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(Pope Leo XIII)
The great mistake made in regard to the matter now under consideration is to take up with the notion that class is naturally hostile to class, and that the wealthy and the working men are intended by nature to live in mutual conflict. So irrational and so false is this view that the direct contrary is the truth. Just as the symmetry of the human frame is the result of the suitable arrangement of the different parts of the body, so in a State is it ordained by nature that these two classes should dwell in harmony and agreement, so as to maintain the balance of the body politic. Each needs the other: capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital. Mutual agreement results in the beauty of good order, while perpetual conflict necessarily produces confusion and savage barbarity. Now, in preventing such strife as this, and in uprooting it, the efficacy of Christian institutions is marvellous and manifold. First of all, there is no intermediary more powerful than religion (whereof the Church is the interpreter and guardian) in drawing the rich and the working class together, by reminding each of its duties to the other, and especially of the obligations of justice(RN 19)
Brian:
Good evening. Good taste is the enemy of comedy.I am from Paraguay and know bad English, please tell me right I wrote the following sentence: "Compare cheap flights and research airline tickets and travel prices to worldwide travel deals and cheap airline tickets from one of our many."With best wishes :o, Brian.
bitacoramexicana@yahoo.com.mx:
hamponazo con barlett diaz emperador de mexico and union europea dueño de chiahuahua del hampa ejecutora de canal mexiquense zurrados ni madres dueño del centrofoxbitacoramexicana@yahoo.com.mx
Pam:
Just blog hopping and thought that I'd say "HI!"
John Médaille:
I am proud to announce the publication of my book, The Vocation of Business: Social Justice in the Marketplace, by Continuum International.The overriding theme of this book is that the original unity of distributive and corrective justice that prevailed in both economics and moral discourse until the 16th and seventeenth centuries was shattered by the rise of an individualistic capitalism that relied on corrective justice (justice in exchange) alone. But an economics that lacks a distributive pr
Reprinted from The Catholic Worker newspaper, May 2008
The aim of the Catholic Worker movement is to live in accordance with the justice and charity of Jesus Christ. Our sources are the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures as handed down in the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, with our inspiration coming from the lives of the saints, "men and women outstanding in holiness, living witnesses to Your unchanging love." (Eucharistic Prayer)
This aim requires us to begin living in a different way. We recall the words of our founders, Dorothy Day who said, "God meant things to be much easier than we have made them," and Peter Maurin who wanted to build a society "where it is easier for people to be good."
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When we examine our society, which is generally called capitalist (because of its methods of producing and controlling wealth) and is bourgeois (because of prevailing concern for acquisition and material interests, and its emphasis on respectability and mediocrity), we find it far from God's justice.
--In economics, private and state capitalism bring about an unjust distribution of wealth, for the profit motive guides decisions. Those in power live off the sweat of others' brows, while those without power are robbed of a just return for their work. Usury (the charging of interest above administrative costs) is a major contributor to the wrongdoing intrinsic to this system. We note, especially, how the world debt crisis leads poor countries into greater deprivation and a dependency from which there is no foreseeable escape. Here at home, the number of hungry and homeless and unemployed people rises in the midst of increasing affluence.
--In labor, human need is no longer the reason for human work. Instead, the unbridled expansion of technology, necessary to capitalism and viewed as "progress," holds sway. Jobs are concentrated in productivity and administration for a "high-tech," war-related, consumer society of disposable goods, so that laborers are trapped in work that does not contribute to human welfare. Furthermore, as jobs become more specialized, many people are excluded from meaningful work or are alienated from the products of their labor. Even in farming, agribusiness has replaced agriculture, and, in all areas, moral restraints are run over roughshod, and a disregard for the laws of nature now threatens the very planet.
--In politics, the state functions to control and regulate life. Its power has burgeoned hand in hand with growth in technology, so that military, scientific and corporate interests get the highest priority when concrete political policies are formulated. Because of the sheer size of institutions, we tend towards government by bureaucracy--that is, government by nobody. Bureaucracy, in all areas of life, is not only impersonal, but also makes accountability, and, therefore, an effective political forum for redressing grievances, next to impossible.
--In morals, relations between people are corrupted by distorted images of the human person. Class, race and sex often determine personal worth and position within society, leading to structures that foster oppression. Capitalism further divides society by pitting owners against workers in perpetual conflict over wealth and its control. Those who do not "produce" are abandoned, and left, at best, to be "processed" through institutions. Spiritual destitution is rampant, manifested in isolation, madness, promiscuity and violence.
--The arms race stands asa clear sign of the direction and spirit of our age. It has extended the domain of destruction and the fear of annihilation, and denies the basic right to life. There is a direct connection between the arms race and destitution. "The arms race is an utterly treacherous trap, and one which injures the poor to an intolerable degree." (Vatican II)
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In contrast to what we see around us, as well as within ourselves, stands St. Thomas Aquinas' doctrine of the Common Good, a vision of a society where the good of each member is bound to the good of the whole in the service of God.
To this end, we advocate:
--Personalism, a philosophy which regards the freedom and dignity of each person as the basis, focus and goal of all metaphysics and morals. In following such wisdom, we move away from a self-centered individualism toward the good of the other. This is to be done by taking personal responsibility for changing conditions, rather than looking to the state or other institutions to provide impersonal "charity." We pray for a Church renewed by this philosophy and for a time when all those who feel excluded from participation are welcomed with love, drawn by the gentle personalism Peter Maurin taught.
--A decentralized society, in contrast to the present bigness of government, industry, education, health care and agriculture. We encourage efforts such as family farms, rural and urban land trusts, worker ownership and management of small factories, homesteading projects, food, housing and other cooperatives--any effort in which money can once more become merely a medium of exchange, and human beings are no longer commodities.
--A "green revolution," so that it is possible to rediscover the proper meaning of our labor and/or true bonds with the land; a distributist communitarianism, self-sufficient through farming, crafting and appropriate technology; a radically new society where people will rely on the fruits of their own toil and labor; associations of mutuality, and a sense of fairness to resolve conflicts.
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We believe this needed personal and social transformation should be pursued by the means Jesus revealed in His sacrificial love. With Christ as our Exemplar, by prayer and communion with His Body and Blood, we strive for practices of
--Nonviolence. "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God." (Matt. 5:9) Only through nonviolent action can a personalist revolution come about, one in which one evil will not be replaced simply by another. Thus, we oppose the deliberate taking of human life for any reason, and see every oppression as blasphemy. Jesus taught us to take suffering upon ourselves rather than inflict it upon others, and He calls us to fight against violence with the spiritual weapons of prayer, fasting and noncooperation with evil. Refusal to pay taxes for war, to register for conscription, to comply with any unjust legislation; participation in nonviolent strikes and boycotts, protests or vigils; withdrawal of support for dominant systems, corporate funding or usurious practices are all excellent means to establish peace.
--The works of mercy (as found in Matt. 25:31-46) are at the heart of the Gospel and they are clear mandates for our response to "the least of our brothers and sisters." Houses of hospitality are centers for learning to do the acts of love, so that the poor can receive what is, in justice, theirs, the second coat in our closet, the spare room in our home, a place at our table. Anything beyond what we immediately need belongs to those who go without.
--Manual labor, in a society that rejects it as undignified and inferior. "Besides inducing cooperation, besides overcoming barriers and establishing the spirit of sister and brotherhood (besides just getting things done), manual labor enables us to use our bodies as well as our hands, our minds." (Dorothy Day) The Benedictine motto Ora et Labora reminds us that the work of human hands is a gift for the edification of the world and the glory of God.
--Voluntary poverty. "The mystery of poverty is that by sharing in it, making ourselves poor in giving to others, we increase our knowledge and belief in love." (Dorothy Day) By embracing voluntary poverty, that is, by casting our lot freely with those whose impoverishment is not a choice, we would ask for the grace to abandon ourselves to the love of God. It would put us on the path to incarnate the Church's "preferential option for the poor."
