Replacing Capitalism

This is a red alert post. That is, an idea that came to me in the wee hours of the morning that I want to run up the flag pole. It is also wildly outside my area of knowledge, much less expertise: economics.

I did have an economics class once in 1969. I made a good grade, but it was one of the classes that the University of Texas set up to make sure the football team kept its grades up. It was me and the National Champion Longhorns and we all made A's. Texas fight.

Nonetheless, you don't have to be a physician to notice that the surgeon cut off your healthy leg and left the one with gangrene.

This evening, allow me to restate the obvious: capitalism has failed to create a humane, even livable society for most people, and has produced a truly wretched society for many. Socialism has its own problems. Let's move to something that worked for a thousand years in Europe.

Let's discuss "distributism."

Belloc, Chesterton and Day are the most important proponents of distributism. Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton were two English Catholic writers of the early 20th Century. Dorothy Day was the American founder of the Catholic Worker of around the same time who supported distributism.

Belloc wrote that distributism was the system of private and collective ownership of land that had developed to support a just distribution of wealth during a 1000 years of Catholic influence in Europe. He did not view it as a new system, but rather, a return to a just system that had been replaced by the Servile State (the name of his book) that capitalism had produced. The introductory quotation in his book is:

". . . If we do not restore the Institution

of Property we cannot escape restoring
the Institution of Slavery; there
is no third course."

Chesterton in What's Wrong with the World describes the problems with capitalism by arguing the capitalists are against property:

I am well aware that the word "property" has been defied in our time by the corruption of the great capitalists. One would think, to hear people talk, that the Rothchilds and the Rockefellers were on the side of property. But obviously they are the enemies of property; because they are the enemies of their own limitations. They do not want their own land; but other people's.

Distributists, then, are defenders of property. But there is no right to have as much property as you want. The metaphor is marriage. Just because you are in favor of marriage does not mean you defend the right of a man to have as many wives as he wants. Nor should he have as many houses as he wants.

If King Solomon has a thousand wives, there must be nearly as many men without wives. Similarly, every billionaire has monopolized the wealth to sustain thousands. So people starve.

To modernize the argument. Saying Gates should be able to have all the wealth he can accumulate does not defend property any more than allowing him to round up a million women into a personal harem would defend the institution of marriage.

Dorothy Day endorsed the distributist society and in the Catholic Worker mission statement argued how to get there:

A complete rejection of the present social order and a non-violent revolution to establish an order more in accord with Christian values. This can only be done by direct action since political means have failed as a method for bringing about this society.

The distributist economy would be a combination of private property and community property. It would be a return to the Christian economy of the Middle Ages. Belloc describes that earlier society like this:

There was common land, but it was common land
jealously guarded by men who were also personal proprietors
of other land. Common property in the village
was but one of the forms of property, and was
used rather as the fly-wheel to preserve the regularity
of the co-operative machine than as a type of holding
in any way peculiarly sacred. The Guilds had property
in common, but that property was the property
necessary to their co-operative life, their Halls, their
Funds for Relief, their Religious Endowments. As
for the instruments of their trades, those instruments
were owned by the individual members, not by the
guild, save where they were of so expensive a kind as
to necessitate a corporate control.

Thomas Storck argues (cited in the link under the title) that following the teachings of justice of the Church leads inexorably to distributism:

The justification of private property that the popes have made is always tied, at least as an ideal, to ownership and work being joined. Thus Leo XIII: "The law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many people as possible to become owners" (Rerum Novarum, no. 35), and this teaching is repeated by Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno (nos. 59-62, 65), by John XXIII in Mater et Magistra (nos. 85-89, 91-93, 111-115), and by John Paul II in Laborem Exercens (no. 14). If "as many people as possible...become owners," then that fatal separation of ownership and work will be, if not removed, at least its extent and influence will be lessened.

The invisible hand snatches away food, housing and health care from those who need it. The traditional economies of Catholic Europe offered a better way.