The New Distributist League

Capitalist-Socialist-Distributist Debate

2009-04-15T04:43:00.001-07:00

For the article, please go to The Distributist Review.

Is There A Bellocian Response For Today's Economics Crisis?

2009-03-10T09:29:00.001-07:00

For the article, please go to The Distributist Review.

The True Sources of Wealth

2009-02-20T08:40:00.000-08:00

This post was cross-posted to Donald Goodman III's personal blog.

In light of the timely Call to Action posted at The Distributist Review yesterday, I'd like to suggest another practical means of helping establish distributism in the present time: creating wealth.

It's nearly universal for our politicians to tell us that we need to get back to creating wealth. This much is true; sadly, however, our politicians want to get back to creating wealth by getting people to borrow more money to buy more stuff, most of which was made in foreign countries by foreign workers, and most of which they couldn't afford even if they weren't going into still more debt in order to buy it.

Why does our age, alone among all, consider increased consumer debt and the increase in consumption that goes along with it to be "creating wealth"? Isn't this truly merely consuming wealth? And given that the vast majority of these consumer goods that we're purchasing with our borrowed stimulus funds are made in foreign factories by foreign workers, while our own citizens are occupied predominantly with serving each other (increasingly foreign-produced) food and selling each other incomprehensible financial documents (not to mention helping to import the foreign products that we're doing all this in order to buy), isn't this consumption of wealth without ever replacing it with anything?

Certainly, these foreigners (who are mostly perfectly decent people in their own right) are creating wealth, and we're paying them to do so. But what happens when they decide to start selling their new wealth to their own people? And even besides this, is it right for us to rely on the Chinese keeping their workers in borderline slavery in order to provide us with cheap goods, while we fritter away our immense national resources, both human and natural, voraciously consuming the wealth produced on other shores than ours?

At this point distributist readers will doubtlessly expect me to begin railing against industrialization and capitalism. But truly, this financial system isn't even really industrial capitalism (which can certainly be rightly railed against); it's something called finance capitalism, which in some ways is even worse. Industrial capitalism does, in fact, isolate all the means of production into the hands of the wealthy few, leaving the rest in near-slavery; however, at least the non-owning many can easily ascertain that they're being exploited by the owning few. Finance capitalism, on the other hand, ostensibly raises the wealth of the non-owners, and they acquire more and more material goods. This lulls the non-owners into total complacency, unaware that they and their nation are being stripped to the bone by the financiers, who are funding the shipment of the national wealth to foreign countries to be worked by foreign slaves.

Still, our benevolent leaders insist that this sort of activity is really creating wealth for our nation. But what is wealth, really? Surely it's not simply money, green paper or binary signatures on banks' hard drives? No; money is simply an agreed-upon standard for exchanging wealth, not wealth itself. Hillaire Belloc, in his seminal distributist work The Servile State, defined wealth as "matter which has been consciously and intelligently transformed from a condition in which it is less to a condition in which it is more serviceable to a human need." In other words, wealth is anything that's been worked on to make it more useful; so, for example, lumber, which are trees made into a more useful form for building, is wealth. Wealth is created by production, which is the "special, conscious, and intelligent transformation of his environment which is peculiar to the peculiar intelligence and creative faculty of man." The means of production, then, are simply the tools, such as saws and hammers, and resources, such as land and timber, necessary to produce wealth.

Certainly, the non-owning worker has more stuff than ever before; he has more things which have been made more useful for human needs, and consequently he is in possession of more wealth. However, he still does not own the means of production, the way in which wealth is produced. Under industrial capitalism, for a very long time, the non-owning worker was confined in poverty and squalor, and distributists have always identified this as truly evil. Many capitalists have hailed the arrival of finance capitalism as the end of that era, in which even the lowly non-owning workers are awash in unprecedented amounts of wealth. Doesn't this, truly, eliminate the objections of distributists to the capitalist economy? The workers, after all, are well cared for.

However, while distributism has always decried the physical exploitation of the worker, it has first and foremost decried his economic exploitation. Distributists object strongly to a characteristic common to both industrial and finance capitalism, one which remains no matter how stuffed with Chinese-made garbage the non-owning worker's heavily-mortgaged house might become: the fact that the vast majority of society are non-owning workers, with only a very few owners of productive property. In other words, while workers in the capitalist world often now have wealth, they still have no means of producing wealth, and that makes all the difference.

As Belloc observed, "[w]ithout wealth man cannot exist." Without the constant transformation of natural resources to a form more useful for man's needs, man will die. And so it follows that "to control the production of wealth is to control human life itself." But in our society, the means of producing wealth are owned by only a very few, and even those few have moved most of those means into the custody and control of foreign producers. Which means, of course, that the vast majority of our society, who are non-owning workers, are really and truly controlled by those few owners and their foreign counterparts. Thus, the state is, in a very real sense, servile, as Belloc warned. (As an aside, it is also servile in a way that Belloc never predicted: not only are the citizens of the state servile to the owning few, but the state as a whole is servile to the other nations which produce the wealth which it consumes.) As Leo XIII observed, two decades before The Servile State flowed from Belloc's pen, ownership by only a few in this way has "laid a yoke almost of slavery on the unnumbered masses of non-owning workers." (Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum.)

That is what distributists despise most about our current system: that it makes the vast majority of us near-slaves of the owning few. Furthermore, it makes the state as a whole incapable of producing what it needs itself; it must instead rely on other states to produce it, which is what has led to many of our economic problems today. Distributism, on the other hand, seeks to establish the distributist state, in which, as Belloc said, so great a number of the citizens are owners that the society as a whole takes on the character of owners, rather than of non-owning workers. Distributism seeks the greater distribution of productive property, the means of producing wealth. That is the first and primary economic goal of the system.

What property is productive? There are almost limitless correct answers to that question, but fundamentally wealth is produced from four forms of such property: the fields, the forests, the factories, and the mines. By fields we mean those pieces of land that are used for the all-important necessity of raising food, both farmland and pasture. By forests we mean those pieces of land that are covered with trees and wild growth, from which can be harvested timber, furs, and innumerable other natural resources. By factories we mean those pieces of land, including the improvements thereon, that take the products from the other three types of productive property and transform them into more useful forms, including the tools necessary to do so; it covers everything from a corner shoemaker's shop to an automaking factory. Finally, by mines we mean those parts of the land that are dedicated to the extraction of mineral resources to be used as such, such as gold, silver, iron, and copper mines.

Notice what is not included in this list. Restaurants; real estate brokers; attorneys (my own profession); stock traders; merchants; shopping malls; supermarkets. All of these professions are necessary (even if some ought to be made much smaller) and good within their proper spheres; but none of them are productive of wealth, and thus all of them are secondary to those which are. Even in a distributist society there will be non-owners who perform certain necessary tasks; however, the vast majority of citizens will be owners of wealth-producing property.

In those four places are the creation of wealth, not Wall Street, and certainly not the Washington mall. None of the proposed government projects to help expand our imploding economy involve creating wealth; they just involve the non-productive consumption of it, which we've been doing for far too long already. So we'll just keep consuming the wealth created by others until either they realize that they don't need us anymore (since they're already producing all the wealth themselves), or we realize that we're almost slaves and rise up to fix the problem ourselves.

But to return to the stated purpose of this article, how can the distributist help establish the distributive state right now, even within the bowels of finance capitalism? It's really quite simple: begin producing wealth. Even if one is in a non-productive profession within our currently terminal economy (as I am), and even if one has no financially feasible means of escaping that situation, one can produce wealth, even if in only a modest way.

If the distributist has a productive hobby, let him practice it until it becomes a second profession. I know a gentleman (not a distributist, sadly) who's an engineer by trade, but who has a great love of woodworking, and produces many things of great beauty while practicing that hobby. In so doing, he's established a small factory, one of the four great means of production; he is really producing wealth, a distributist thing for him to do, though his economic principles vary.

