Oh great, I hadn't noticed that. As I was saying about crankery.... I'm only vaguely acquainted with CounterPunch but it does indeed appear to be, if nothing else, way over on the red end of the hysteria meter.

That's how they keep us down.

Can it be worse than cleaning terrapins?

AMDG

Now that I am a wage slave, I don't have much time to read about not being one.

That's pretty funny, in a disturbing kind of way. :)

Thanks for this, Maclin, I haven't had much time to check out the new site.

Re: the "cranky" link - surely a website can put up links to other groups etc without necessarily ascribing to all their views?

It is very hard not to be a crank, under such circumstances, I reckon. I'm pretty cheerful and laid back by nature, yet as time goes on, I get more and more irritated and cranky. God help me.

I like what you say about the common sense aspect of distributism. I agree. This ought to be the greatest part of its appeal. The best thing about Rerum Novarum, IMO, is that its very name highlights the fact that socialism and capitalism, far from being the only kinds of economies in existence, are actually "the new things."

Actually I meant "cranky" in the sense of "he's a crank," meaning he's eccentric.

Yes, but being irritated regularly about things of importance to me, is not only making me cranky (i.e. angry) but potentially a bit of a crank! This is the opinion of my husband and one of my male friends who took the time to caution me re: some of my (possibly over the top) blog posts, when I was still blogging.

I'm not a crank about the Jews, however. Indeed, we hardly have any here in Tassie, so they're just not on the radar.

No, I haven't. I need to do that--thanks for the reminder.

I think that's an extremely trenchant criticism, and one I have a lot of sympathy with. I don't think it's the last word, though. I'm in a hurry right now (shouldn't even be on the computer) but I'll try to reply more fully on my lunch break today.

So what I'm saying is that the government could make it possible by less interference rather than more. Of course, you couldn't create a whole society along those lines this way, but small groups of people could do it.

AMDG

I just recently finished reading Chesterton's The Outline of Sanity, in which he presents a haphazard case for Distributism. When reading, I raised the same objection that Jeff raised: even if one could establish the distributist ideal at a particular time, the natural dynamics of the market would tend to destroy it. Chesterton's counter-argument is that this depends on cultural factors and is not necessary. He argues -- whether rightly or not I do not know -- that something very like the distributist ideal existed in pre-industrial Europe and was stable over a long period. The tendency of the market to concentrate wealth and property in the hands of those who already have it could be countered by, for instance, a social stigma against selling one's own land. (This is Chesterton's own example.)

Well, I've just about run out of lunch break now, but I was going to say something along the same lines as Craig.

I get annoyed with distributists who give the impression that just itching to take total control of economic matters (in the name of the Church) and that if they could just get hold of enough power, they would immediately impose a total and fairly rigid model of distributism. I don't think that's either possible or desirable. It would have to be a cultural change. I think more of our current economic practices are rooted in culture than we are conscious of. We have a cultural prejudice, for instance, that it isn't rational or especially desirable for people to act on the basis of any consideration except immediate financial advantage in any economic transaction. That could change. I also get annoyed with free-marketers who talk as if economics were a branch of physics. There are no "laws" in economics comparable to those in physics. There are natural tendencies and patterns, but we're talking about human decisions, not physical forces.

On the other hand, I'm not so sure the example of stable pre-industrial Europe is quite as persuasive as Chesterton thinks. Most people were peasants. What did they think, I wonder?

Everyone should read I see you are trying to impose a total and fairly rigid reading system on us.

AMDG

As one small example of a way in which guvvermints could simply get out of the way - remove any laws forbidding/restricting the selling of produce etc on roadsides.

It seems from the little I've read that sometimes guvvermints promote a distributive economy (somewhat) by accident. I'll have to go find an example.

99% of businesses are small businesses, and their main complaint is being ham-strung by bureaucracy. 1% are big businesses, and they (and their shareholders) are the ones with the big tax breaks and the easy access to policy makers.

The government could go some way to encourage small ownership just by getting out of people's way, and by not bending over quite so far backwards to make exceptions for big business (not oppressively, you understand, but just by making them subject to the same rules as the rest of us).

I've not come across a trumpeter of the "free market" who really seemed to think that big business shouldn't be allowed to play by its own rules. All the ones I've come across give every appearance of rating the freedoms of big corporations higher than the freedoms of either workers or co-operatives. But I try to avoid them, so I might not have come across a representative sample.

In Australia, I doubt very much that small business would account for a very high percentage of businesses. Sadly.

When the GFC hit, one remark made was:

"socialism for Big Business, capitalism for everyone else"

Jeff, I don't think distributism would require a wholesale spiritual transformation. I'm not convinced it's utopian, although certainly its advocates make it sound that way sometimes. A distributist order would certainly have its share of corruption and if it were the actual reigning order it would simply be part of "the world" in the biblical sense, and people like today's Catholic distributists would still denounce it. I've heard it said, for instance, that guilds, which sound so benign, also functioned as a way of limiting access and fixing prices for certain trades. Yet possibly we could have a more human order. It seems not insignificant to me that no one loves the physical or mental environment created by capitalism (using that word, rightly or wrongly, to describe our system). We like the money, we like our iPods and such, but we try to escape from the environments where they're produced and sold. We have contempt for commercials and marketing in general. There's something seriously amiss in this. And then there's the whole question of whether what we've done over the past century can be sustained within our present ideas of how things ought to be done--I think there are serious doubts about that.

I think I'm going to hold off any further comment on what I think is actually possible until I've read some of Medaille's book. I admit none of my ideas are very clear.

A distributist I know once said that although Richard Nixon was a terrible man he deserved credit for one thing: implementing wage and price controls. I was greatly taken aback by that, as I thought most knowledgeable people agreed that such controls were counter-productive. It does seem that there are in the distributist movement a certain number of people who simply want an economy commanded from the top down, and in that sense might be thought of as socialist in temperament, or like socialists. I'm pretty suspicious of that thinking, and whatever I think distributism might be, I don't think it's that.

The British government is launching a crack-down on benefit fraud, which costs the exchequer 2 billion pounds a year. As a cousin of mine just posted on Facebook - tax fraud costs the exchequer more like 15 billion a year, but if they cracked down on that they'd be embarrassing their funders, friends and colleagues.

Appalling.