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We must be prepared to accept seeming failure with these aims, for sacrifice and suffering are part of the Christian life. Success, as the world determines it, is not the final criterion for judgments. The most important thing is the love of Jesus Christ and how to live His truth.
[Dear friends, below is a copy of Thomas Storck's presentation from the recent "Catholicism and Economics" conference.]
Distributism is an economic system which encourages the widespread ownership of private productive property. This productive property is to be well-distributed so as to discourage extremes of wealth and poverty. The ideal of distributism is for each owner to work his own property, whether that is farm land, a workshop, a retail store or some kind of service, even if that ideal cannot always be realized.
Distributism is grounded in Catholic social teaching, for example in Pope Leo XIII's call that "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 later popes, including Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno (nos. 59-62, 65) and John XXIII in Mater et Magistra (nos. 85-89, 111-115). Distributists seek to minimize the employer/employee relationship by making as many people as possible owners of their own productive enterprises. Although the wage relationship, as Pius XI explained in Quadragesimo Anno (no. 101), is not unjust in itself, provided we are speaking of a living wage, distributists believe that when the employer/employee dichotomy becomes the usual way that an economy and a society are organized, this is dangerous and unwise.
Why so?
To answer this question we must look for a minute at the purpose of economic activity. Why did God create man in such a way that we have both the capacity and the need for external goods? What is the purpose of our production of goods and services? A Christian, and indeed any thoughtful person, will realize that we need external goods not as ends in themselves, but to sustain a life that is truly human, a life in which more important matters, such as our families and friends, artistic and intellectual activity, and our relationship with Almighty God can flourish. Material goods are of course not evil, but in general, they are subordinate to more important values and they must be judged on whether and how well they serve these values. We wear shoes, for example, to protect our feet. That is their primary purpose. I might well need several pairs of shoes, but it is hard to see how anyone would need dozens of pairs of shoes. Similarly with dozens of cars or dozens of houses. In fact, our acquisition of material goods is or should be limited by their relationship to fulfilling human needs. As St. Thomas Aquinas wrote, "...the appetite of natural riches is not infinite, because according to a set measure they satisfy nature; but the appetite of artificial riches is infinite, because it serves inordinate concupiscence..." (Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 2, a. 1 ad 3). Very few people would collect a hundred pairs of shoes, but people do tend to collect much more artificial wealth than they have any possible need for and in so doing they serve "inordinate concupiscence."
Now if what I have said about material goods is true, then the production of goods and services ought to be oriented toward human use and human need. Any society which understands that material things are subordinate to human life in its fullness and are meant to serve human needs, will not produce simply for the sake of piling up goods. Still less will it engage in financial transactions which have little or no relation to production or to the fulfilling of genuine human needs.
But when the employer/employee distinction becomes widespread and characteristic of an economy, and especially when it has assumed the form of the business corporation, there will exist a class of people one step removed from the production of real goods. That is, for the most part, owners and managers of capital who employ others to work are no longer directly focused on the production of goods to serve human needs, but gradually become preoccupied with what St. Thomas calls "artificial riches," either by concentrating their efforts on simply sales or, even worse, on manipulating financial instruments for their gain. So in time the managers of corporations tend to become more interested in mergers, buyouts and providing themselves generous salaries and pensions rather than in the actual product their company produces, because they have become to some degree separated from that product. If they are likely to make more money more quickly with a merger or acquisition than with the steady production and sale of useful goods or services, they will often opt for the former. And the mergers and acquisitions frequently result in less actual economic activity, less production of real goods and services, since the new company often must fire some of its workers in order to service the new debt it has taken on.
The stockholders, meanwhile, although legally the owners of a company, usually have little interest in what the company actually manufactures, so long as their dividend checks keep coming or the stock price is rising. Owners of mutual funds do not even own part of a company, but a form of artificial riches twice removed from real goods, traded on a market in which ownership of the actual company can change hands by the hour or the minute.
Here is Hilaire Belloc's description of the process.
"But wealth obtained indirectly as profit out of other men's work, or by process of exchange, becomes a thing abstracted from the process of production. As the interest of a man in things diminishes, his interest in abstract wealth - money - increases. The man who makes a table or grows a crop makes the success of the crop or the table a test of excellence. The intermediary who buys and sells the crop or the table is not concerned with the goodness of table or crop, but with the profit he makes between their purchase and sale. In a productive society the superiority of the things produced is the measure of success: in a Commercial society the amount of wealth accumulated by the dealer is the measure of success." (An Essay on the Nature of Contemporary England, 1937) p. 67.
Distributism therefore seeks to maintain a healthy relationship between ownership and production by maintaining and encouraging small businesses, small workshops, small farms in which the owner would always be personally involved in the actual production of the product or service. He would see himself primarily as a craftsman or a farmer or as some kind of service provider, rather than as someone who could indifferently make and sell books or shoes or computers depending on where the greatest profit could be made at the moment.
What about industrial entities that because of the technology involved necessarily must be large-scale? How could you break down Ford Motor Co. into ten thousand micro-companies? This objection or question is hardly new to distributists and Belloc addressed it himself in one of the original distributist books, The Restoration of Property. The distributist solution is simple: in any entity that necessarily is large because of the technology involved, the workers themselves should be the owners of the firm. With regard to worker ownership, more than one model is also possible. John Paul II notes some of them, mentioning "proposals for joint ownership of the means of work, sharing by the workers in the management and/or profits of business, so-called shareholding by labor" (Laborem Exercens, no. 14).
Moreover, even large companies like Ford began years ago to outsource aspects of their manufacturing, showing that production can be decentralized even in a capitalist economy.
This question of the size of industrial enterprises brings up a related point about technology. It is often said that distributists are luddites, opposed to anything more complicated than hammars and saws and that distributism would hinder technological development. But this is not the case. Different attitudes toward technology exist among distributists and the question of what level of technology is appropriate for mankind, although a real and urgent question for the health of human society, is a separate question from the proper distribution of property. Distributism is perfectly compatible with many different levels and kinds of technology.
One very important aspect of a distributist economy, again in accordance with papal teaching, especially of Popes Leo XIII, Pius XI and Pius XII, is that individual workshops, retail firms and farms would be organized into occupational groups, or to give them their older name, guilds. Occupational groups are autonomous societies consisting of all who produce the same product or provide the same service. Their purpose is the necessary regulation of the industry in question with the twin aim of its honest prosperity and the provision to the public of a quality product or service. They would concern themselves with matters such as product quality, technological research, safety standards, prices, training programs and compensation for trainees, supply of raw materials and the like, and would represent the industry or trade in dealings with the government.
On the local level, an occupational group might purchase for common use an expensive piece of machinery which no individual owner could afford. Note that much of the economic and industrial regulation which the modern state undertakes would, under distributism, be exercised by these lower bodies. Occupational groups would not be agencies of the government, neither would they be voluntary organizations. They are true intermediate groups and have both private and public aspects. Membership in them would be required for all who exercise a trade or profession. Their governance, like that of the medieval guilds, would be democratic. In cases where an occupational group had started to act like a cartel and to ignore the common good, the public authorities would be empowered to step in to prevent or end the abuse in question. The nearest analog in our society would perhaps be a bar association, whose membership in some states is mandatory for attorneys and which regulates some aspects of legal education, admission to the bar and professional discipline.
These occupational groups or guilds would in fact free the government from many tasks which it now undertakes, but which it is not especially well suited to perform. Whenever possible the regulation of the workplace and the economy should not be done by the central government, but by smaller and lower bodies, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity articulated by Pius XI. These occupational groups will also aid in spreading the spirit of solidarity or social charity among those engaged in the same line of work, so that instead of regarding each other as competitors, they will tend to see each other as engaged in a joint task to provide the public with a needed good or service, at the same time of course, receiving a sufficient remuneration to provide decently for themselves and their families.
The establishment of a distributist economy would necessarily take place gradually. Right now there is much we can do on our own, including patronizing as much as possible local markets and small stores, use of local currencies, establishing cooperatives and the like. Chesterton and Belloc saw favorable tax treatment for small firms or for transactions in which property becomes more widely distributed as important means for the legal establishment of distributism. But right now it is to our own collective actions that we must chiefly look.