Personally, I am an attorney, one of those that Dmitry Orlov called "mere embroidery on the fabric of an affluent society" (Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century (Part Two of Three)). While this overstates the point, it does identify the truth that this profession is not productive of wealth in any direct way. However, that fact does not mean that I, as a distributist, cannot do my part in creating a distributist state. While I'm quite halting with my woodwork, I deeply enjoy gardening, though I'm very inexperienced. So I'm reading up on natural and sustainable gardening, and I'm practicing as best as I can. While I don't have much land, I'm using what little I have to produce some wealth; that is what God made it for, after all. It is hard to imagine someone with no interest in any productive craft; let the distributist select one and practice it, and get to work on the all-important economic task of producing things of value. It may be countercultural, but it's also the only way our society can ever recover.

Wealth is wonderful; but he who produces the wealth controls the world. Let us begin to more widely distribute productive property according to our principles, and let us do so by beginning with ourselves.

Praise be to Christ the King!

Note: This is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Announcements, Announcements, Announcements!

2009-02-15T09:40:00.000-08:00

For the article, go to The Distributist Review.

Something Old, Something New

2009-02-14T17:20:00.001-08:00

For the article, go to The Distributist Review.

Why Distributism Can Work (For Us, Right Now) Part I

2009-01-15T07:49:00.000-08:00

For the article, please go to The Distributist Review.

An Interview With Thomas Storck

2009-01-08T13:04:00.001-08:00

For the full interview, please go to The Distributist Review.

Why Care about Distributism?

2008-12-13T14:13:00.000-08:00

This post was cross-posted at Donald Goodman's personal blog.

An old friend has been commenting on my post Consumer Confidence or Consumer Recklessness, and he's led me to an interesting question. He asked me why I bother with this whole distributism thing at all? After all, he observes, it's exceedingly unlikely that I'd ever live to see distributism put into place; why not focus on making capitalists more virtuous, rather than explaining to them why the system itself is bankrupt?

I can respond in two ways. First, of course, is that while I might not see a distributist system in place in my lifetime, I can certainly see certain distributist principles put into practice. Some of this is happening already, though often under different names. The credit union system, for example, is in a certain way quite distributist (in others not really at all). Another example is the increasing prominence of farm co-ops. The people who form these efforts rarely go by the name "distributist"; however, these efforts are eminently in accord with distributism, and can and should be supported as such by distributists. My advocacy for distributism can therefore forward these and other efforts that I can actually effect, even if an entire distributist system is unlikely in the immediate future.

Second, I advocate for distributism the same way I advocate for Catholicism. While I'm talking to a Protestant, for example, it might be extremely unlikely that I'll convert him entirely to Catholicism, but pretty easy to convince him that he should venerate Mary. I'll certainly try to convince him to venerate Mary (as I certainly now try to convince capitalists to be more virtuous); but that doesn't mean that I give up trying to convince him to adopt Catholicism (as I don't give up trying to advocate for distributism over capitalism).

Well, this friend replied, you do that because God has commanded you to try to convert people to Catholicism, so it's different. However, God has commanded us to spread the truth, and distributism's economic principles are truth, while capitalism's are falsehood. To spread the truth, then, I must try to spread distributism; I can't exclude this one part of the truth any more than I could exclude Marian veneration from spreading Catholicism.

The capitalist at this point generally smirks knowingly, as he's now certain that his interlocutor is not quite straight in the head. Are you seriously claiming, he'll ask, that distributism is just as important as Catholicism? That's absolutely absurd. Well, yes and no; is distributism just as important as Catholicism? Obviously not. But is Catholic social teaching just as important as Catholicism? Unquestionably, yes; indeed, it is part and parcel of Catholicism, and one cannot be had without the other.

Is that absurd? If so, I'm afraid you'll have to tell that not just to me, but also to John Paul II, who said precisely that. Catholic social teachings, he argued, are an integral part of the Gospel and must be spread along with it. Rerum Novarum, for example, the flagship of Catholic social teaching, "is a document of the Magisterium and is fully a part of the Church's evangelizing mission, together with many other documents of this nature." Centesimus Annus, no. 54. Think for a moment about how strong a statement that is; the late Pope is saying that Catholic social teaching is part of the message that the Church must spread throughout the world. That's a pretty high-octane statement if spreading distributism is pointless.

Now, distributism is a name for an economic system that attempts to embody Catholic social teaching; as such, it could be mistaken in some particulars, and can't be called, by itself, part of Catholicism. But the Catholic social teaching that it seeks to embody unquestionably is such. So I must, when spreading the Gospel, spread Catholic social teaching, including those parts that are fundamentally antithetical to capitalism. Such as:

Just wages cannot be set merely by the market, but must be compelled to be at least sufficient to support a worker and his family. Rerum Novarum no. 63; Quadragesimo Anno p. 36; Centesimus Annus no. 15.

Women should be legally compelled to avoid certain occupations, no matter to what the market might lead them. Rerum Novarum no. 63.

Some industries not only might, but ought to be owned and run by the state. Quadragesimo Anno, p. 55.

Onwership of private property is a right, but the use of private property is not, and is subject to just state and community regulation. Rerum Novarum no. 25; Quadragesimo Anno p. 24-25; Centesimus Annus no. 30.

Free competition is not the best, or even a good, way to organize economic affairs. Quadragesimo Anno p. 44.

Social justice and social charity are just and, in fact, are the "soul" of a just economic order. Quadragesimo Anno p. 45.

Income earned by a man which is not necessary for his upkeep according to his state is subject to just regulation and use by the state and community. Quadragesimo Anno p. 26.

And these are just specifics; they barely begin to get into the principles of capitalism as opposed to the principles of Catholic social teaching.

So yes, it is important to spread Catholic social teaching, and as such the particular way of embodying it that I support, which is called distributism. To spread Catholicism without it would be omitting an essential part of the Gospel message. Truth is truth; I will try to spread all of it whenever I can.

What We Want, And How

2008-11-26T09:03:00.000-08:00

For the article, go to The Distributist Review.

Hillaire Belloc on the origins of Capitalism

2007-06-16T11:44:00.000-07:00

by Athanasius

Why did the new inventions give us the form of society now known and hated under the name of industrial? Why did the vast increase in the powers of production, in population and in accumulation of wealth, turn the mass of Englishmen into a poverty stricken proletariat, cut off the rich from the rest of the nation, and develop to the full all the evils which we associate with the capitalist state?
To that question an answer almost as universal as it is unintelligent has been given. That answer is not only unintelligent, but false, and it will be my business here to show how false it is. The answer so provided in innumerable textbooks, and taken almost as a commonplace in our universities, is that the new methods of production-the new machinery, the new implements-fatally and of themselves developed a capitalist state in which a few should own the means of production and the mass should be proletarian. The new instruments, it is pointed out, were on a vastly greater a scale than the old, and were so much more expensive, that the small man could not afford them; while the rich man, who could afford them, ate up by his competition, and reduced from the position of a small owner to that of a wage earner, his insufficiently equipped competitor who still attempted to struggle on with the older and cheaper tools. To this (we are told) the advantages of concentration were added in favor of the large owner against the small. Not only were the new instruments expensive almost in proportion to their concentration in few places and under the direction of a few men. Under the effect of such false arguments as these we have been taught to believe that the horrors of the industrial system were a blind and necessary product of material and impersonal forces, and that wherever the steam engine, the power loom, the blast furnace, and the rest were introduced, there fatally would soon appear a little group of owners exploiting a vast majority of the dispossessed.

It is astonishing that a statement so unhistorical should have gained so general a credence. Indeed, were the main truths of English history, taught in our schools and universities today, were educated men familiar with the determining and major facts of the national past, such follies could never have takenroot. The vast growth of the proletariat, the concentration of ownership into the hands fo a few owners and the exploitation by those owners of the mass of the community, had no fatal or necessary connection with the discovery of new and perpetually improving methods of production. The evil proceeded in direct historical sequence, proceeded patently and demonstrably, from the fact that England, the seed plot of the industrial system, was already captured by a wealthy oligarchy before the series of great discoveries began.

