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Posted on 10/18/2011 8:36:07 PM PDT by MeNeFrego
NEW YORK — Can an Anglican theologian from Britain revive an 80-year-old Catholic social justice theory and provide a solution to America’s economic woes and political polarization?
Philosopher and political thinker Phillip Blond thinks so, and he’s giving it everything he’s got.
Blond, who has been a counselor to British Prime Minister David Cameron, just wrapped up a two-week U.S. tour to pitch his retooled version of “distributism,” a theory that argues that both capitalism and government are out of control.
In that sense, the thinking goes, both Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party are right...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
OK, let's slice your nuances thin and be more specific.
They advocate an amorphous religious state in which the state benevolently allocates justice and resources based upon the needs of the people, and grounded in Biblical principle.
Statist, Fascist or Communist...they're all the same to me and my mortal enemy.
Leftist Catholics are too ignorant to even know what 'distributism' is.
Most of the Catholics that were distributists were also very conservative. Especially Hillaire Belloc who was one of the first commentators to state that at some point one of the major foes of Western Civilization would be Islam. And this was before the communists had even done their worst.
ha, you mean a journalist got it wrong? what a shock. well i’m sure now that i’ve heard the term, i’ll pick up more about it as time goes on.
How do you like living in the United States of Morgan Stanley, Frank, and Dodd?
Does this mean the Chinese were distributists when they pushed “back-yard blast furnaces” to boost steel production back in Mao’s day?
Before Belloc was born, that major foe had 1,000 years of aggresive history. To me, Mr. Belloc's economic theories were unconvincing.
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Distributism is/ was not any official Catholic idea. It was not from the Church. It was believed by some priests and some prominent lay Catholics in England early in the last century. Catholic seminaries do not teach much about Economics, alas.
You are in the Northeast, right? If so then most of everybody you meet is probably Left. In my K of C council we sometimes talk politics after a meeting and the liberal members are from New York or New England. Everybody else is pretty straight conservative. Nobody has a kenyan sticker on his bumper.
I am not optimistic that America will recover. I am a longtime gate guard at a resort in Florida. The spring break crows and the early summer crowd- mostly college kids or just out of college and unemployed- has been getting duller each year that I have been there and this year the curve took a discernible turn netherwards. This is the generation that will run our businesses and politics in a few years.
“libertarians of the left and the right...”? Libertarianism, at least from the Randian perspective, will never be a leftist or statist perspective. The closest thing might be an Nietzchian or ‘will to power’ viewpoint and that is anything but a classical liberal viewpoint.
I respect the intellect and intentions of people like Chesterton, Belloc and Blond, but the fact is there wouldn’t be such an ideological gulf between left and right if anything the left attempted in the last century actually worked. Forms of distributism are brought back from time to time, witness the “small is beautiful” movement of the Seventies. While localized socioeconomic models have their obvious charm, they must arise naturally from existing circumstance. If they are created or enforced by public sector coercion, they will never succeed and will probably fail immediately.
So, there were Catholic intellectuals who were in favor or a different balance of state, corporate, and individual, power. Many a Protestant was a Fabian socialist in the same era, too, so it's just another example of intellectuals doing their usual theorizing. There are more than enough boneheaded ideas that were once popular among one or another group of intellectuals to find fault with any religious group. Just put this theory in that category and forget it, no one much is even interested in hearing about this theory much less in implementing it.
You have no reason to fear some "mortal enemy" creeping out of a dark, dank, Catholic, alley somewhere. The existing Protestant system is heading quite rapidly to the logical endpoint of Protestant theology overlaid on a society. Rest assured that Catholics don't want to seize control and take credit for the existing system. What we have now has done a fine job of destroying the Constitution in favor of the Almighty Dollar. Those who built the skeleton and left it to be fleshed out by future generations are long dead, and those rapidly establishing a fascist nobility are cozy in their Snuggies oblivious to everything except their own superiority
Regards
Good for you, Sara.
From the article: ““You need a new culture, or a new commonality around which you can associate and create.”
“And the problem is you don’t have that because you have culture wars. And once you have culture wars you have a society that fragments ... which means you become a society that can’t solve problems. Which is very worrying.””