Distributists do not desire an equality of incomes or heavy-handed regulation by the state. Distributism is an effort to provide an institutional framework in which our use of external goods would not conflict with our pursuit of holiness. At the heart of distributism is the attempt to place man's activities in a right relationship with God, insofar as human institutions can do that. Distributists realize that grace perfects nature, as St. Thomas taught, and that only if human institutions have a basic orientation toward justice and right can we expect divine grace to abound in human society.
Capitalism
I must now say a word about the other two economic systems represented here today, capitalism and socialism. If we are to talk intelligently about either of them we must be clear what we mean, otherwise we may be talking at cross purposes. As for capitalism, despite its ubiquity in the modern world, there is surprising little consensus among economists and economic historians as to exactly what it is. I will use the definition of Pope Pius XI in the encyclical which I have more than once quoted today, Quadragesimo Anno. Pope Pius calls it "that economic system in which were provided by different people the capital and labor jointly needed for production" (no. 100). In other words, the widespread separation of ownership from work, the general presence of the employer/employee relationship, which I have been criticizing today: this is capitalism, since "different people [provide] the capital and labor jointly needed for production." I have already said why distributists think that capitalism is dangerous and unwise. All the ills of capitalism, what is sometimes called the "spirit of capitalism," such as its excessive concentration upon amassing riches, the loss of genuine quality in production, the periodic instability of capitalist economies with their regular cycles of boom and bust, their tendency toward labor conflicts, all these are simply the more or less necessary results of that original separation between capital and labor, between ownership and work.
It is often assumed that capitalism is simply the system of private ownership of property. We have seen that this is not the case. Capitalism has entirely forgotten the reason private property exists and in reality is no friend of property. Above I quoted St. Thomas to the effect that "the appetite of natural riches is not infinite, because according to a set measure they satisfy nature." That is, natural goods have a purpose, an end, and should be judged on how well they fulfill that end. Under distributism the purpose of private property is clear: the support of the producer and his family and the provision of a quality product to society. But capitalism has divorced property from its natural purpose. The mere amassing of property beyond any rational need cannot be the reason why God gave man the use of material goods. G. K. Chesterton once wittily wrote,
"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 enemies of their own limitations. They do not want their own land; but other people's.... It is the negation of property that the Duke of Sutherland should have all the farms in one estate; just as it would be the negation of marriage if he had all our wives in one harem." (What's Wrong with the World, p. 42)
Moreover, under capitalism, property is considered valuable only because of its exchange value. There is no essential legal difference between your property in a farm or home handed down in your family for five generations and your ownership of a share in a hedge fund. Both are equally sacred to the law only because both are equally capable of monetary exchange, of being bought and sold. Pope Leo XIII wrote (Rerum Novarum, no. 35), that "Men always work harder and more readily when they work on that which is their own; nay, they learn to love the very soil which yields in response to the labor of their hands, not only food to eat, but an abundance of the good things for themselves and those that are dear to them." This is the Church's defense of private property, a defense based on the intimate connection of person and property. But under capitalism property is anything from which I can make a buck. We can learn to love our farms and even our workshops, but it is pretty hard to love bank accounts or stock certificates. And if we ever do learn to love them, then perhaps we should tremble at the thought of the coming judgement of God, when we recall that St. Paul said that the "love of money is the root of all evil" (I Timothy 6:10).
In a capitalist economy and society property generally has no particular relation to any person. The U.S Supreme Court decision of a year or so ago that allowed a local government to exercise eminent domain to confiscate neighborhoods for building luxury housing shows how capitalism values property. So long as the residents receive money value equivalent to their homes, it makes no difference that a neighborhood and a way of life are destroyed. A capitalist society is incapable of seeing property as having anything other than market value, because for capitalism value is equivalent to money value. But distributists know that each piece of property is unique just as each person is unique, and that only when property is widespread and well-distributed can this intimate relation with what is one's own develop. Although material things are subordinate to the ultimate purposes of human life, they still have their appropriate and unique place and value. Hilaire Belloc thought that in a distributist society people would be more attached to their property and more opposed to excessive taxation or confiscation in the name of the public good. People would more easily see the difference between genuine property and the kind of legal fiction that looks upon a share in a futures contract as a form of real wealth.
Since the separation of ownership and work is the keynote of capitalism, wage labor will always be the most characteristic kind of labor under capitalism. Now what is one consequence of this? For the capitalist, wages are always an expense, always an item in his balance sheet which he would like to reduce or even eliminate. Hence the constant pressure under capitalism to reduce wages, lay off employees, to find cheaper places to manufacture, to ship jobs overseas or to import foreign workers at lower wages. And on the other hand, the periodic struggles by labor unions to increase or maintain workers' incomes. Labor unions have not always been just or reasonable in their wage demands, but they quite rationally felt that since the capitalist was usually going to pay as little as he could get away with, they would try to get as much as they could. Usually neither party felt itself bound by a standard of justice, so each tried to get as much for itself as it could. I am not arguing that there is a natural opposition between labor and capital, but rather that under capitalism, willy-nilly they are put into a situation where their own interests usually seem opposed to the interests of the other party. Distributism, however, eliminates or minimizes this opposition by eliminating as much as possible the wage relationship. Distributism thus reduces or eliminates an additional cause of the tension and strife which characterize capitalist economies.
Despite the frequent homage paid to small business in the United States, under capitalism the tendency is always toward bigger firms. This is because of what St. Thomas said, that "the appetite of artificial riches is infinite." When you separate economic activity and production from its immediate relation, on the one hand, to the legitimate needs of the producer and his family, and on the other, to the genuine needs of consumers, there is no reason not to expand your business as much as possible and in the process lose touch with the actual product you make. And with advertising even the natural need of consumers for material goods is stimulated and increased not according to what is needed, but according to what they can be convinced to buy. In 2004, although there were almost four times as many proprietorships as corporations, it is corporations that dominate our economy and in that same year corporate receipts were almost 20 times that of proprietorships. Americans profess to prefer small businesses, and if this is so, then it is not capitalism that we should promote, but distributism.
Capitalism is often given the credit for the prosperity that characterizes the Western world. But is this true? Capitalism did not create the scientific or technological revolutions, in fact, in some areas, such as public health, improvements were carried out by governments, sometimes over the objections of supporters of free markets. And when we speak of prosperity we need to be careful as to what we are talking about. The mere piling up of goods is not true prosperity. But capitalism fails to make any distinction between useful and harmful goods. It is ready to sell anything, provided it is legal, and it does not always scruple at that. It seeks the cheapest way of doing things regardless of how that affects product quality, for as Belloc pointed out, its sole criterion of excellence is wealth. The present crisis of capitalism is not an aberration, but simply the inevitable result of the forces that capitalism both unleashes and depends upon. Human greed has always existed, but capitalism has institutionalized it and made it the mainspring and virtue of its operation. Because of the strength of the human desire for gain, and because of the power of organized capital, when capitalism controls an economy it tends to take over the entire society so that, as one writer put it, society itself becomes an adjunct of the economy. The result is what some call a commercial society. Everything is now for sale or is measured in money price. The average cost of a wedding is around $30,000; average house size has increased since 1970 while average family size has shrunk; the share of aggregate income of the richest Americans has grown while that of the poorest has decreased in the last 29 years. In 1980 the lowest 20% of the population received 4.2% of the nation's aggregate income, while the top 20% received 44.1%. In 2006, the last year that I have data for, the lowest 20%'s share had fallen to 3.4% while the top 20% has risen to 50.5%. And for the top 5%, their share had risen from 16.5% to 22.3%. Incidentally, the share of aggregate income fell for every segment except the highest. And most recently the capitalist system has been kept going only by massive infusions of wealth from government in a series of cynical bailouts by both the Bush and the Obama administrations. This is capitalism in action.
