Distributism (JD Vance)

Much like Chesterton and Belloc posited and argued for a third way, a path that did not look like Monopoly Capitalism or State Socialism, we may be some arguing for this now.

I came across what I thought was a fascinating interview by Bishop Barron of Vice President JD Vance. I am a big fan of anything Bishop Barron puts out, not just because I agree with him, but because I find him to be one of the top intellectuals of our day. Listen to his debates, discussions and interviews. Watch the speech he gave at America’s 250th birthday. Suffice to say, the algo’s populate my feed with his content.

I did not know what to expect of the interview when I saw it. JD Vance has become a figure that is somewhat vilified on both the left and the right. The left sees him as Trump’s attack dog, lacking civility, and embodying the same brutal message. The right sees many of his comments, particularly where he said that maybe we need to move beyond the views of Milton Friedman, as an abandonment of core conservative ideology.

I encourage you to listen whether you like him or not. You will surely learn something. That is important since he is likely leading the ticket in 2028. You might want to know what you are (or aren’t) voting for.

It's pretty bad when someone manages to make Chris Christie look brilliant by comparison.

I saw them both up close at the Georgia State Convention in 2015. Rubio just gave a stump speech of his biography and was done. We all heard it before. Christie actually tried to tailor his speech for his audience (Georgia isn't New Jersey), and did a very good job of it. He was actually engaging. Cruz had a separate reception in the evening, and though I was a Cruz supporter, was underwhelmed. I wouldn't say he mailed it in, but he was more or less on auto-pilot. Fiorina used a campaign tape. Not a winning move. John Ellis Bush had proxies manning lonely tables. Even in 2015, they looked like a well-funded, losing team. Even though his state was next door. They were the best dressed. No Rand Paul or Scott Walker presence.

Why are you trying to muddy the waters by bringing Rubio into this. Most senators and other politicians are not suited for the SCOTUS including at least half of the current justices.

Vance has no credentials that would make him an acceptable Supreme Court justice. I wouldn’t think of Rubio for the court either. But I think he would likely be a pretty competent president. We’re not going to get another Trump.

Tariffs and restricted immigration are also government actions.

They, together with the gold standard, gave investment in the US a good return for both US and foreign investors while a shortage of labor encouraged high wages and improvements in productivity.

Inflation was caused by Nixon's abandonment of the gold exchange mechanism in order to boost government borrowing and spending.

Collusion in price fixing is not only illegal, but it fails due to someone trying to undercut prices. OPEC always had the second problem.

The US Government spent hundreds of millions of dollars taking on IBM in an anti-trust case. IBM spent more. Nothing came of it.

It was Apple, started in a garage with the benefit of a second mortgage on the home, and later Microsoft, who sold the geeky disk operating system, that took IBM down. The business world is too dynamic for anti-trust to be effective or needed.

I’ll admit that IBM market dominance lasted longer than impatient people wanted. However, it came to an end. This is in contrast with the postal service and their legal monopoly, or government schools which cost the taxpayer way too much for the services they provide.

This is not to say that anti-trust is entirely ineffective. Per Grok:
U.S. Shoe Corporation was a major domestic manufacturer of shoes, and after its breakup, U.S.‑based shoe manufacturing under its brands essentially came to an end.

“Tariffs and restricted immigration are also government actions.”

Tariffs are merely a way to bring in revenue, like income, sales, property, inheritance, and corporate taxes. The government has an infinite need for revenue because the demands for government to take action have no end.

Controlling immigration is a legitimate function of government.

“Inflation was caused by Nixon’s abandonment of the gold exchange mechanism in order to boost government borrowing and spending.” In other words, inflation was caused by calls for government to take action.

"That is correct. Anti-Trust laws were designed to achieve the Distributist aim of preventing monopolies and market distortions caused by collusion among a small number of corporate oligarchs. Anti-trust laws are essentially "Distributism" without the deceptive name."

That's a bit of a problem then. The Pope's 1891 Rerum Novarum encyclical was highly popular during the Progressive Era 1900-1920, at least among many of the Progressive leaders.

So then we examine................. What's the dime's bit of difference between Woodrow Wilson and a Distributist? What's the dime's bit of difference between Franklin Roosevelt or Theodore Roosevelt or Truman or LBJ or Nixon or even Obama, compared to Distributists?

