explains why most catholics i meet are leftists.
And most of the ones who claim to be conservative are ideologically to the left of conservatives!
He had obviously never read the constitution of the United States. I love these lefty “thinkers” who think they can rewrite the constitution at their superior whim.
Centralized health care and education? Get lost! No mention of National defense nor border protection - two of the central constitutional functions of the US government.
Let the states and locals handle health care and education however the citizens want.
But he’s right about this: Tea Party is right that the government is too big and powerful. Some of the wall street protesting stinkies are right that corporations have too much power and influence in the government due to global trade. Globalism has to go if America is to recover.
Distributism is hardly leftism. It’s founded on the principle of subsidiarity, that it’s evil to assign to a higher level of hierarchy what a lower level of hierarch is capable of. In other words, it supports not only states’ rights in the face of the federal government, but county rights in the face of the state, village rights in the face of the county, and family rights in the face of the village.
Distributism is the economic side of that model. As corporations become massive, they invariably restrict competition, and seek to manipulate government to prevent competition. Distributism seeks ways to keep the marketplace free, so that conglomerates don’t get to write the rules in ways which that favor “synerigism,” “supply line dominance” (the lethality of which for an economy was demonstrated by the Japanese earthquake), regulation, and exclusive contracts.
An artifically imposed distributism might have effects that might please liberals, such as defeating Walmart in favor of local grocers. But an organic distributism (which is necessary as not to violate the underlying principle of subsidiarity) would see Walmart diversify into niche subsidiaries, while local grocers get the leg up with microdistribution, farmer’s markets, etc.
There’s some natural limits to distibutism in bricks-and-mortar companies; a smallish manufacturing plant is going to develop the expertise and scale to efficiently produce automobiles. But, surprisingly, new markets tend to start out better distributed: remember Mom & Pop video stores were the norm before Blockbuster? And that they were cheaper than blockbuster? The problem is Americans mistook 500 spaces with one video as indicating a better selection than all copies of one video being in a single stack... because we naturally believe bigger is better. Well, the internet is the ultimate is distributism.
Correction: distibutism has found a very unlikely foothold: banking. Microloans are revolutionizing the third world, and reversing poverty.
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.
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.
That might be true, but much of the intellectual firepower of the conservative movement is also from Catholic minds, and many conservatives, once they examine the foundations of their political and social principles, convert to Catholicism.
“explains why most catholics i meet are leftists.”
Please allow me to chalk one up on the other side of the tally sheet.
Matter of fact, I don’t think it is possible to be both a Catholic and a leftist. The two are totally incompatible.
Just calling yourself a Catholic doesn’t mean that you believe as the Church does or try to act as Jesus taught.
Just as a disclaimer, I will add that just trying to act as Jesus taught doesn’t mean you’re doing a very good job of it.