Socialism
Now socialism is a more slippery thing to define even than capitalism. This is not so much because conceptually it is more difficult, but because socialists, over the course of almost two centuries, have been modifying their economic ideas, very often in the right direction. Already by 1931 Pope Pius XI noted that socialism had split into two groups, the Communists and the moderate socialists, and that the programs of the latter "often strikingly approach the just demands of Christian social reformers" (no. 113).
But nonetheless the Church made the definitive statement in that same encyclical that "No sincere Catholic can be a true socialist." And why is this? Not necessarily because the proposals put forward by moderate socialists are always unjust, but because the socialist movement, as it historically has existed, has had at bottom a materialist philosophy, one that was hostile to supernatural religion and looked upon mankind as a purely material creature with purely material needs. Incidentally in Centesimus Annus (nos. 13, 19), John Paul II shows that the philosophy that gave rise to capitalism is equally as materialistic and atheistic as that of socialism, and that the post-World War II capitalist quest for the affluent society sought to defeat Marxism on the level of pure materialism by showing how a free-market society can achieve a greater satisfaction of material human needs than Communism, while equally excluding spiritual values. In reality, while on the one hand it is true that this social model shows the failure of Marxism to contribute to a humane and better society, on the other hand, insofar as it denies an autononous existence and value to morality, law, culture and religion, it agrees with Marxism, in the sense that it totally reduces man to the sphere of economics and the satisfaction of material needs. (no. 19)
Conclusion
I have spoken of many of the specific structures that would characterize a distributist economy. But in closing I should say something about the effect which such an economy might have on our society and our culture, on each of us in fact as Christian believers. Fr. Ian Boyd, editor of The Chesterton Review, once described distributism as a "different rhythm of life." By that he meant, I think, that in a distributist society the external things of life, and especially what St. Thomas called "artificial riches," would have a much more subordinate role than they do in American society today. Around three-quarters of our gross domestic product consists of consumer spending, consumer spending moreover that is constantly stimulated by advertising and that for some has become a form of recreation. Yet does this make us happier? Does it help keep marriages and families together? Does it increase our piety, our love of God and neighbor? Has it contributed to outstanding works of art and literature and music? Most of us know that the answer to these questions is No. Holy Scripture long ago warned us of the corroding effect of seeking after riches. Since this is the Year of St. Paul, let me quote his words on the subject again. "If we have food and clothing, with these we shall be content. But those who desire to be rich fall in temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and hurtful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is the root of all evils; it is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced their hearts with many pangs" (I Tim. 6:8-10).
Distributists do not desire poverty for the human race, but we do desire a society in which economic goods are seen for what they are. To put material goods in their proper place is, of course, ultimately a work of divine grace. No economic system, including distributism, is sufficient to reform human nature, but the sacraments of the Church will be more efficacious if their natural setting is not the arid and toxic atmosphere produced by a society which makes commercial gain its highest aim. Grace perfects nature, St. Thomas said, but grace will not usually substitute for a deformed nature. Distributism therefore hopes to aid in the construction of our earthly city so that it will be, as much as possible, like the city of God. This is not Utopianism, this is simply attempting to carry out the commandments. For if I know that I must try to make my own life something fit for eternal life, why would Christians imagine that the life of their society should be based on any other aim?
I do not want to ignore or minimize the real difficulties that would accompany any attempt to establish a distributist economy. Although we know pretty much what we are aiming for and have some idea of the method for attaining it, necessarily many things would arise which we would not foresee. Moreover we realize that if we were to make a transition to distributism, it would have to be gradual. But we need not fear either the process or the endpoint. Distributists do not desire to deprive anyone of the legitimate fruits of his labor or to force an equality of incomes on society or to increase the state's power to interfere in our lives. We want only to turn man's attention to those things that matter, to those things that promote real happiness in this world and in the world to come.
Adam and Eve were put in the Garden of Eden to "till and keep it." Many centuries later we are still subject to the same necessity, that of working upon the raw material which God gives us. But if human labor is, as Pope John Paul said, "a participation in God's activity" (LE, no. 25), we cannot allow it to become detached from its twin purposes of providing a living for the worker and his family and providing society with the useful goods it needs. This distributism seeks to do without neglecting man's ultimate vocation to a life in which production and consumption will no longer matter and we will look upon God himself face to face.
I'm writing today on the feast of St. Joseph the Worker to ask for your help in passing one of the most important pieces of legislation Congress will consider this year. The Employee Free Choice Act will help rebuild our economy by providing a more just and democratic process for workers to choose to form unions. Without this legislation, working families will continue to lose ground – and that hurts everyone.
To help convince some key senators to support this legislation, I've recorded a radio spot for Catholics United's “Catholics for Working Families” project. The ad is ready; now we need your help running it in these senators' states. Can you help?
Why do I support the Employee Free Choice Act? Because my Catholic faith tells me that our economy's success is measured by how our lowest-paid workers fare – not by the bottom lines of those at the top. In the past fifty years, U.S. union membership has declined from 30% to less than 12%. At the same time, working families' income has stagnated and corporate pay has skyrocketed.
On April 4th, Thomas Storck, Dr. Charles Clark, and Michael Novak participated in the conference “Catholicism and Economics,” a presentation and debate featuring three economic systems: capitalism, socialism, and distributism. They were tasked with presenting their positions, discussing their viability, and relating them to Catholic Social Teaching.
The conference commenced with a luncheon provided by the host and sponsor of the event, the Nassau Community College Center for Catholic Studies. Many familiar faces were in attendance including Tim Ehlen, Director of Building Catholic Communities, Fr. Ian Boyd and Dr. Dermot Quinn from The Chesterton Review, as well as author and Taki’s Mag contributor, Mr. James Kalb. John Médaille, Bill Powell, Ryan Grant, Jeremiah Bannister, our speaker Thomas Storck, and yours truly represented The Society for Distributism. Literature was available for sale by the Campus bookstore, including Thomas Storck’s “The Catholic Milieu” (Christendom Press) and Belloc’s “Economics for Helen” (IHS Press). Both virtually sold out by the time lunch was over.
180 people registered, but due to intense weather conditions in New York, we estimated somewhere in the vicinity of 120-130 arrived at the event. The numbers were impressive and we were delighted to see a full house. We must thank Dr. Joseph Varacalli, President of the Center for Catholic Studies, for the opportunity to not only debate Mr. Novak and Dr. Clark, but to expose the public to Distributism. This conference successfully exceeded our expectations and we owe Dr. Joseph Varacalli all our deepest thanks for inviting us to take part in it.
Dr. Joseph Varacalli was also kind enough to arrange a table for us to use throughout the conference. We mounted a colorful display with hundreds of our pamphlets (including a promo sheet for Distributist Review Press), our brochure, and a mailing list sign up sheet. Our readers may be excited to know dozens joined our mailing list and we barely had any material left once the event was over.
Attendees varied from layman to academic, so we couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity to dig in and introduce Distributism to a large group of people who probably have never heard of it.
Following the initial tributes for Avery Cardinal Dulles, Msgr. Wrenn, and Fr. Neuhaus, the debate started with a half hour presentation by the three participants. Dr. Clark was the first to commence. Some of our readers are probably familiar with Dr. Charles Clark, who penned the Foreword to the IHS Press edition of Amintore Fanfani’s Catholicism, Protestantism, and Capitalism. Dr. Clark is a Professor of Economics at St. John’s University. He opened up with the Democratic Socialist argument by offering a phenomenal attack on capitalism from a practical lens. Clark chastised capitalism for failing to provide workers with a family wage, for its profit seeking at the expense of labor, outsourced manufacturing, and debt enslavement. Clark did an excellent job and in one poignant part of his tit for tat with Michael Novak regarding our financial economy, Clark reminded us of John Médaille’s famous article, “Buy it up! Break it up! Fund it right!” where John argued for a government buyout of our financial institutions, so they could be broken into small businesses, and end the havoc wrought by corporations riding on the coattails of the public. My only critique of Dr. Clark’s presentation is that while he struck the first blow against the capitalist position, we didn’t entirely know how advocates of socialism planned to solve the problems capitalism wrought. From what we gathered, his argument highlighted an expected heightened role of the central government in our economic and social affairs, distant from Marxism and probably likened to a moderate Christian Socialist position.