The whole article was just another WaPo space filler against the TeaParty. Oh, and somehow give the illusion that it’s the fault of religion.
Yes the leftist are trying to use the TEA party and make us all “useful idiots” en masse.
What needs to be said, first and foremost about this article in the absolute error that is made by the statement there are ANY similarities between OWS and the Tea Party. The two are like night and day. And there are no REAL similarities at all.
That being said, distributism has much more in common with Christian principles and subsidiarity than any other form of sociological approach to economics. In fact, I think F.A Hayak would tell us that it fits the model of “Free Markets” better than anything else.
“”Distributism is hardly leftism””
Spot on! So is the rest of your post.
One can see by reading the late Belloc and others that unbounded usury is the real evil force that has driven the west closer socialism and lack of ownership, this has aided greed and corrupt power more than anything else.
by Hilaire Belloc
As long as Usury was forbidden by the moral law and its immorality admitted, even though it took place widely, it took place under protest. It was always checked by the public disrepute in which it was held and by the fact that unless it were disguised, the interest could not be recovered by law. Disguises were indeed often used, as for instance, the promise to repay on a certain date a certain sum of money as having been lent, when as a fact a small sum had been lent. But though such subterfuges were continual, the evil could not spread until the taking of interest upon money alone became an admitted practice of which no man was ashamed, which no one thought evil, which was taken for granted.
By the third generation great central banks had arisen, notably in Amsterdam and London. Shortly afterwards, during the 18th century, men had everywhere begun to think (later in Catholic nations than in Protestant, but everywhere at last) as though interest on money were part of the nature of things: as though money had indeed, merely as money, a right to breed. The false doctrine was bound to lead to a deadlock at last, and in our own time that deadlock has been reached. The recovery of the vast usurious loans is impossible. Recourse has had to be made to repudiation on all sides, and the whole system is breaking down.
But remember that the worst of its effects is not its own self-destruction, but the way in which it has gathered into a few centers the power of controlling lives of the community and particularly of the proletariat, whose employment, and therefore existence, depends upon the great advance of credit by the holders of financial power. For all our great enterprises today are possible only through the favor of the lenders of money or credit.
We may sum up then and say that the unrestricted admittance of Usury as a normal economic function about a lifetime after the Reformation advanced the destruction of economic freedom, the swallowing up of the small man by the greater man, and the ultimate production of a large destitute Proletariat in the following fashions:
1. By the eating up of small property by Usury, falling as it did habitually upon men already embarrassed, and achieving their ruin;
2. By transferring real wealth in goods and land to those who directly used their mere money power, often enormous and impersonal, through mortgage and foreclosure.
Hilaire Belloc was correct and we are seeing it unfold before our eyes!
“Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party are essentially different expressions of the same phenomenon,” Blond said. Both are angry at the concentration of power, but both are on rocky ground when they demand salvation from either the gods of the market or government.That is not distributism as I understand it. Distributism will have a local school teaching local kids and a local doctor visiting his patients, no different than local blacksmith shoeing local horses and local farmer getting food to local market. It is a medieval model, not a central-government model; in a medieval state the central goverment, at most, mints the coin and brokers peace treaties.Distributism, Blond argues, calls for going smaller and more local in search of solutions (music to the ears of classic conservatives) while leaving the central government to build the infrastructure and guarantee basics like education and health care (ideas that would warm any bleeding heart).
He may have some hybrid left-wing version of distributism which makes little sense.
What you must understand is that Distributism is an economic application of Subsidiarism; it’s antithetical to state management of justice and resources... which is why distributists have had a difficult time forming a political movement. All stripes of politicians recognize it would strip them of power.
The only sense in which the government “does” anything for Distributism is that it pulls back from its role in protecting the market shares of behemoth corporations, by means such as reducing regulation, withdrawing from market management, removing a tax structure which favors supply line dominance, reforming intellectual property rights (which are supposed to support innovation, not destroy it), and prevent exclusive contracts. You’ll note that the first four of those five are downright libertarian.
Thank you for your explanatory posts.
It’s been a while since I read Belloc on distributism, but doesn’t he advocate the state introduce impediments (e.g. progressive taxation, etc.) to discourage market-share growth?
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