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explains why most catholics i meet are leftists.
What’s your opinion on this, new FRiend?
thank you, never heard this one before.
assuming the article has the concept right and i understand it. one minute of thought suffices to spot the fallacy at the center of this idea:
power cannot be distributed in a “collective.” corrupt human nature trumps theoretical communism (the distribution of power equally among individuals). any morally rudderless individual or oligarchy will then, again corruptly, maintain, defend and extend it’s power over others, who will be rendered slaves.
if power is allowed to concentrate at all, and in communism there is no barrier to factionalism as madison defines it, it will recursively concentrate itself within a smaller and smaller circle of individuals.
the genius of our Founders was to erect institutional barriers (our Constitution) and leverage God’s law (morality) to retard and block it’s concentration.
the other proposition in the article is provably absurd. if all power is concentrated in the libertarian individual, it can only be defended by just and dispassionate government. but governments are by definition a concentration of power in the few. thus we have the reductio absurdio.
To try to associate communism with the Tea Party is laughable.
Does this mean the Chinese were distributists when they pushed “back-yard blast furnaces” to boost steel production back in Mao’s day?
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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.
“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.
“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.
Distributism is an interesting concept that I have some trouble wrapping my head around.
I’d like to see a knowledgeable person give a comparison between free markets or capitalism and distributism.
The alternative to "capitalism" being what exactly? Some sort of collective authoritarianism, no doubt.
Well, this guy is half right, at least. Government certainly is out of control.
In truth, as most of us know, capitalism is not really being practiced in the USA, at least at the level of big business. So for that reason alone, branding capitalism as the boogeyman in the first place is rather misguided, since it's not the actual enemy.
What is out of control (besides government, of course) is corporatism (crony capitalism) whose benefactors, predictably, capitalize on their influence over an ever-expanding government, with its associated spending.
That's why people like Sarah Palin and her ilk who speak out against this real enemy are so important and influential in these times.
Let's all find a solution to the real problem, and not chase misnamed phantoms, whose pursuers invariably offer some flavor of Marxism as their "solution."