I believe I share the same frustrations as my colleagues when I say I was very disappointed with Michael Novak’s presentation. Mr. Novak made no attempt to either define his position or to relate capitalism with Catholicism at all. Neither did he give any mention about our current crisis. He began by contrasting capitalism’s departure from a society in favor of stability and poverty relief to societies paving the way for wealth creation as a solution to massive poverty. In an attempt to minimize distributism, Mr. Novak claimed capitalism exemplified the widest distribution of goods and property, by oddly pointing to the Homestead Act. The Homestead Act, signed into law by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, allowed Americans within the 13 colonies to claim stakes of undeveloped land outside its borders. The Homestead Act was not only the antithesis of capitalism and a victory for government, but also a devastating exploitation of the Native American nations, which were driven off their lands by military forces.
Perhaps Novak’s harshest distinction between the three economic systems came in the form of an ethnocentric jab against Europeans. Comparing the United States to Europe, Mr. Novak claimed Europeans simply drank coffee in cafes and contrasted this with American ingenuity. Europeans enjoyed life, while Americans were the true innovators of the world. Considering Europe is arguably responsible for the bulk of our architecture, arts, sciences, education, and history, I found the comment rather strange.
In another baffling moment, Mr. Novak claimed trade unions were a staple of capitalism and not an association rallied against the abuses resulting from it!
Thomas Storck presented a precise definition of Distributism, its practicality as an economic model, and correspondence to Catholic Social Theory. Mr. Storck brilliantly began by focusing on the purpose of economic activity within the realities of our human use and need. Quoting St. Thomas Aquinas Storck said, “…the appetite of natural riches is not infinite, because according to a set measure they satisfy nature; but the appetite of artificial riches is infinite, because it serves inordinate concupiscence…” (Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 2, a. 1 ad 3) Mr. Storck went on to define capitalism by separating it from its flat definition and repeating the definition offered by Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, which described capitalism as the separation of ownership and work. Thomas Storck argued that recognizing this friction between ownership and production in a capitalist state, Distributism dispensed with this problem by making ownership and work one and the same. Thomas Storck also argued for capitalism’s clash with productive property and illustrated this particular point by stressing how laws such as eminent domain, capitalism’s obsession with money to the detriment of the human person, lack of innovation, and creation of artificial needs are in actuality enemies of true progress. Once Mr. Storck concluded his portion of the presentation period, we took a break, and I was quite pleased to see a line of people waiting to speak with him.
When Michael Novak took the opportunity to ask our speaker a set of questions, I was surprised to hear him openly state his sympathies with Distributism. Arguably, the question he posed to Mr. Storck regarding the feasibility of health care in a Distributist State might have appeared to him to be the Achilles Heel against the Distributist platform. But to his surprise, Mr. Storck proposed a solution. His favored the restoration of occupational groups (or creation of co-ops) within a Distributist State to operate, regulate, develop, and research in the medical -or any- large scale field. It was a sharp reply for those who have never heard of Distributism before or those unconvinced of its viability in large-scale markets. Mr. Storck concluded his answer by stating that guilds and cooperatives exemplify the limitless potential for the decentralization of large entities through the use of smaller firms as practiced by the automotive industry today.
Following the exchanges, Franciscan University’s Dr. Stephen Krason offered a fifteen-minute talk on Heinrich Pesch and Solidarism. Dr. Krason delivered a passionate lecture and we commend him for it given Solidarism’s brief allotted time. My only objection to his talk came from his perception of the masses as uninterested in working for themselves and preferring to work for others. While self-employment always comes with an elevated risk, employment today is a comparable risk. The problem as I see it, isn’t the lack of desire on the part of most people to own, the problem is the red tape. After all, I am sure Dr. Krason would agree with Pope Pius XI that man works best on that which is his own.
We lament time made it impossible for a “Question and Answer” period between the speakers and the audience. That said, we are grateful to the Center for Catholic Studies for all the time and work they invested in the debate, as well as the meticulous and considerate manner this conference was managed from the onset. Under Dr. Varacalli’s leadership this Center is proving to offer some of the finest events I have ever attended. When Dr. Varacalli asked us to participate I knew it would be successful and all of us jumped right in.
Special thanks must be given to Thomas Storck for his intelligence, gracious support, activist spirit, and the incredible precedent he has bestowed on all of us.
Also, we must thank fellow distributist Jeremiah Bannister for the fantastic photographs.
I know our readers are interested if a transcript, audio or video recording of this event will be available. Yes, the event was recorded. However, please bear with us as we are praying and hoping this recording will be accessible for all of you through our website. I will keep everyone informed through our email list when and if this becomes available.
Is There A Bellocian Response For Today’s Economic Crisis? Dear readers of The Distributist Review,
Paul Likoudis, News Editor for The Wanderer -the oldest Catholic newspaper in the United States- recently conducted an interview with yours truly regarding "Bellocian Economics," and has kindly granted us permission to reprint it here. Our thanks go to Mr. Likoudis for the opportunity. We would also like to applaud The Wanderer for their recent defense of distributism.
If you would like to subscribe to the online or hardcopy version of the newspaper, please go to The Wanderer website.
For the benefit of our readers, a Scribd version is below. Please feel free to copy the Scribd version onto your websites, however please add the following link to The Wanderer (www.thewandererpress.com).
Is There A Bellocian Response For Today’s Economic Crisis? By PAUL LIKOUDIS
One of the signs of the times of the past two decades is a growing interest in Distributism, often described as a “third way” economic philosophy opposed to both capitalism and socialism. It was chiefly formulated by the British historian and journalist Hilaire Belloc and is firmly grounded in Catholic social teaching, especially Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum.
Belloc never claimed he was inventing a new system; rather he wanted to return to an economic arrangement of society that prevailed in Europe before the rise of post- Reformation capitalism and the big banking houses that prospered on the poverty of the masses and war.
With the rise of globalization and the spread of “democratic capitalism” after the fall of the Berlin Wall, capitalism — as we all see much too clearly today — is in crisis. Catholics looking for a solution are looking to Belloc, his associates G.K. Chesterton and Fr. Vincent McNabb, OP, and the Americans Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, founders of the Catholic Worker Movement.
One sign of the Belloc/Distributism revival is The ChesterBelloc Mandate ( www. distributist. blog spot.com), put up by a 34-year-old New Yorker, Rich Aleman. This offers viewers an extensive library of writings by Belloc, Chesterton, Fr. McNabb, Day, papal encyclicals, and other Church documents, and contemporary expositors of Distributism such as John Sharpe, Thomas Storck, John Medaille, Joseph Pearce, Dr. William Fahey, among others.
“There is definitely a resurgence in interest in Belloc,” said Aleman, “which can be seen in the growing number of online web sites devoted to his work, the reprinting of his books, and many organizations in existence modeled on Distributist ideals. One example is the E. F. Schumacher Society, named after the German economist and Catholic convert, E.F. Schumacher. Their development of the Community Land Trust Model has proven itself a terrific method for restoring local farming.
“In such a scheme, the Land Trust purchases the land, while the farmer is responsible only for his home and barn; the land trust then establishes as a lease contract between the farmer and the trust for 99 years, thus removing the mortgage and tax burden from the farmer. The benefits of this as a transitional solution toward agricultural restoration are multiple.
“Then there are other Distributist ideas offered such as measured and small- scale technology, the creation of agricultural schools, the support for credit unions, microlending, and land associations tasked with relieving unemployment and home ownership,” said Aleman.
There are also political ideas that reflect the Bellocian ideal, Aleman added, such as the discontent on the part of the average citizen with the narrow difference between the politicians from both major parties, or that the left and right, Aleman said, “ are fashionable political markers with no true bearing on individuals. Our lawmakers are either pro-life while undermining the material necessities of the family, or pro-death and at the same time championing the legitimate rights of the workers.