Consider in what way the industrial system developed upon Capitalist lines. Why were a few rich men put with such ease into possession of the new methods? Why was it normal and natural in their eyes and in that of contemporary society that those who produced the new wealth with the new machinery should be proletarian and dispossessed? Simply because the England upon which the new discoveries had come was already an England owned as to its soil and accumulations of wealth by a small minority: it was already an England in which perhaps half of the whole population was proletarian, and a medium for exploitation ready to hand.
When any one of the new industries was launched it had to be capitalized; that is, accumulated wealth from some source or other had to be found which would support labor in the process of production until that process should be complete. Someone must find the corn and the meat and the housing and the clothing by which should be supported, between the extraction of the raw material and the moment when the consumption of the finished article could begin, the human agents which dealt with that raw material and turned it into the finished product. Had property been well distributed, protected by cooperative guilds, fenced round and supported by custom and by the autonomy of great artisan corporations, those accumulations of wealth, necessary for the launching of each new method of production and for each new perfection of it, would have been discovered in the mass of small owners. Their corporations, their little parcels of wealth combined would have furnished the capitalization required for the new process, and men already owners would, as one invention succeeded another, have increased the total wealth of the community without disturbing, the balance of distribution. There is no conceivable link in reason or in experience which binds the capitalization of a new process with the idea of a few employing owners and a mass of employed non-owners working at a wage. Such great discoveries coming in society like that of the thirteenth century would have blest and enriched mankind. Coming upon the diseased moral conditions of the eighteenth century in this country, they proved a curse.
To whom could the new industry turn for capitalization? The small owner had already largely disappeared. The corporate life and mutual obligations which had supported him and confirmed him in his property had been broken to pieces by no "economic development," but by the deliberate action of the rich. He was ignorant because his schools had been taken from him and the universities closed to him. He was the more ignorant because the common life which once nourished his social sense and the cooperative arrangements which had once been his defense had disappeared. When you sought an accumulation of corn, of clothing, of housing, of fuel as the indispensable preliminary to the launching of your new industry; when you looked round for someone who could find the accumulated wealth necessary for these considerable experiments, you had to turn to the class which had already monopolized the bulk of the means of production in England. The rich men alone could furnish you with those supplies.
Nor was this all. The supplies once found and the adventure "capitalized," that form of human energy which lay best to hand, which was indefinitely exploitable, weak, ignorant, and desperately necessitous, and glad enough if you would only keep it alive, was the existing proletariat which the new plutocracy had created when, in cornering the wealth of the country after the Reformation, they had thrust out the mass of Englishmen from the possession of implements, of houses and of land.
-Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State

Vintage Distributism

2007-06-27T19:12:00.000-07:00

Are We Reactionary?
by G.K. Chesterton

In our last issue Sir Henry Slesser quoted at length from the debates of the House of Commons a perfectly lucid and logicial and solid criticism of the social policy which we pursue. It was by Mr. Montague, a Labour member; and apparently the only Labour member to maintain what many suppose to be the whole Labour policy. He criticised our conception from the point of view of the old Fabian intellectual; who did at least differ from many other intellectuals by the possession of an intellect. This criticism, being concerned with fundamental and essential questions of public policy, was very little reported in the press. Newspapers are necessarily limited in their space; and we who are beginners would be the last to deny the difficulties of making up a page. And if the newspapers were to admit into their columns any considerable discussion of what is to happen to the English land or the English labouring class, they would find it impossible to print at length the fourth housemaid's fifth reiteration, in the witness box, that she never saw anything particular about the demeanour of Captain Bingle towards Lady Brown. We should be driven to content ourselves with only five photographs of people paddling in the summer or ski-ing in the winter. We shall endeavour to provide Mr. Montague with an adequate reply, but we feel some pride in the fact that we are probably among the few who will give him even an adequate report.

It is necessary to deal here with the charge of being reactionary and what is really implied in it. It is popularly expressed, as our contributor has noted, in the common phrase about putting back the clock. It makes the brain reel to think how how many million times we have been told that we cannot put back the clock. It is strange that people should use the same mechanical metaphor in the sam mechanical spirit so many times without once seeing what is wrong with it. It looks rather as if their clocks, anyhow, had stopped. If there is one thing in the world that no sane man ought to connect with the idea of unlimited progress, it is a clock. A clock does not strike twelve and then go on to strike thirteen or fourteen. If a clock really proceeded on the progressive or evolutionary principle, we should find it was half-past a hundred in about a week. So far as the significance of the signs go, which is the only value of a clock, the case is altogether the other way. You do not need to put the clock back; because in that sense the clock always puts itself back. It always returns to its first principle and its primary purpose; and in that respect at nay rate it is really a good metaphor for a social scheme. The clock that had completely forgotten the meaning of one and two would be valueless; the commonwealth that has completely forgotten the meaning of individual dignity and direct ownership will never recover them by going blindly forward to an infinity of number; it must return to reality. It must be reactionary, if that is reaction.

But if that is reaction, a great many other things are reactionary. For instance, a Trade Union was and is utterly reactionary. Indeed, when it first appeared it was regarded as reactionary; especially by the people who then considered themselves most progressive. It was regarded by the Radical of the industrial revolution as a piece of unscientific sentimentalism and ignorant discontent. And so it was, upon the principles then counted scientific. The Trade Union was reactionary if the Manchester School was progressive. And the Manchester School was certainly thought itself progessive; and indeed everybody else thought so, too; it was not only praised as progressive but dreaded and denounced as progressive. What is the use, therefore, of Mr. Montague throwing the word "reactionary" at us, when his own grandfather might have thrown the word "reactionary" at him? The Trade Union reacted almost automatically towards the tradition of the Guild because individualism was driving on indefinitely to insanity; because that mechanical clock had gone mad, and was striking a million. We react towards the tradition of the peasant because the divorce between property and personality has become equally impossible; so that a man is not even a clock but one of the works of a clock.

If we can dispute with Mr. Montague over the term "reactionary" we might dispute with him still more over the term "medieval." About that we have a very simple thing to say. If Mr. Montague will get into a little boat and sail away from his native land in any direction whatever (short of the North Pole) he will probably land in a country where small ownership is a living, thriving, staring modern reality, in a greater or less degree according to the inroads of the last "progressive" fad of industrialism. If he goes west and lands in Ireland he will find it. If he goes east and lands in Denmark he will find it. If he goes almost anywhere he will find it much more fully developed than he will find it here. Everywhere doubtless it is modified or thwarted; everywhere doubtless it might be improved; but everywhere it is a thing of the present. If anything in the world is modern, small property is modern. He might as well say the decimel coinage is medieval; for almost every place which has a decimel coinage has some measure of small property. He might as well say Napoleon was a medieval figure; for this tendency has largely followed the code Napoleon. In a legal or strictly historical sense, indeed, Mr. Montague's implication is wildly correct. Medieval civilisation was indeed progressing towards private property for all, when it was split asunder by that strange earthquake whether economic or theological. But medieval civilisation started with the legal fiction of feudalism, by which the land belonged to the King; that is, to the State. In other words medieval civilisation started with the fiction of Socialism. It is Mr. Montague who is medieval. It is Mr. Montague who is reacting towards the first heraldic fictions of the feudal age. We hand him back the emblazoned escutcheon with a bow. Modern Europe, swarming with prosaic and practical peasants, is good enough for us.

Of course, we know what he really means, whether he knows it or not, by our being medieval. He means something that has many other euphemisms. He means something that has survived medievalism thought it made medievalism, just as it survived feudalism though it mitigated feudalism, just as it survived slavery though it dissolved slavery. We know its name if he does not; and we beg to inform him that this also is an exceedingly modern institution. If he will sail round the world in his little boat, he will find out how modern. But nobody expects him to argue on the assumption of Catholic Christianity, and therefore it is irrelevant to deal with that matter here. We will only say that, if he cares for a hint about the nature of the thing in its varied effects, he will find it in the notion of the Will which is at the root of all liberty. Because that philosophy favours voluntary association, it supports Guilds and Trades Unions; because it believes in a province for volition it favours property. And he will find this study more philosophical than playing with a clock and talking of politics in terms of time. It is bad enough when he merely calls that reactionary to-day which was reactionary yesterday.

