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).
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.
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).