If Distributism is just the administrative state - heavy regulations in order to turn the economy into a marionette with the government itself as a puppetmaster and a heavy reliance upon experts and bureaucracies where everybody is unelected and cushioned away from voters, well we already have that. We've had Distributism for 125 years then.

It's called progressivism. It already has a name.

That sort of comparison as quoted above makes Distributism look dreadfully terrible and also, JD Vance.

I think you are conflating two different things. You are critiquing what the French under de Gaulle called "Dirigisme", i.e. a situation where the state picks winners and losers through subsidies, tax incentives, regulatory exemptions etc for favored businesses while regulating and taxing their competitors out of existence. That approach does create monopolies, or at least oligarchies.

However, anti-trust laws are exactly the opposite of this with respect to both means and aims: they're an effort to prevent monopoly and oligarchy by making anti-competitive practices (e.g. collusive price fixing) illegal. That and not Dirigisme is at the core of Distributism.

As another poster (Dr. Sivana, I think) pointed out, Distributism has an unfortunate name - it implies that the government is confiscating the wealth of one and distributing to the other, but it does no such thing.

I'm not a fan of Chris Christie in terms of policy either (though in a deep blue state like NJ, he's as good as you're going to get), but you're right in that he was a very effective political operator and speaker, and intellectually light years ahead of a scripted empty suit like Rubio. Jeb Bush and Carly Fiorina weren't any better.

What I remember about the 2016 election was being highly skeptical of Trump at first, thinking that he wasn't serious about any of his immigration or trade policies and was just running a vanity campaign, but most of the alternatives were so bad that I said "what the hell" and voted for him. The gamble paid off, at least given the alternatives in the primary and even more so the general election.

What I remember about the 2016 election was being highly skeptical of Trump at first

I started out with Cruz because I was doubtful that Trump would be pro-life. I still don't know where he is in his heart, and am saddened on his role in IVF and inaction on abortion pills (especially across state lines). But he went after Title X for the first time since Reagan (and unlike Reagan, partially succeeded), and actually got things done, and not just SCOTUS.

His world is different than mine, so I now understand why he "had" to donate to Ted Kennedy's Senate campaigns given his line of work. I couldn't do that, and is likely a small part of the reason why I never hit it big in politics or business.

I am glad he got in, of course. He is opening up the discourse and moved somethings that were long thought to be immovable. He has inspired a new generation of patriots.

There can be a big difference. You have basically three approaches:

1) laissez faire;
2) structuring the law and policy to balance labor and capital (collective bargaining, tariffs, immigration restrictions, limited mandates and minimum redistribution)
3) general redistribution (socialism, large welfare schemes, multiple mandates for employers, hyper-regulation)

Western societies did a very good job of (2) between 1945-75.

The destruction of the gold exchange mechanism and liberal trade in the post Cold War era has given us the worst of both (1) and (3): the regulatory state and its confiscatory tax schemes got ever bigger while "free trade" and mass immigration subjected wages for ordinary people to massive downward pressure while simultaneously greatly increasing the welfare burden. Neo-liberalism is simply economically and politically unsustainable.

The main problem with the Catholic Church is that it never really made its peace with both political and economic liberalism. John Paul II did so by emphasizing the dignity of labor and the market as involving free choice and the ability for self-improvement (virtue), something denied by command economies and totalitarianism. But his teachings were never fully understood or embraced by the Church. Instead, like every other Western institution, the Catholic Church has been steeped in socialist dogma dressed up as traditional Christian teaching. Vance sems to be aware of the importance of the opportunity for self-improvement and self-sufficiency that are core elements of original Catholic social teaching.

I don’t disagree. I would say that in a Distributist model, we would have Guilds rather than labor unions. While the guild would of course push for better working conditions, they would also set standards for the professions of which they are a part. The trade Unions (electricians, plumbers) pretend to do some of that, but don’t really. The worst example of someone who does the opposite are the Teachers’ unions (NEW, AFT). They actively work against any imposition of standards (except political/leftist acquiescence).

You have basically three approaches:

1) laissez faire; 2) structuring the law and policy to balance labor and capital (collective bargaining, tariffs, immigration restrictions, limited mandates and minimum redistribution) 3) general redistribution (socialism, large welfare schemes, multiple mandates for employers, hyper-regulation)

Good post - unfortunately, people believe that the only alternatives are the false choice between 1. and 3., i.e. having to choose between robber baron plutocracy vs. various incarnations of Marxist socialism. The irony is that both models rob most people of agency.

