When All the World Dissolves

I recently read Faustian Economics: Hell Hath No Limits. This is an article by novelist Wendell Berry that appears in the May 2008 issue of Harper's Magazine. Berry says:

We seem to have come to a collective delusion of grandeur, insisting that all of us are “free” to be as conspicuously greedy and wasteful as the most corrupt of kings and queens. (Perhaps by devoting more and more of our already abused cropland to fuel production we will at last cure ourselves of obesity and become fashionably skeletal, hungry, but–thank God!–still driving.)

When I was in college my economics teacher, Clifton Grubbs, talked about what it would be like if gas were $5.00 per gallon. It was actually then about a quarter a gallon, so he was talking about an increase of twenty times the price. Even accounting for inflation, gas is more expensive than it was then. That quarter of a gallon gas would still be under $2.00 now, so the $3.50 or so we are paying at the pump is less than double, but a 75% increase.

Under Grubbs' scenario, gas would cost about $40.00 per gallon now. His idea was that if gas were really to pay for the costs involved in its use, including the clean up afterwards, prices would be this high.

If gas were this expensive, society would rapidly reorder itself. I have trouble imagining it but it seems, as a beginning, downtowns would become prime real estate and people would walk and ride bicycles more. Probably, also, whole other industries would come to a screeching halt: vacations, airlines, trucking. And then the industries that rely on those things would collapse such as hotels and grocery stores.

A friend made a trip to El Salvador last week. He has been traveling back and forth for most of the forty years he has lived in Brownsville and he tells me that with the price of corn and rice so high, conditions are dire. People are starving.

Berry in thinking of our predicament is brought back to Christopher Marlowe's Tragical History of Doctor Faustus: Berry describes the desire of Dr. Faustus, so much like our modern approach to control "all Nature's treasury," to "Ransack the ocean.../ And search all corners of the new found world..."

The warning is that where we have no limits, hell also becomes limitless.

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib'd
In one self place; for where we are is hell,
And where hell is, there must we ever be:
And, to conclude, when all the world dissolves,
And every creature shall be purified,
All places shall be hell that are not heaven.

Berry is a farmer first and a writer second, so a local economy based on growing much of your own food does not intimidate him.

The distributists also are big on locally grown food on personally owned, mortgage-free land. With the price of grain spiking, it is easy to be held for ransom if you have no control over your own food.

Now my tomato plants have always died and I'm too fat to keep a garden comfortably. Do you suppose sloth and gluttony are kin? How about control of our food and control of our freedom?

Dear Raulito, please give a message to our new President if you see her.

Well, Raulito, this arrest of the Women in White is not good news. That's fidelista stuff and we need to turn over a new leaf. While you are at it, I suggest you go ahead and cut loose all 75 of the dissident husbands.

We want a new level of tolerance to go along with our distributism. After all, I'll bet when each of those husbands gets his own little plot of land, gardening will become more interesting that protest and with all of the changes you will be making, there will be little to protest against.

I know, I know, George W. and his predecessor have their own violations. I have met with protesters who spent six months in the Federal Prisons for protesting at the School of the Americas.

And of course the Berrigan Brothers. And all of those conscientious objectors.

And then there are those reservists and soldiers who change their minds about going to Iraq. Some were recruited as minors.

I sometimes teach with one of Mumia Abu Jamal's lawyers.

Yes, Raulito, it is true, the Human Rights Watch faults the United States for Guantanamo, torture, secret prisons, detainee abuse, incarcerating a bigger percentage of the our population than anywhere else, death penalty, juvenile life without parole and abusing the rights of non-citizens. Whew.

Cuba, though, appears to have the worst record in Latin America. You have the death penalty and bad prison conditions like us, but Human Rights Watch gives you bad grades on other things:

Cuba remains the one country in Latin America that represses nearly all forms of political dissent. There have been no significant policy changes since Fidel Castro relinquished direct control of the government to his brother Raul Castro in August 2006. The government continues to enforce political conformity using criminal prosecutions, long-term and short-term detentions, mob harassment, police warnings, surveillance, house arrests, travel restrictions, and politically-motivated dismissals from employment. The end result is that Cubans are systematically denied basic rights to free expression, association, assembly, privacy, movement, and due process of law.

I highlighted that second sentence, because I want you to know everyone is hoping you will show Fidel how it's done.

I also know that George W. has been unwilling to talk to you, but maybe a little more distributism and some fewer long-term and short detentions will make it less embarrassing to hang out with you.

Hillary and Obama have both said they (with conditions) they will talk to you. And Nixon went to China; so maybe McCain would work things out with you.

If you see any of them, would you mention the problems we have with people drowning trying to cross the river near Brownsville and the tent city in Raymondville and all of these death penalty prosecutions in Brownsville. We could really use some help.

Raulito Supports Private Home Ownership!