“However, today the individualist and collectivist dichotomies of old are fading, and are replaced instead with a restored concern for independence for the family and social interdependence for the community, with a proper understanding that our material needs are subordinate to our spiritual ones. Thus, the alternative to the materialism of capitalism and socialism is a social and economic policy centered on a wealth- producing society through family and cooperative ownership.
“This last takes the form of worker- owned businesses, where the workplace is owned by the workers who produce the goods and services of society, such as the Arizmendi Bakery project that started in San Francisco and is spreading across California.”
The Arizmendi Bakery takes its name from Fr. Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta, a Basque priest who founded Mondragón Corporation in 1943, a self-managed worker cooperative which currently makes $16 billion in a range of products, including appliances and small parts manufacturing, and has some 77,000 worker-owners.
Another example, Aleman said, is Confcooperative in Bologna, Italy, a Catholic cooperative inspired by Rerum Novarum. That and other cooperatives in the Emilia-Romagna region make over 40% of the region’s GDP.
A model of a renaissance in nonindustrial local agriculture is Polyface Farms in Staunton, Va., a Protestant endeavor to promote local farming through their school of husbandry. People who want to learn farming are provided room and board for various terms of apprenticeship, and upon completion of their term, these apprentices return to their own region able to apply what they learn.
In another case, there is the Catholic Homesteading Movement located in Oxford, N.Y., also instructing in the fundamentals of living off the land. Operated by Richard Fahey and his family, day and weeklong workshops are offered on topics ranging from organic gardening to fruit-tree grafting.
“People are willing to listen to alternatives such as Belloc and Chesterton proposed due to the financial crisis we are in,” said Aleman. “I believe the Distributists and other like-minded reformers of their time, spoke clearly to the hearts and minds of the common man, unlike anything seen before or since, and the reemergence of their work is once again popular and necessary.”
Belloc’s Economics
For Catholics who are completely unaware of Distributism, and Catholic social teaching, the basic thing to understand is that Belloc took as a personal mission Pope Leo XIII’s exhortation that “ the law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners.”
Man always fully dedicates himself to the work and land that belong to him, as Chesterton reiterated through the parable of the Good Shepherd. Today most men have been convinced to pick between thousands of careers just to work for someone else, but the Distributists recalled to memory the natural desire for man to work and own for himself.
Money has been transformed from a means of exchange backed by commodities produced by the economy, to property. But money in itself is unproductive, as Belloc reminds us. Only productive property is a generator of real wealth and strength for the family and the local community. Land allows us to secure something for ourselves and is a shelter against the gap between poverty and wealth. Most of us work and save money for that purpose, so we can plant our roots and raise our families in a home, because its value to us transcends what the market tells us it is worth. For Belloc, a nation founded on micro-property is a stable and fruitful nation.
“Belloc believed that the consequences of narrowing the division between ownership and work presents for the family an autonomy from the consolidation of power, and wealth for the community, which man, as a corporeal being would always be partially dependent on. This productive property supplies the requisites for domestic autonomy, which in turn provides for a greater means toward achieving the ends of life, e.g., the eternal vision, or our original purpose,” said Aleman.
“By the family and workers owning the means of production — the tools, equipment, etc. — needed for labor to transform raw resources into goods and services, the family and the worker could be independent from big business and big government and pursue thrift as well as enjoy a robust spiritual life. After all, the ultimate goal of the ‘restoration of property’ — the title of another Belloc book — would lead to the Christian reform of morals, just as Pope Pius XI reiterated in Quadragesimo Anno, through the quest for a life of virtue, instead of the dog-eatdog world.”
Through the lens of Belloc’s analyses, people today can gain a better understanding of the economic, political, and social crisis this country is facing.
Belloc formulated his views on the coming of the Servile State, and the need for a Distributist society from the contemporary crisis England was experiencing due to overproducing as a consequence of the embrace of mass production in lieu of the small producer, Aleman observed.
“The problem with overproduction is that it creates under- consumption; large- scale business needs to churn out as many goods as it can create, while consumers are unable to match the volume of production dispensed. As a result, wages decline as the capitalist cuts labor costs in order to maximize profit. This cost reduction and desire of the capitalist to increase his purse leads him to ship his labor overseas.
“But of course here is the conundrum. The consumer and the employee are the same people, so as costs are reduced, the worker finds himself with a declining wage, and the employer expects the same worker to consume the goods he and other capitalists produce,” Aleman explained.
The only “solution” to overproduction is usury. The people with the profits lend them to people with the low wages. This sustains consumption for a while, but is ultimately selfdefeating, so the government absorbs the excess production. It fails because the government cannot perform this task as the productive base on which its taxes depend has been shipped overseas. So now we borrow money from nations that are making things to sustain consumption. But of course, that can’t go on forever. There is a limit. The results are staggering. Today our nation is twothirds consumption, and one-third production.
Stagnant wages, institutionalized usury, derivatives, impersonal investment, planned obsolescence, waste, and consumer debt transformed a nation of small businesses and small farmers into over-indulgent consumers, pitted between corporations passing their liabilities to taxpayers, an obliging government protecting them from liability, and the “stimulus” of Keynesian policies which inflated government in the first place.
Belloc’s solution to big government is decentralization. “Distributists are decentralists who believe most functions should occur at the smallest level as possible. In a Distributist state, the role of central government addresses challenges outside the scope of locality, such as defense, or international trade, amongst other things. Local guilds and other institutions exist to restrain the concentration of power or property, whether bureaucratic or commercial,” said Aleman.
The early movement and Belloc believed the implementation of Distributism would not come from above, but from below, in other words, not by government force but by a proselytizing popular movement convinced and eager to realize the various facets of Distributist living.
The Mandate
“What I strive to do with The ChesterBelloc Mandate,” Aleman said, “is to create a fountain of information for the academic and layman on the subject of Distributism and Catholic social teaching. Besides the work of Chesterton, Belloc, and Fr. McNabb, I’ve also included some of the work of Amintore Fanfani, Fr. Heinrich Pesch, A.J. Penty, B.A. Santamaria, Hilary Pepler, Cardinal Manning, and my favorite, K.L. Kenrick.
“The first time I ever heard the word ‘ Distributism’ was on Dale Ahlquist’s (president of the American Chesterton Society) show on EWTN about six years ago. My curiosity led me to an article by Thomas Storck, called ‘ What is Distributism?’ Storck’s work left a lasting impression on me, as did some of the great work of the now defunct Caelum et Terra.
“However, I found information on Distributism to be scarce and often piecemeal. Luckily, after reading the republishing of the Distributists’ work by IHS Press — another sign of the Bellocian revival underway today — I decided to consolidate as many essays and articles as I could find on the topic. Some of these materials required constant trips to the library, while others I searched for in schools across the country. I wanted to prove to the readers of the site that Distributist thought wasn’t limited to the classics, but extended to other publications such as America, Blackfriars, Commonweal, Orate Fratres, etc.
“I also wanted my readers to realize that Distributism wasn’t a small movement in Great Britain. From the various Catholic Land associations, the 24 branches of the Distributist League, the Guild of St. Joseph and St. Dominic, and the massive contributions from various columnists for Chesterton’s G.K.’s Weekly, Distributism permeated across the British Isle, and in Ireland where similar features of a Distributist rural economy were already in place.
“The feedback has been very positive, and over the years Distributism has risen rapidly amongst Catholics and other Christians. Online and print journals are often chatting about it on a worldwide level. As a result, I’ve added a foreign-language section dedicated to contemporary articles about Distributism I’ve found from Spain, Argentina, France, Poland, and the Czech Republic, among many others.
“But The Mandate and the reprints on it are one-half the topic. John Medaille, author of ‘The Vocation of Business: Social Justice in the Workplace,’ and I collaborate at The Distributist Review (www.distributism.blogspot.com), a contemporary online web site discussing contemporary politics and socioeconomic issues from a Distributist perspective. We believe we offer sound analysis about the current crisis in the Bellocian tradition.”