We shall find an opportunity elsewhere of discussing in greater detail the practical criticisms involved in Mr. Montague's most interesting speech; here we are only concerned with the particular reproach of reaction. But in a general fashion we may say this. Mr. Montague's ideal society is one in which no man will ever have any real control; even over himself. The advantage of the plan he deprecated, the plan by which each worker in a factory might also be an independent worker on the land, is that each man would have something to fall back upon, and that is fundamental. Suppose, for instance, there is a strike; presumably in that case there will be a strike fund. We certainly have never indulged in the vulgar, grumbling, against strike funds or strikes. But after all a strike fund must be in the hands of officials; just as all the money of the Treasury is in the hands of officials. In theory we have control over the money in the Treasury. In practice, men may come to have as little control over the Trade Union fund as over the Treasury. Of course, this iwll not affect one who does not want the people to rule; who would uphold the Trade Union against the Trade Unionists. But the people we want to rule are people and not offices. Against the despotic thing called Supply we set the democratic thing called Demand.

Vintage Distributism

2007-06-28T13:05:00.000-07:00

On Direct Action
by G.K. Chesterton
July 7, 1928

The essential idea of Distributism is the idea of Directness. It concerns direct ownership, direct expression, direct creation and control. We do not say we are in favour of entirely abolishing indirect action. We do say that the modern world is entirely abolishing direct action. We do not say there ought to be no such thing as a cactus or an orchid grown in Kew Gardens, at the public expense for the public instruction. We do say that there will soon be no such thing as a cabbage really grown by private enterprise for private use, unless the whole trend of modern mechanical society can be turned. We do not say there ought not to be a national granary in case of a national famine. On the contrary, we say there ought to be; and we said it long ago, when it never crossed the minds of the capitalists and social reformers and practical people that there would ever need to be. But we do say that there very soon will not be such a thing as a normal barn, expressing normal personal thrift, if we continue in our present direction; which might rather be called an indirection, seeing that it is in the direction of everything that is not direct. We say that, though it is sometimes right and necessary to control things, or try to control them, indirectly, it can never be a substitute for controlling them directly; yet it is everywhere being substituted. It is assumed to be an intrinsic improvement that a man should grow a cabbage, cart a cabbage, sell a cabbage, and then take an omnibus to another town to buy another cabbage, instead of eating the cabbage he has grown. But we say that if everything depends on exchange, everything will depend on the rulers of exchange; and if everything depends on carting, we are putting the cart before the horse and the horse above man. It is only by the permanent potentiality of growing and eating the cabbages, that we may hope that the feeding of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

At present it is perishing from the earth. At least, it is perishing from our own small but not unimportant corner of the earth. And the evil is not so much that people do adopt indirect methods, which up to a point is rational enough; but that they deny that there is any disadvantage to indirect methods, and are therefore ready everywhere to substitute them for direct ones. The general principle of Directness, like all such, extends beyond its strict application in Distributism. The other day I wrote a note in this place on one or two of the thousand things of interest to be found in Mr. Bernard Shaw’s new book on Socialism. There was no space to note very much beyond the essential issue; that though his machine of State monopoly, with its centralized property and centrifugal salaries, sounds a beautifully simple process as set forth in his own neat and candid prose, it really is a very indirect process, and has the hitch in it that all indirect processes have. It is a process by which the cabbage is whirled away on a great wheel from the man who has grown it, and returns to him after having gone the whole round of the official process of taxation, public expenditure, and public trade. Some think that the cabbage looks a little forlorn, and even slightly soiled or damaged, when it comes back out of that far-reaching machinery. Anyhow, this is certainly true about any number of other things that pass thus through modern machinery. The name of Mr. Bernard Shaw reminds me that he recently made an extremely amusing gramophone record, which largely consisted in warning his hearers that they were probably hearing a voice entirely unlike his own, and hinting pretty broadly that they probably could not work their own gramophones. Most modern people would be satisfied with saying simply that the gramophone or the wireless installation could carry a person’s voice in a most wonderful manner across the world. It does carry it in a most wonderful manner; but it does not carry the person’s voice. I took Mr. Shaw’s advice and slowed down the machine until it bore a very considerable resemblance to his voice, but it was never the same thing, or a substitute for the same thing. To come in contact with Bernard Shaw through a gramophone or an earphone is not to come in contact with Bernard Shaw. It may be better than nothing, or a harmless amusement or a legitimate by-product of civilization. But it is not meeting Mr. Shaw, as we used to meet him when he towered buoyantly above the cultured riot of the Fabian Society, and distributed inspiring wit and infernal nonsense, like a man talking to men. And that difference will always remain to make a case for the smaller commonwealth, as does the truth about the cabbage for the smaller farm. No representation or report or official machinery is the same thing as a man and a mob; and as long as people trust to mere machinery, they will forget the nature of a mob as well as of a man.

Many other examples could be taken, of course, even in Mr. Shaw’s own case. It is an excellent jest, in his own style of an exuberant perversity, to ignore the existence of man and talk through the whole volume to an imaginary woman. But I rather wonder whether the woman represented on the coloured cover is the woman he had imagined. If she has really been listening to him, she looks as if the simple truths of Socialism had been a little too much for her. That sort of thing is inevitable but instructive: the instant a thing moves from home, out of the direct influence of its maker, it accumulates a dust or accretion of slightly alien things; and by the time it reaches its remote destination, it is not the thing that was sent forth. It is so with the voice; it is so with the vote; it is so with the return in mere money for effort or expenditure; it is so in a comparatively trivial matter like the writing of a book, as compared with the printing or binding of a book. This is not, of course, a reason for not binding books or completing ordinary processes of civilization. But it is a reason for remembering always that something is lost in the process, and that everything will be lost if that is the only sort of process. It is a reason for preserving deliberately a normal life that shall be more narrow and more genuine; in which we can argue with the men we have really met and enjoy the things we have really made.

Vintage Distributism

2007-07-06T07:38:00.000-07:00

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

Vintage Distributism

2007-07-19T14:11:00.001-07:00

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.

Distributism: More than Just the Farm

2007-07-21T18:23:00.000-07:00

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.

Inefficiency and modern retail

2007-07-22T09:02:00.000-07:00

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.

The New Laws

2007-07-22T14:53:00.000-07:00

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

Vintage Distributism

2007-07-22T14:57:00.000-07:00

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.

Vintage Distributism

2007-07-24T18:57:00.000-07:00

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".

