>> It’s 100% voluntary? They would ask that the collective owners of corporations surrender their ownership interest voluntarily so that families could own those means of production? <<
NO No No No No no NO! My God, you think like a socialist. The free market, that Invisible Hand tied behind our back, would do it. There’s no reason on earth why a company in Arkansas can sell produce grown in New Jersey to customers in New Jersey more cheaply than a company in New Jersey can. The Arkansas company gets involved because it can guarantee a huge market to the grower, but it does that at the cost to the grower of having to sign an exclusive relationship.
There’s no growth and efficiency in Microsoft destroying innovation for fifteen years until Google finally comes up with an end-run around operating system dependence. There’s no growth and efficiency in Nintendo patenting a screen-scrolling algorithm invented by Atari, and then putting Atari out of business.
Now, no-one promises all huge corporations would disintegrate into small companies. A mom and pop operation probably can’t build the same quality aircraft that Boeing can. But we can at least remove the artificial economic forces through which Big Capital and Big Government squash entrepreneurship and private ownership. (For starters, one thing that Belloc and Chesteron didn’t dwell on, but I will simply putting an end to laws prohibit subdivision of land.)
No-one owns their land; they rent it from the bank at exorbitant rates, and must seek approval for their Masters in the government before they can do anything with that land. That’s a crisis.
>> What I am saying is that their goals cannot be achieved, in real terms, without the coercive power of the state. Short of that coercive power it’s nothing more than the bleating of an utopian. As soon as implementation is attempted it requires the power of the state. <<
That is nothing more than an uninformed assertion. Prove that any one of the specific recommendations of distribution would fail to help the distribution of the means of production. Naturally, before you can do that, you need to read up on those recommendations and the theories behind them; your posts demonstrate you haven’t. So quit making untrue assertions based on your own prejudices, and start contributing to solutions.
What specific regulations or laws would you implement or eliminate that would achieve the distributionist goals?
The reason a company in Arkansas can sell produce grown in NJ cheaper is that the company in Arkansas has done the work to build the business relationships and contracts with the buyers in NJ.
How would you un-do that?
From your descriptions, distributism doesn’t sound all that different from free markets/capitalism. It just sounds like capitalism with a few regulations.
That sounds similar to how we (at least used to) have free markets but with anti-trust laws.