"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.
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.
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.
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.