Vintage Distributism

2007-08-01T08:18:00.000-07:00

The Dreadful Duty of Gudge/A Last Instance
by G.K. Chesterton

In the quarrel earlier alluded to between the energetic Progressive and the obstinate Conservative (or, to talk a tenderer language, between Hudge and Gudge), the state of cross-purposes is at the present moment acute. The Tory says he wants to preserve family life in Cindertown; the Socialist very reasonably points out to him that in Cindertown at present there isn't any family life to preserve. But Hudge, the Socialist, in his turn, is highly vague and mysterious about whether he would preserve the family life if there were any; or whether he will try to restore it where it has disappeared. It is all very confusing. The Tory sometimes talks as if he wanted to tighten the domestic bonds that do not exist; the Socialist as if he wanted to loosen the bonds that do not bind anybody. The question we all want to ask of both of them is the original ideal question, "Do you want to keep the family at all?" If Hudge, the Socialist, does want the family he must be prepared for the natural restraints, distinctions and divisions of labor in the family. He must brace himself up to bear the idea of the woman having a preference for the private house and a man for the public house. He must manage to endure somehow the idea of a woman being womanly, which does not mean soft and yielding, but handy, thrifty, rather hard, and very humorous. He must confront without a quiver the notion of a child who shall be childish, that is, full of energy, but without an idea of independence; fundamentally as eager for authority as for information and butter-scotch. If a man, a woman and a child live together any more in free and sovereign households, these ancient relations will recur; and Hudge must put up with it. He can only avoid it by destroying the family, driving both sexes into sexless hives and hordes, and bringing up all children as the children of the state--like Oliver Twist. But if these stern words must be addressed to Hudge, neither shall Gudge escape a somewhat severe admonition. For the plain truth to be told pretty sharply to the Tory is this, that if he wants the family to remain, if he wants to be strong enough to resist the rending forces of our essentially savage commerce, he must make some very big sacrifices and try to equalize property. The overwhelming mass of the English people at this particular instant are simply too poor to be domestic. They are as domestic as they can manage; they are much more domestic than the governing class; but they cannot get what good there was originally meant to be in this institution, simply because they have not got enough money. The man ought to stand for a certain magnanimity, quite lawfully expressed in throwing money away: but if under given circumstances he can only do it by throwing the week's food away, then he is not magnanimous, but mean. The woman ought to stand for a certain wisdom which is well expressed in valuing things rightly and guarding money sensibly; but how is she to guard money if there is no money to guard? The child ought to look on his mother as a fountain of natural fun and poetry; but how can he unless the fountain, like other fountains, is allowed to play? What chance have any of these ancient arts and functions in a house so hideously topsy-turvy; a house where the woman is out working and the man isn't; and the child is forced by law to think his schoolmaster's requirements more important than his mother's? No, Gudge and his friends in the House of Lords and the Carlton Club must make up their minds on this matter, and that very quickly. If they are content to have England turned into a beehive and an ant-hill, decorated here and there with a few faded butterflies playing at an old game called domesticity in the intervals of the divorce court, then let them have their empire of insects; they will find plenty of Socialists who will give it to them. But if they want a domestic England, they must "shell out," as the phrase goes, to a vastly greater extent than any Radical politician has yet dared to suggest; they must endure burdens much heavier than the Budget and strokes much deadlier than the death duties; for the thing to be done is nothing more nor less than the distribution of the great fortunes and the great estates. We can now only avoid Socialism by a change as vast as Socialism. If we are to save property, we must distribute property, almost as sternly and sweepingly as did the French Revolution. If we are to preserve the family we must revolutionize the nation.

And now, as this book is drawing to a close, I will whisper in the reader's ear a horrible suspicion that has sometimes haunted me: the suspicion that Hudge and Gudge are secretly in partnership. That the quarrel they keep up in public is very much of a put-up job, and that the way in which they perpetually play into each other's hands is not an everlasting coincidence. Gudge, the plutocrat, wants an anarchic industrialism; Hudge, the idealist, provides him with lyric praises of anarchy. Gudge wants women-workers because they are cheaper; Hudge calls the woman's work "freedom to live her own life. "Gudge wants steady and obedient workmen, Hudge preaches teetotalism--to workmen, not to Gudge--Gudge wants a tame and timid population who will never take arms against tyranny; Hudge proves from Tolstoi that nobody must take arms against anything. Gudge is naturally a healthy and well-washed gentleman; Hudge earnestly preaches the perfection of Gudge's washing to people who can't practice it.
Above all, Gudge rules by a coarse and cruel system of sacking and sweating and bi-sexual toil which is totally inconsistent with the free family and which is bound to destroy it; therefore Hudge, stretching out his arms to the universe with a prophetic smile, tells us that the family is something that we shall soon gloriously outgrow.

I do not know whether the partnership of Hudge and Gudge is conscious or unconscious. I only know that between them they still keep the common man homeless. I only know I still meet Jones walking the streets in the gray twilight, looking sadly at the poles and barriers and low red goblin lanterns which still guard the house which is none the less his because he has never been in it.

From What's Wrong With The World?

The Vocation of Business

2007-08-01T18:41:00.000-07:00

Editor's note: The Vocation of Business: Social Justice in the Marketplace was written by John Médaille, editor of The Distributist Review and member of The New Distributist League. We wish to applaud him for a job well done and recommend this book to all our readers.

The following is a review written by Angelo Matera from the Houston Catholic Worker:

It is ironic that because the Church refuses to accept the reduction of man to one dimension--homo economicus--thereby reducing all of life to matters of utility and exchange and profit, it is accused of being unrealistic and out of touch with economics. Médaille, in the opening pages of The Vocation of Business, thoroughly refutes the idea that the Church doesn't have the right to interfere with the "science" of economics (we've heard this before from extreme Darwinists who want the Church silenced on evolution). He asks "Is life, both the life of the world and the life of the individual, thus consigned to a kind of schizophrenia in which our moral life--the life of love and personal relationships and our deepest longings--is forever at odds with our 'scientific' life, the life in which we earn our daily bread?"

Médaille takes on the critics of CST [Catholic social teaching] on their own turf, accepting the challenge that "a 'teaching' which cannot be enacted in daily life and mundane concerns, which has no 'practical' application, is not really a teaching at all, but a mere set of platitudes." HE painstakingly builds the case for introducing ethics and justice into economics and business, starting with the most basic issues. He begins in the territory of Alasdair MacIntyre, the acclaimed Catholic philosopher who, in his 1981 book, After Virtue, argued that moral discussion isn't even possible in western societies anymore because we no longer share a common vocabulary. Médaille confronts this problem directly, and carefully reconstructs the process of moral reasoning, taking the reader all the way from the Bible and the Greeks to the Enlightenment, and the separation of reason from faith--the source of our modern (or post-modern) predicament, where relativism rules.

Médaille's range is breahtaking; he explains classical economic theory and the Church's social encyclicals, the arguments of the Catholic "neoconservatives," the history of "Distributism"--the Catholic-influenced movement for a wide dispersion of land and property which was promoted by G. K. Chesteron and Hillaire Belloc in England, and by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in this country. (Many progressives would be surprised to know that Day's urban-based Catholic Worker Movement advocated a radical, faith-based agrarian vision.) He continues on to the "just wage" and the theory of the corporation, and then presents several case studies of recent social and business innovations that illustrate how CST can be implemented. (These include the Distributist-inspired Mondragon Cooperative in the Basque region of Spain, and the Grameem micro-bank of Bangladesh.) Throughout, he weaves in history and theology, from the ancients through the medieval era to contemporary thought.

I've only touched on the breadth of ideas and examples that Médaille includes. The book is a densely packed 325-pages, yet the writing is always clear and elegant. It's not for the casual reader, but neither is it for the theological or economic specialist. It's aimed at the intelligent layman willing to put in some effort. Médaille covers so much, I'm surprised the book works so well. You would expect a few embarrassing simplifications, but there are none--the argument is airtight, and Médaille leaves almost nothing out (I wish he had addressed the mid-twentieth century economist Joseph Schumpeter, who coined the phrase "creative destruction," and reworkd classical economics to account for "disequilibrium" and the dominance of large firms. And although Médaille includes the communitarian economies of South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, he doesn't mention the Catholic-influenced "Social Market" economy of post-World War II Germany.)

The Vocation of Business may be the definitive book on Catholic Social Teaching. But did Médaille accomplish his goal of bridging the gap between moral theory and business practice? I'm not sure. In the final paragraph, he says: "The world we live in is a world built by businessmen and -women." Unfortunately, I don't think this book will reach that audience. Theologians? Yes. Economists? Probably. And that's no small accomplishment. But I doubt it will engage the business leaders who run MBA programs and business magazines, or make the sort of impact that E.F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful did. I don't think The Vocation of Business will spark a revolution of virtue-based business practicies (although I hope I'm proved wrong and it becomes the guidebook for thousands of social and business innovators.) It's an important stepping stone in that direction. But we still await that oh-so-necessary book. In the meantime, we should thank Médaille--and God--for this one.