Raulito has taken the next step upward into distributism. The Cuban government yesterday passed regulations that acknowledge the right of state workers to live long term in their houses and pass them to relatives after their death.

The New York Times opines, "The decision seemed to inch property rights forward...." The newspaper does offer the move "stopped well short of allowing the unfettered purchase and sale of private homes."

(Raulito: please note the new posting for a blogsite devoted to the ChesterBelloc Mandate. I am just beginning to review it and we need not swallow the whole pill, but we can seek some guidance. I do note an unnecessary hostility to Darwin, so we may have to rewrite or challenge certain parts).

Now, Raulito, that we have moved toward private ownership of land, what should that ownership look like? Should we move to the "unfettered purchase and sale of private homes?" What if, for instance, Walmart was not satisfied with a mere monopoly of retail sales and jobs and decided to buy up all the houses. They certainly could go a long way in that direction. Would that "unfettered purchase and sale" be OK?

I think, Raulito, you may want to prohibit corporate ownership of land.

Maybe short-term corporate ownership would be OK until a house is finished and may be sold, but long term ownership would be dangerous. I mean, given a chance, corporations could buy up all the water, oil and gas and air. Yeah, I know corporations owning the air may seem funny, but remember when potable water came from the tap and you did not have to buy it from the Coca Cola Company?

Certainly, anyone actually living in a house should have a valid title and anyone buying a house with the intention of living in it should be able to take valid title.

It would also seem reasonable that until everyone had someplace to live, no one should have three or four houses.

The government exercises claims for eminent domain to take title to property they want. Just ask all those folks who are about to get a wall through their backyards. The government can even now exercise eminent domain for the benefit of private building projects. (Kelo v. City of New London).

Why can't we have restrictive covenants in deeds allowing transfer based on human needs? I mean, we have them for all types of other silly things like, brick versus wood siding and wooden versus hurricane fencing. We used to allow them to keep out unpopular races. We still use them to keep out children. (Can this possibly be Right?)

Why not establish some principles of private ownership of land and houses: Human beings over corporations. Children, handicapped and infirm over healthy adults. Habitation over commercial use. Homeless over summer house. Bigger houses for big families, smaller houses for smaller families. Something along those lines.

I know this is very vague, but my hunch is that some real estate lawyer legislative draftsman type has already figured out how to do it.

Then allow a human being to file for human eminent domain.

Hang in there, Raulito, I am sure you and me and our fellow distributionists can figure this all out.

Communist Cuba Dabbling in Distributism

Bloggers (the few I have met and as best I can tell from reading) seem endlessly fascinated by whether and if so, how much, their blog is being read. I confess this fault. I put one of the free counters on the blog and it is something of a utilometer of my personal happiness. Each little tick of the counter is another little squirt of dopamine.

More sophisticated bloggers apparently have more sophisticated counters and get additional squirts from learning how widely read they are, based on area codes I guess.

I know this all runs counter to my blogging goal as taken from the Granddaddy of All Bloggers:

"I have no thought of serving either you or my own glory. My powers are inadequate for such a purpose. I have dedicated it to the private convenience of my relatives and friends, so that when they have lost me (as soon they must), they may recover here some features of my habits and temperament. Thus reader...you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivoulous and vain pursuit."

Indulge my pride, though as a tell you based on certain empirical evidence I have a celebrity reader. It was only Friday past when I urged an economic system based on medieval Catholicism, distributism. Two days later, I see the headlines, "Cuba to Lend Land--In a bid to boost agricultural production, Raul Castro's government is lending Cuba's unused land to private farmers and cooperatives."

It is obvious to me: Raul Castro has been reading my blog. Not only that, I have converted him to distributism. Let me say it again: RAUL CASTRO IS ONE OF MY READERS!!!!

Now it is important I carefully cultivate this first new convert to distributism. First, how to address him? We distributists are anti-hierarchical and I hardly think either Mr. President or General Castro are appropriate.

Nor can I bring myself to say, "Comrade." First, I don't know if this will be part of the distributist tradition. I have not seen the word yet in Chesterton or Hilloc. Also, since we have not met, this may overly familiar. On the other hand, "Raul" or even "Raulito" feels OK, for some reason. Maybe because of that guy who sells the eye surgery on TV.

I am so happy to have you on board, Raulito, that I will happily serve as consultant. To that end, I will be reading medieval Church history and economic and legal forms. More to the point, though, Raulito, I would suggest we approach an appropriate order to come in and help run things. I suggest we avoid the more warlike groups like the Hospitallers of Jerusalem in favor of say, Franciscans or Cistercians.

Now that I know you (Raulito) are a reader, I'll give little hints along the way.

This transition from Cuban Communism to distributism should in some ways be quite smooth, because there are not big landowners with whom we must deal. On the other hand the human rights issues have been a problem in Cuba since they were reported by Bartolome de las Casas, but, hey, human rights is the whole idea behind distributism.

Now if only George W. will start reading.

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.