The Wanderer Active content removed Active content removed Publish at Scribd or explore others: Posted by Richard Aleman a Distributism, The Wave of The Future Saturday, December 20, 2008
The Health Care System and the Guilds
There can be no question that the American health-care system has tremendous problems. We spend almost as much per capita in public funds as do the Europeans, but we do not have universal service. We spend a greater amount in private funds, yet we do not have free market in medical care. It is almost as if someone deliberately designed a system that combined the worst features of socialism and capitalism into one Rube Goldberg operation. We spend more than any other country in the world on medical services, yet the results are near third-world levels.
The debates on this issue usually take place within this framework of “free market” vs. “socialized” medicine, yet the system we have is neither and both. It cannot be a free market system because the supply of medicine and medical services are limited by licenses and patents. Milton Friedman advocated abolishing the licensing of doctors altogether. Friedman argued that medical licenses restrict the supply of doctors and thereby raise the cost. He believed that the free market would judge medical competence better than any license board, rewarding the competent doctors and punishing the incompetent.
The problem with Friedman's argument is that we have already tried that. Right into the early 20th century, doctors were unlicensed; they took perhaps one to two years at a local medical college, usually a for-profit institution run by local doctors who lectured at the college. After their course of lectures, and without ever having touched a microscope or a cadaver, they set up as doctors. The results were disastrous, as became evident in the great Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918. After that, the move to improve education and require licenses gained public support to produce the system we have today, a system largely controlled by the American Medical Association (AMA).
Further, a free market solution depends on the availability of information and the ability to judge that information. In comparing doctors, information about them is hard come by, and even if I had such information, I would not be able to make an informed judgment. And if I am having a heart attack, I am in no position to do the comparison shopping that a free market requires.
Yet for all that, Friedman has a point. By limiting the number of doctors, we restrict the supply and raise the cost. Further, the education of a doctor is long, arduous, and expensive. New doctors are frequently burdened with huge education loans, and setting up a practice requires a huge capital investment. This forces doctors to act more like businessman than medical professionals; they have to turn a large profit just to break-even on both their costs and the amount of income forgone while they were getting their educations. And it has frequently been charged that the AMA restricts the number of “slots” in medical schools so as to further restrict supply.
I have previously dealt with the problem of licenses (see Sicko-phancy). Instead of a single license requiring many years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, I propose a series of licenses: midwife, nurse practitioner, medical practitioner, medical doctor, medical specialist. This would vastly expand the supply of medical personnel and thereby lower the cost. However, this can only be a partial solution. Doctors, whatever their license level, still face tremendous problems with medical insurance. And likewise the public faces similar problems. The cost of medical care is so high that nearly everyone needs insurance, but the insurance companies do their best to limit the claims they will pay. And there is still the problem of who gets to grant the licenses, no matter how many levels there are. Would not the AMA exercise its influence on governmental agencies to keep the supply as low as it is today, and the price as high as possible? And how to address the problems of the high cost of medicine and medical equipment, like MRIs?
Can we take away the power from government and still have an effective medical system? Must we be mired in socialism, or should we return to the free-market chaos of the 19th century? I believe that there is a better way. I believe that the answer lies in a well-tested institution from out past, and that institution is the guild. The guilds were associations of professionals in a given field who took responsibility for the training of their members and the quality and price of their products and services. They were the sole judge of the qualifications of their members, and had the power to set both standards and prices. What I propose is that we allow medical professionals to form guilds with the power to grant various licenses. They would be the sole judge of the qualifications required, and they would set the practice standards and prices. But most importantly, the guild would stand surety for its members. That is to say, when a patient had a complaint, he would sue not the doctor but the guild. The guild would be responsible for the competence and good conduct of its members.
You might ask, “why would one doctor stand surety for another?” But in fact, this is what already happens in malpractice insurance. Insurance is merely cost averaging. If the losses go up for one doctor, the rates for every other doctor in that insurance pool goes up. But doctors have no control over who is in their insurance pool; the quack and the competent get thrown in the same insurance system, with the later required to pay for the former. In a guild system, the guild would have a strong incentive to ensure the competence of their members and monitor their practice standards; they would want to weed out the incompetent or downgrade their licenses. The guild would purchase insurance for all its members, or even provide the insurance itself, thereby removing the profit motive and lowering the cost.
Since the guild would be the sole judge of the qualifications and practices of its members, there would be a greater diversity of practical approaches. The Guild of St. Luke, for example, might favor one approach to medicine, the Galen Guild might favor another, and natural competition and practical experience would be sufficient to discover the superior approach. And while it might be difficult for the public to judge one doctor against another, it would be easier to judge the performance of one guild versus another. Further, this also provides space for “alternative medicine.” I have no way to judge whether such things as acupuncture or Chinese herbalism are medically valid. But when joined in a guild and required to stand surety for each of their members, practices which do have some value would likely thrive, even if traditional medicine does not, as yet, recognize their value. And if they have no value, it is likely that such practices would simply disappear because the insurance claims would bankrupt them. Likely the government would still have some minimal role to prevent outright quackery; they would not likely allow a Guild of Peach Pit cure-alls.
The guild would also provide a career path for its members. As it is now, student spends the better part of their youth and a great part of their future earnings in getting an MD. But with a guild with a multiple license structure, they could enter as nurse or medical practitioners, practice medicine at some level while continuing their training for higher levels. This would give them both an income stream and practical experience in their trade. It would be a kind of “apprentice” program.
In addition to insuring their doctors, the guild could offer insurance to the public. That is, they could offer to treat people for a fixed annual fee. This would give the guilds an income stream, but also a great incentive to insure that small problems do not go untreated to become big problems. In other words, such health insurance would actually be concerned with insuring health rather than denying claims. Further, the guilds could be required to devote a certain amount of their resources to free or low-cost care for the impoverished or indigent. The government might play a role here in qualifying people as eligible for such reduced-cost treatment.
The guild would be empowered to establish its own clinics, its own training and education programs, its own pharmacies, labs, administrative structures, and whatever else is necessary to medical practice. This would also make it easier for medical professionals to enter practice without worrying about setting up the business and administration that consumes so much of doctor's time today. Of course, the complete solution to the problem cannot be found without breaking the monopoly power of prescription drugs and medical equipment. I have already outlined an approach to this in the aforementioned Sicko-phancy. But I believe that the guilds can also play an important role here, especially in the testing new drugs and negotiating prices. Drug companies would no longer have an incentive to “bribe” doctors to prescribe their patent medicines, since it would be the guild and not the individual doctor who establishes standards for medicines and judges their effectiveness. The collective judgment of the guild is likely to be superior to the individual judgment of any given doctor, especially when that individual judgment is influenced by “gifts” from the drug companies, as it is now.
Now, I will not pretend to my long-suffering readers that I am an expert in medical economics. I welcome any critiques or refinements that those more qualified than I am can offer on these matters.
But I will assert that there are some principles which hold no matter what the system, one of these being that the incentives will dictate the outcomes. And the current incentives—for doctors, insurance companies, the AMA, and others—are all wrong and cannot be repaired in the current system. Every solution now on the table in the public debate will likely only make the problems worse.
What I will assert is that sometimes our best future is in our long past; that methods that have been tried and worked, but for some reason were abandoned, can be re-worked to answer current conditions. I believe that it is the essence of both the progressive and the traditional to find what has worked, and to adapt it to the present moment. Posted by John Médaill Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Sometimes Low Prices...Sometimes
Times being what they are, Christmastide has become a bargain hunt as people seek to stretch their hard-won and limited gift-giving dollars. In such circumstances, the image of the Wal-Mart “happy face” bouncing around the store and knocking down prices is particularly appealing. After all, shopping, even in good times, is about trying to get a good bargain. However, one might might ask if the prices are really all that low. They are indeed perceived to be low, but perception and reality are not always the same things. There is in fact a whole science devoted to creating the perception of low prices without having to deliver the reality.
One way to create this impression is the use of “signposts” and “blinds.” Signposts are items like milk and light-bulbs for which the average shopper is likely to know the going price. These products are often sold by the “big-box” stores below their cost. This accomplishes two things: it creates an impression that the whole store contains bargains and it puts pressure on independent retailers and helps to drive them out of business.