Living Distributism: One day at a time

2007-08-07T14:00:00.000-07:00

by Athanasius

Critics of Distributism argue that oh, it is impossible, it can't be done, you will never get that in say America, or England. We may also not get the Traditional Latin Mass in Los Angeles, and we may not find exceptional beer in the area we live in. Yet this doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

Social movements are often started by the work of individuals at the grass roots level, even when they are not aware of it. To start living Distributism, the first and obvious goal should be the attainment of property and working on small agricultural plots, or working some kind of trade, even if it is only in our spare time.

Yet for many, given the state of the modern economy where house prices rise 80% but wages only 2%, this is also very difficult. So then we have to stop and say, how do we live a Distributist lifestyle, and begin rejecting the atheistic materialist yoke of Capitalism? It starts in our daily lives, with how we use our resources, and what we spend our money on.

The first step is frugality. One of the things which drives the consumerist culture is the throw away society created by advertising and crummy goods. The cheap worthless goods of our society are beyond number. Consider cheap t-shirts which fall apart, clothes not stitched well, bad food, furniture which falls apart, American cars, appliances which break after 2 uses, all carted to the dump and conveniently discarded.

Donald P. Goodman in his book "Distributism, a Catholic System of Economics", gives this example:

Landfills are so full that states are trucking their garbage elsewhere to dump it; everything, from toys to groceries, comes wrapped in at least one layer of packaging; we now actively choose wasteful methods rather than those which conserve and reuse. This culture of waste is fundamentally antithetical to distributism, which emphasizes cultivation over exploitation, and is an aspect of modernity which everyone can fight. More than that, it is an aspect of modernity which everyone can benefit from fighting. The expense of our wasteful habits is more enormous than most of us realize. Let us take a relatively benign example: paper plates. While real dishes are not only of greater utility and durability than paper ones, most in our society choose to employ paper plates because they are much less of a bother. They need not be washed or put away; they can be simply used and discarded.....
Waste is, we must all remember, a sin, and distributism is in large part an attempt to eliminate societal structures that are based on sin.

Another way not to waste, is to utilize everything available to you. Instead of supporting the immoral fashion industry, which works overtime to make women look as slutty as possible, and make men look as "pimp", "gangster", and buffoonish as possible, even from 6 months old, learn how to sew or make your own clothes. Buy American brands from small companies only, accept hand me downs. Don't throw clothes away once the children out grow them, as every family did within my memory. Baby clothes and most infant materials come to mind. Instead of buying a new crib for every baby, or redesigning rooms at enormous expense, or buying designer baby clothes, one can save the clothes for the next baby. After all, babies do not normally wear clothes out, they simply outgrow them or get them dirty.

Instead of supporting mass industrial companies, we can put our money into small family owned businesses which produce quality goods. That can be quite a sacrifice to us, especially when convenience appears to make it look better. Instead of buying garbage at McDonalds, one might try saving his money and going to a quality restaurant once in a while. Consequently he might try conserving his money and making quality food at home instead of buying frozen dinners with no nutritional value that remove the delight of the culinary activity which has kept human civilization going for many centuries. Instead of supporting Walmart or Target or other retailers in any manner, we might try family owned shops. This is more possible thanks to the internet, which decentralizes, rather than centralizes like the "Big Shop", a horrible creation that has only served to continually cheapen human life. As Chesterton noted in the Outline of Sanity:

I think the big shop is a bad shop. I think it bad not only in a moral but a mercantile sense; that is, I think shopping there is not only a bad action but a bad bargain. I think the monster emporium is not only vulgar and insolent, but incompetent and uncomfortable; and I deny that its large organization is efficient....As applied to things like shops, the whole thing is an utter fallacy. Some things like armies have to be organized; and therefore do their very best to be well organized. You must have a long rigid line stretched out to guard a frontier; and therefore you stretch it tight. But it is not true that you must have a long rigid line of people trimming hats or tying bouquets, in order that they may be trimmed or tied neatly. The work is much more likely to be neat if it is done by a particular craftsman for a particular customer with particular ribbons and flowers. The person told to trim the hat will never do it quite suitably to the person who wants it trimmed; and the hundredth person told to do it will do it badly; as he does. If we collected all the stories from all the housewives and householders about the big shops sending the wrong goods, smashing the right goods, forgetting to send any sort of goods, we should behold a welter of inefficiency. There are far more blunders in a big shop than ever happen in a small shop, where the individual customer can curse the individual shopkeeper. Confronted with modern efficiency the customer is silent; well aware of that organization's talent for sacking the wrong man. In short, organization is a necessary evil--which in this case is not necessary.

Taking such a thought to heart, avoiding the big shop altogether is the best course for the Distributist. Society reflects in its character the tenor of its microcosm, the family. The more families that live frugally, not spending freely but spending in necessity alone, the more we spread the gospel of ownership.

America's Relations with China: Contradicting Our Values?

2007-08-07T14:49:00.000-07:00

By Justin Soutar

We Americans have a peculiar love of freedom. In fact, for almost one hundred years, our government has taken up an impressive mission to spread freedom to all the peoples of the world. But in practice, our government restricts its focus to what it determines to be the worst examples of tyranny. Iran tops the list due to its anti-Western Shiite Muslim government, its alleged sponsorship of terrorism, its persecution of religious minorities, its nuclear program, and its harsh criticism of Israel. Next comes Syria with another anti-Western, Baath regime, sponsorship of terrorism, persistent meddling in the affairs of its neighbor Lebanon, and hostility to Israel. North Korea ranks third for the cruel Communist dictatorship of Kim Jong Il, the mass imprisonment and torture of political opponents, the manufacture of nuclear missiles and weapons. Although not nearly so cruel, Cuba is another bastion of Communism. Finally, our government ostracizes Myanmar (Burma) for its unelected military junta, and Zimbabwe for its steeped in government corruption and resulting poverty. Despite the fact that personal and political interests and issues heavily shape this list, there is no question that all the countries on this register are guilty of human rights violations to various degrees

But one major country is disturbingly absent from the Bush administration’s list. Having been so completely neglected for so many years now, the absence of this giant nation’s Communist regime from American concern for human rights and freedom is no longer conspicuous. The dramatic shift in American foreign policy thinking after the collapse of the USSR, preoccupation with the “War on Terrorism” and most significantly the narrow bias of Western media are together largely responsible for this omission. By what they cover and don’t cover, the news executives of the Beltway determine how the American people view the world. Fox News, CNN and MSNBC have steadily ignored the situation in China, creating the popular American perception that the Chinese regime is no longer a threat to its people. In any event, we think, the Chinese have attained economic independence thru the globalization system. The Cold War ended in 1991, and Communism now lies utterly discredited.

Such a perception couldn’t be more misleading. Communism has indeed been discredited, but it is far from gone. The second largest country on earth, boasting one fifth the world’s population and now the second largest economy in world history, is still ruled by a Communist dictatorship. Freedom of religion does not exist, and clerics who adhere to a spiritual authority above the government continue to spend years, and even die, in prison. Journalists and political opponents get incarcerated for challenging the ruling Communist party and reporting the hideous methods used to keep control, respectively. With the practice of censorship, freedom of the press is still a dream. Indigenous separatist movements are brutally repressed with military force, torture, and murder. No, China is not a free country like the United States.

Nor is it prosperous. Internationalization of the Chinese regime-controlled economy has made little dent in the glaring widespread poverty afflicting a number of people larger than the whole US population. As many as 325 million Chinese citizens go without clean drinking water, and a staggering 780 million lack modern sanitation. (1) American trade with China has certainly been booming for more than a decade and a half, and investors from Wall Street to Hong Kong have catapulted the huge Asian country into the status of an indispensable link in the global economic chain. But with such a small portion of the Chinese population enjoying the benefits of financial globalization, China cannot truthfully be called wealthy. The average Chinese citizen (about three in five) (2) possesses a small farm and tries to cope with heavy taxes; 350 million others accept a grueling, 100 hour per week “sweatshop” factory job that provides less than 1 dollar an hour. (3) For the latter group, independent labor unions are illegal, stifling hope for better working conditions and wages. Participation in the privatized Chinese market for this 1.1 billion (4) human beings is increasingly a lose-lose situation. Only the foreign investors, their bloated multinational corporations and a relatively few lucky college-grad Chinese expatriate businesspeople draw benefit from this scheme, at the price of hundreds of millions serving against their will—and in violation of their freedom—as sources of cheap labor.