The fact is that there are other economic systems that better serve at promoting the national interest - i.e. anti-trust laws combined with tariffs, infrastructure investment, and a tax system that promotes small business and independent enterprise while curbing the market distortions caused by corporate oligarchies.

Part of the problem today is that the economy has been so financialized that there's a disconnect between speculation (e.g. cryptocurrency, futures/derivatives trading, currency shorting) and actual wealth creation that results in businesses that generate jobs and products that people actually use. In this sense, our current system may be worse than the robber baron model of 100+ years ago, because at least those robber barons often got their wealth through job and product creating enterprises rather than speculation. Efforts to re-industrialize America through tariffs are one way to curb this trend.

An additional irony here is that people are attacking Vance for not being a Friedmanite libertarian, despite the fact that Trump is quite clearly not a Friedmanite libertarian either - Trump supports tariffs, restrictive immigration policy, etc.

This implies that deviation from libertarian economics isn't their real beef with Vance. As I remarked on another thread, the anti-Vance hatefest isn't really motivated by economic policy or any other domestic issue, it's due to the fact that he's perceived by certain obsessives as being insufficiently pro-Israel (and by a smaller but very noisy contingent of even more obnoxious obsessives who see the VP as insufficiently pro-Ukraine).

Where I live my wife and I once shopped around at a lot of new construction for condos. The union-built units were immediately detectable: plumb drywall, even paint, conduit straight and pipe openings through concrete that looked like they were cut on a CNC machine. Taking pride in the work and professionalism are still important for some unions.

Funny thing was in 2003 I got into a discussion with a construction union official. He was pushing "tax the rich." We discussed pay. After he told me what he and his wife made I told him he was in the top 10% of all US household incomes. He didn't believe me, probably because union guys, especially with overtime, would bring in +$150K per year easy.

My dad had one of those jobs when I was in college & I helped him with taxes. I ran what I remembered through the inflation calculator, and it's only in the past few years that my wife and I (both of us with post-grad degrees) have earned as much or more than my parents did 40+ years ago.

I'm not trying to muddy any waters, I don't want "Gang of 8" Rubio as President any more than I would want him on the Supreme Court.

You're right that we won't get another Trump, but we can do a lot better than having a suntanned clone of Lindsey Graham like Rubio as POTUS. There are far better choices out there - if you don't like Vance, there's Ron DeSantis, who may be better than all of the above and possibly an even better President than Trump.

A key consideration is Centralized vs de-Centralized government.... In other words MONOPOLY GOVERNMENT.

When states, counties and cities offer different menus of choices, WE VOTE WITH OUR FEET where to live, where to pay taxes, where to vote for politicians.

When state and local government exist, not to cater to the needs, taxpayers or voters ...but to get FREE MONEY from the distant Central government we have MONOPOLY GOVERNMENT.

“Democracy in America” (1831) clearly explained this.

Donald Trump is in the economic sense a reincarnation of the protectionist policies that characterized the Republican Party from Lincoln to Hoover. Lincoln himself began his political career as a Whig, a party that championed high tariffs. Lincoln was an admirer of Henry Clay, who like Lincoln was a Kentuckian. Clay in turn followed in the footsteps of Alexander Hamilton, who advocated for a strong central government, Federal encouragement of manufacturing, and high tariffs.

J.D. Vance seems to be following the beliefs of distributism, advocated by the British Catholic authors Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton. Distributism is not necessarily contradictory to protectionism, but the former line of thought favors decentralized economic power while the latter tends to favor economic concentration by reducing foreign competition.

Distributism is not confined to Catholic circles. The Social Credit Party of Canada, which was led by low church Protestants and was strongest in western Canada, advocated distributism, as did Huey Long of Louisiana, a Baptist.

Your analysis is correct. Trump's economic views of tariffs, state support/investment in infrastructure and energy development, and by extension immigration restriction makes him heir to Federalists, Whigs, and early Republicans.

I get the impression that Vance is on board with the same program, perhaps combined with a stronger anti-trust line against corporate mergers and collusion. I don't see this as inconsistent with Federalism, since tariffs do nothing to stifle competition within a country - indeed they can aid the process by preventing outsourcing and favoring foreign investment into the US (i.e. other countries building their plants here).

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.