not by the value. And since Price is a crazy and incalculable thing, while Value is an intrinsic and indestructible thing, they have swept us into a society which is no longer solid but fluid, as unfathomable as a sea and as treacherous as a quicksand.

Whether anything more solid can be built again upon a social philosophy of values, there is now no space to discuss at length here; but I am certain that nothing solid can be built on any other philosophy; certainly not upon the utterly unphilosophical philosophy of blind buying and selling; of bullying people into purchasing what they do not want; of making it badly so that they may break it and imagine they want it again; of keeping rubbish in rapid circulation like a dust-storm in a desert; and pretending that you are teaching men to hope, because you do not leave them one intelligent instant in which to despair.

Taken from The American Chesterton Society