While the American term “Red China” has fallen into disuse, the state is still governed by an authoritarian, political Communist regime. Yet America is unwilling to confront this massive and egregious violator of human rights. Why? Because it is no longer politically correct. America’s present worship of wealth has reached its logical conclusion, where economic considerations trump moral and ethical ones. From Wal-Mart to Microsoft to McDonald’s, every major US business has a crucial stake in China. Uniting with the international community to pressure the Chinese rulers for a more just government might rock the boat—might create some friction and internal “instability”, words that corporate executives do not like to hear. Furthermore, a change of regime would empower separatist movements in Xinjiang, Tibet and other regions, harming the US battle against terrorism. Communists, big business magnates, and supporters of the “War on Terrorism” have all weirdly discovered a common goal: suppress freedom in the name of freedom.

In the excitement of its headlong dive into the world’s oldest continuous civilization, American business to date has left ethical considerations on the diving board. China’s repression of religious liberty, after all, does not hurt the multinational tycoons, who tend to be nonreligious and regard the observance of a weekly day of rest, for themselves and their hapless wage slaves, as an irksome enemy of profit. At the clamor of American investors, the regime has been slipping closer and closer to total laissez-faire economics. Conversely, in fields outside of economics, the Red Chinese regime has maintained tight control over its people’s lives. With its politics, militarism, violations of human rights, and hostility to religion, Red China is a practical demonstration of the wild “free market” at its worst.

Now, I will not deny that capitalism is the ultimate basis for a sound national economic system, or that the worldwide version of it is a real and exciting opportunity for the benefit of the human race. But it is just as true that without civic government based on a foundation of ethics, the human race will destroy itself. Common sense as much as the moral law dictates the necessity of basic principles of justice to guide the world market. To shape a competitive economic system that is both free and fair for all the peoples of the world is a challenge and a responsibility that confronts America more and more each day, with ever-growing monopolies and acts of international “Islamic” terrorism. If only for the sake of world peace, we must strive to carry out this task with international assistance.

The “War on Terrorism”, however, because it is a war on political freedom and economic fairness, conflicts with our duties in regard to Red China. Two hundred thirty years ago, America was born as a result of England’s consistent, deliberate failure to remedy the English colonists’ economic and political grievances. Having evolved into a unique people and facing a repressive government, the colonists believed that they had a right to form their own country. Nationalist and separatist movements in northwestern China and Tibet as well as thruout the Middle East, Africa, Europe and South America are all products of serious injustices remaining unresolved for a significant period of time. When grievances lie disregarded by the government for too long, citizens are likely to reject or even overthrow that government. And according to our Declaration of Independence, such oppressed citizens have not only the right, but the duty to oust a despotic regime.

Yet instead of championing the human freedom of all including the Chinese people, America has politicized the concept of freedom to suit the interests of big business. The tyrannical Red Chinese regime is the most outstanding example of this double standard. Repeating the slogan that Communism is dead and a thing of the past enables the US to cover up this evil policy for dishonest, voracious multinational corporations.

By shamelessly monopolizing the market and squeezing out all competitors, big businesses and multimillionaire investors unite with our government in attacking human freedom. The average Chinese citizen has no prospect of starting a successful small business or improving his or her life, and lacks the money to attend college or university. While the Red Chinese regime has significantly released the nation’s economy and merged it with the international economy, the result has not been vibrant financial health for the nation as a whole. Excessive privatization leads to a wildly insecure market that negatively affects the greater part of the Chinese, and world, population.

Classic Communism is a mistaken response to such economic travail and injustice which does just as grave damage as unrestrained capitalism. Between the extremes of total central economic planning and ridiculous laissez-faire indifference, only a balanced financial system established on moral and ethical principles will succeed. If government does not exercise some degree of regulation over the national economy, if businesspeople can operate above the rule of law, the road is open for wealth to be progressively concentrated in fewer hands at the ever-increasing expense of poorer citizens. Red China‘s speed in traveling down this road does not bode well for the future.

The Communist philosophy which dictates every facet of Chinese public life is evil. Moreover, this current hybrid form in which civil and political rights are curtailed and big business is allowed to dominate the ordinary people is the very antithesis of freedom. Yet America pathetically acquiesces in the first form of repression and actively promotes the latter. What happened to our will to fight Communism? Partly due to our waging of a Cold War and partly to Communism’s inherent economic and political flaws, Russia, Eastern Europe, and most of South America and Africa are free of it. Multinational executives and investors have bribed our government policymakers into facilitating their access to the lucrative Chinese market at the price of capitulating to the last major Red power. We should keep working tirelessly and, as much as possible, peacefully to wipe Communism off the earth.

The “War on Terrorism” emerged from a clear misunderstanding of what terrorism is. It’s simply a method of extortion that some people resort to, in order to compel a government to address their grievances. Although Red China tramples our values, it has received unstinting praise from President Bush as a firm ally in the “War on Terrorism”. This makes no sense and is an inconceivable logic gap. Righting injustices eliminates terrorism. But since the grievances too often concern the huge wealth disparities resulting from the international economic system which America protects, we will not lift a finger to resolve them, causing terrorism to continue unabated.

Sadly, greed has politicized our moral values and distorted our concern for basic human rights. While America should not be an interventionist that builds a worldwide empire, our foreign policy must be guided by the light of our moral values. Governments guilty of systematic and serious violations of the human rights and freedom of their people must be held accountable in the UN and be subject to our diplomatic pressure to change their ways. Red China fits that description. If in spite of these actions it continues to impose Communist dictatorship on its massive and helpless population, we must arm and train Chinese separatists for a revolutionary war of independence—as we did in Afghanistan in the 1980s, with spectacular success.

ENDNOTES

(1) Figures calculated from percentages of the population retrieved from Terrorism Knowledge Base, “Country/Area Overview: China”, at www.tkb.org/Country.jsp?countryCd=CH.

(2) Rural population distribution is 60 percent. Retrieved from www.tkb.org/Country.jsp?countryCd=CH.

(3) Sarah Anderson, “Wal-Mart’s Pay Gap”, Institute for Policy Studies, retrieved from www.ips-dc.org/projects/global_econ/walmart_pay_gap.htm.

(4) Equal to population on farms plus population in sweatshops.

Copyright © 2006, 2007 by Justin Soutar. This article may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the explicit written permission of the copyright holder.
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Vintage Distributism

2007-08-07T18:44:00.000-07:00

Babies and Distributism
by G.K. Chesterton

I hope it is not a secret arrogance to say that I do not think I am exceptionally arrogant; or if I were, my religion would prevent me from being proud of my pride. Nevertheless, for those of such a philosophy, there is a very terrible temptation to intellectual pride, in the welter of wordy and worthless philosophies that surround us today. Yet there are not many things that move me to anything like a personal contempt. I do not feel any contempt for an atheist, who is often a man limited and constrained by his own logic to a very sad simplification. I do not feel any contempt for a Bolshevist, who is a man driven to the same negative simplification by a revolt against very positive wrongs. But there is one type of person for whom I feel what I can only call contempt. And that is the popular propagandist of what he or she absurdly describes as Birth-Control.
I despise Birth-Control first because it is a weak and wobbly and cowardly word. It is also an entirely meaningless word; and is used so as to curry favour even with those who would at first recoil from its real meaning. The proceeding these quack doctors recommend does not control any birth. It only makes sure that there shall never be any birth to control. It cannot for instance, determine sex, or even make any selection in the style of the pseudo-science of Eugenics. Normal people can only act so as to produce birth; and these people can only act so as to prevent birth. But these people know perfectly well as I do that the very word Birth-Prevention would strike a chill into the public, the instant it was blazoned on headlines, or proclaimed on platforms, or scattered in advertisements like any other quack medicine. They dare not call it by its name, because its name is very bad advertising. Therefore they use a conventional and unmeaning word, which may make the quack medicine sound more innocuous.
Second, I despise Birth-Control because it is a weak and wobbly and cowardly thing. It is not even a step along the muddy road they call Eugenics; it is a flat refusal to take the first and most obvious step along the road of Eugenics. Once grant that their philosophy is right, and their course of action is obvious; and they dare not take it; they dare not even declare it. If there is no authority in things which Christendom has called moral, because their origins were mystical, then they are clearly free to ignore all the difference between animals and men; and treat men as we treat animals. They need not palter with the stale and timid compromise and convention called Birth-Control. Nobody applies it to the cat. The obvious course for Eugenists is to act towards babies as they act towards kittens. Let all the babies be born; and then let us drown those we do not like. I cannot see any objection to it; except the moral or mystical sort of objection that we advance against Birth-Prevention. And that would be real and even reasonable Eugenics; for we could then select the best, or at least the healthiest, and sacrifice what are called the unfit. By the weak compromise of Birth-Prevention, we are very probably sacrificing the fit and only producing the unfit. The births we prevent may be the births of the best and most beautiful children; those we allow, the weakest or worst. Indeed, it is probable; for the habit discourages the early parentage of young and vigorous people; and lets them put off the experience to later years, mostly from mercenary motives. Until I see a real pioneer and progressive leader coming out with a good, bold, scientific programme for drowning babies, I will not join the movement.
But there is a third reason for my contempt, much deeper and therefore more difficult to express; in which is rooted all my reasons for being anything I am or attempt to be; and above all, for being a Distributist. Perhaps the nearest to a description of it is to say this: that my contempt boils over into bad behaviour when I hear the common suggestion that a birth is avoided because people want to be "free" to go to the cinema or buy a gramophone or a loud-speaker. What makes me want to walk over such people like doormats is that they use the word "free." By every act of that sort they chain themselves to the most servile and mechanical system yet tolerated by men. The cinema is a machine for unrolling certain regular patterns called pictures; expressing the most vulgar millionaires' notion of the taste of the most vulgar millions. The gramophone is a machine for recording such tunes as certain shops and other organisations choose to sell. The wireless is better; but even that is marked by the modern mark of all three; the impotence of the receptive party. The amateur cannot challenge the actor; the householder will find it vain to go and shout into the gramophone; the mob cannot pelt the modern speaker, especially when he is a loud-speaker. It is all a central mechanism giving out to men exactly what their masters think they should have.
Now a child is the very sign and sacrament of personal freedom. He is a fresh free will added o the wills of the world; the is something that his parents have freely chosen to produce and which they freely agree to protect. They can feel that any amusement he gives (which is often considerable) really comes from him and from them and from nobody else. He has been born without the intervention of any master or lord. He is a creation and a contribution; he is their own creative contribution to creation. He is also a much more beautiful, wonderful, amusing and astonishing thing than any of the stale stories or jingling jazz tunes turned out by the machines. When men no longer feel that he is so, they have lost the appreciation of primary things, and therefore all sense of proportion about the world. People who prefer the mechanical pleasures, to such a miracle, are jaded and enslaved. They are preferring the very dregs of life to the first fountains of life. They are preferring the last, crooked, indirect, borrowed, repeated and exhausted things of our dying Capitalist civilisation, to the reality which is the only rejuvenation of all civilisation. It is they who are hugging the chains of their old slavery; it is the child who is ready for the new world.

Overall Weakness of a Global Economy

2007-08-18T07:51:00.000-07:00

by Athanasius

Today we are constantly inundated with the concept that bigger is better. When Americans lose jobs that go over seas to countries with lower standards of human dignity, we are told that this is a great thing for business, and for industry because it means prices will go down.

The problem with this view, made ever more apparent by the continual collapse that Wallstreet has been in, is that eventually we come to a point where we don't produce anything. On top of that, no real trade is actually occurring. Instead of producing in America, companies are producing under the same name and brand in East Beijing. What is really going on is labor is sent out to other countries. When this occurs not only in America, but in any economy, it becomes more expensive to produce one's own goods than it is to buy them from abroad. This leaves a nation in an inherently dependent situation. If a nation does not produce any of its own goods, apart from taking away jobs from its local citizens, it has no stable economic market. Everything must be shipped thousands of miles before it gets into a Walmart, or a Target, or a neighborhood Supermarket, which requires....gas.

Now let us suppose something catastrophic were to occur, such as a war with Iran which produces 20% of the world's oil, or with Venezuela which produces a large percentage, I can't remember how much. One does not even need a war necessarily, let us assume that China could afford to buy the same oil we do currently from these countries, they could just decide they don't want to sell to Americans because they hate us. Either way, if we were to start bombing Iran, which Bush Administration rhetoric makes increasingly clear is on the table, oil could go up to obscene prices. How high? According to Peter Brooks, the Head of the National Security Foundation and Center for Asian Studies, oil could go up to $200 a barrel. At present oil is $70 a barrel, and we pay around $3 here in Southern California. Perhaps my colleagues on the East pay something around that figure. If the proportions remain similar, let us imagine a 200% increase in gasoline prices, that would be $9 a gallon.

First let us figure that cost here in southern California. Unlike New York, or San Francisco, or Washington D.C., there is no public transportation. What little we have is more expensive than driving, such as commuter trains, which are a very limited capacity. Every day men and women commute as much as 180 miles to work in Los Angeles from North and South, even people who live north of me. First off, that is because we have no local economies in the suburbs north of city, and the only thing that can pay a mortgage is a service based job in Los Angeles. If gas was $9 a gallon, that commute would be impossible to afford even on a 60k income from LA. That would lead to a huge economic recession in this area.

That is only considering a small corner of the ill effects of globalization. In grocery stores, retail outlets, etc., the costs of basic groceries will rise beyond what the average consumer could possibly pay. Goods produced in Asia might very well be cheap wholesale, but the shipping costs would rise proportionally to oil costs. This is an inherent weakness to an economy dependent upon a commodity that is not produced locally in large quantities, such as oil. If that commodity were to disappear the economy would collapse.

Now if on the other hand, we had local economies, where food was grown locally by a series of growers and supplemented by trade, there would be much more stability. When jobs exist locally and money is created in a local community, it tends to stay within that local community increasing its strength. It wouldn't matter if kiwi were shipped in from New Zealand, as long as fruits, grains and vegetables were grown locally. But if all fruits, grains and vegetables are grown abroad and shipped in, the community is inherently unstable because a few minor catastrophes could create a famine.

Thus, if globalization meant increasing foreign trade to supplement stable local economies with goods they do not produce, it is something that could scarcely be opposed. However such is not the reality, and what ultimately results is not a freedom of choice, but a freedom from choice. If the American consumer decides to boycott goods coming from China for instance, it is next to impossible, and almost entirely impossible with food which rarely has a place of origin marked. Seafood is the only exception on this count. The choice is removed from the community because it is not the producer of anything, but only the consumer, and at the mercy of the owner of the means of production. In essence a global economy which supplants rather than works with a local economy, removes stability and choice from markets and limits the power of the consumer, presuming he still has the income to buy the products in question. If it were not for easy credit, the majority of sales at today's retail industries would not occur and they would not be in business. That is the only thing that separates the American consumer from the African consumer who can not afford to buy the shoes he produces in the Nike factory, that the American has credit cards and the African does not. One day however, just as the sham of the global economy must inevitably come crashing down, so must the sham of easy credit, and in their wake a depression which will dwarf 1929.