But signposts are only 5% of the merchandise. The rest are “blinds,” goods for which the shopper is likely to have only a vague notion of the market price. For the blinds, the buyer is likely to judge the price by the signposts and assume there is a bargain when in fact there is not. This is only one of the techniques used to divorce appearance from reality. These techniques are detailed in Stacy Mitchell's Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America's Independent Businesses.
The High Cost of Low Prices Ms. Mitchell challenges the Wal-Mart swindle on grounds other than prices. These stores involve a high cost to our economy, to our communities, to the environment, and to the very fabric of out democracy. By concentrating retailing power in a handful of mega-corporations, we have created monopsonies. Monopsonies are just like monopolies, except that is applies to “one-buyer” rather than “one seller.” Most of those who produce products for the retail market are dependent on getting shelf-space at Wal-Mart, Costco, Lowe's, Office-Max and similar mega-retailers. This gives enormous negotiating power to the big-box stores. In fact, the discussions between the producers and these mega-retailers cannot be called “negotiations” in any real sense of that term; the power is all on one side. Hence, the big-box stores dictate to the producers; they dictate where their goods will be made, how they will be made, what price they will carry, what costs of retailing the producer will bear, and many other things besides, things that would never happen in a real negotiation, where the power between the sides was roughly equal.
The thing that the retailers most demand is that the producers off-shore their production. Wal-Mart and others maintain a list of Chinese and other foreign manufacturers that the producers are encouraged, or even required, to use. These stores have been a big force in the destruction of American manufacturing.
They have also been a big force in the destruction of American business. The stores destroy local commerce, built on a dense network of independent businesses. These businesses are part and parcel of their local communities; they participate in civic affairs, they support local projects, they buy the ads in local papers, they support the high-school football team, and enrich community life in hundreds of ways.
What About the “Free” Market
Despite all these problems, one might counter that this is simply the way capitalism works, and that no one can complain because some people have found a better business model for retailing. Alas, this argument fails on two grounds: one, the creation of monopsonies is counter to the free market, and; two, the big-box retailers are creatures of government subsidies. Concerning the first point, all free market theory depends on the “vast number of firms” assumption, the idea that no firm is powerful enough to affect prices; production (and retailing) is spread over so many firms that each one is a price-taker rather than a price-maker. But clearly, the big-box stores are price-makers, and thereby make a mockery of any coherent free-market theory.
But aside from that, the big-box stores are practically creatures of government power. Ms. Mitchell details the many subsidies they receive from cities desperate for development. These numbers are startling enough. However, the author actually ignores the bigger subsidies that these firms receive from the federal government and even foreign governments. Indeed, the big-boxes could not exist without the “freeway” system, a system which is actually a series of subsidies from the cities to the suburbs. (See Free Markets, “Free”ways and Falling Bridges.) Further, they receive huge subsidies as a result of Chinese currency manipulation (See Subsidizing Wal-Mart.)
Bad Business
It would seem that these stores are at least good business models; that is, they grow fast and make a lot of money for the investors. However, it often turns out that what is good for an investor is bad for the economy. Any business can make a lot of money by firing its workers and outsourcing production to low-wage countries. But if every producer does this, a conundrum arises: when the business fires its workers, it also fires its customers; as G. K. Chesterton points out, these are the same people, and you cannot pay a man like a pauper and expect him to spend like a prince. Now, it may seem as if we have been doing just that for the last 30 years, for while the median wage has stagnated, families are buying more “stuff” than ever.
How do we accomplish this hat trick? By two methods. The first was to put more family members to work. More and more homes became two-income households. But even that was not enough to sustain consumption. For the last 20 years, we have made up the difference between the stagnating wage and increased consumption by the extensive use of consumer credit. In other words, we have created a plastic economy, an economy built on credit cards. But this is a house of (credit) cards, and like all such houses, it is destined to collapse. That, in fact, is what we are witnessing at this very moment.
Fighting Back
The triumph of the Big-box stores may seem inevitable, but it is not. Rather, it is destined to fail, and that quickly. Our task is to decide how we will rebuild the economy along more sane and rational lines. In the meantime, these stores can be defeated. Once communities understand their real impacts, it proves to be very easy to keep them out. Ms. Mitchell recounts how many communities have defeated the great powers, and in the meantime rebuilt there own community retailing base.
The Big Box stores really are a government-sponsored swindle, but their days are numbered because the economic model that supported them was never sound to begin with. Distributists understand instinctively that such models will not work. Now the rest of the world will learn the same lesson. I advise everybody who wants to fight the power of these stores and to rebuild out shattered economy to read Ms. Mitchell's book. Posted by John Médaille Sunday, November 30, 2008
Chapter XIII: The Purpose of Government
I return to Equity and Equilibrium: The Political Economy of Distributism after a two-month hiatus.
What Should the Government be Doing? Milton Friedman famously remarked that if the government were put in charge of the Sahara, there would soon be a shortage of sand. It is a remark that delighted both the libertarian and neoclassical economists. It is likely that Friedman repeated this remark at many a seminar. To do so, he had to leave his home, one built according to strict building codes and protected by the socialized services of the city police and fire departments, travel over socialized roads and freeways to a government-sponsored and -regulated airport, board an airplane after it had been thoroughly vetted by a government-supervised inspector, go to a college or university which was heavily supported by the government, and later that evening, no doubt, he discussed his witticism with friends and colleagues over dinner at a restaurant that had to meet strict government standards for cleanliness. And all of this took place under the protection of a military establishment which involves considerable expense to the government and its citizens.
It would seem, then, that the government does indeed do many things tolerably well. It may be, as Friedman claimed, that most of these services could be provided by the private market. And while that might be true, and in some cases must be true, it is equally true that while many egregious examples of inefficiency can be found, the government provides many services tolerably well and with as much efficiency as can be found in any large bureaucracy, public or private. Nevertheless, the point of Friedman's remark is still valid: What should government be doing, and at what level should it be doing it? Conservatives leave little room for government and socialists leave little room for anything else. Neither provides us with a set of principles by which we can evaluate the proper role of government.
Man is a social animal; he needs government. We are born into the little ready-made communities called “families” ruled in various ways by parents. We organize ourselves into social and political hierarchies as naturally as we breathe, and we need government to fulfill our natural ends and goals. But while government in theory may be natural, any actual government may not fulfill the natural ends and goals of man—and most don't. The modern nation-state becomes an end in itself, and the citizen a mere client. We need some set of principles by which to distinguish good government from bad, and the “all or nothing” arguments of socialists and conservatives are not really helpful Until we decide on the proper role of government, we cannot possibly talk about the proper level and kind of taxation that is required to support the government.
Associated with the question of what the government should be doing is the question of at what level the government should be doing it. During the last election campaign, Senator Joe Biden boasted that he had sponsored legislation which had placed 11,000 cops on the beat in our cities. But while his boast is likely true, it is somewhat frightening; a problem that we would normally take to our local mayor and city council is resolved at the highest level of government. Every local problem becomes a federal case, and the government farthest from the actual situation becomes the guarantor of the cop on the beat, the teacher in the classroom, and every other aspect of our social lives that is normally resolved by local action.
“Starving the Beast”
The question of the proper role and level of government has become a difficult one because each new government expenditure creates a constituency ready to fight for the expansion of the role of government and especially for the expansion of their particular subsidy. Thus addressing the question at a practical level involves battling a thousand constituencies each with a hundred lobbyists and millions in campaign contributions or promises of lucrative jobs when the legislator retires from public work. These special interests easily combine to defeat any serious attempt at budget and government reform.
Recognizing this problem, the Reagan administration abandoned the question of the proper role of government and opted for a strategy of “starving the beast,” that is, cutting taxes and thereby cutting off the air supply to big government. The resulting super-deficits would force a confrontation over the issue of government spending. Alas, the strategy did not work. The “beast's” diet was merely changed from cash to credit, and it turns out that credit is easier to spend than cash. The government did not shrink, but grew, and grew at an alarming rate. The budget deficit tripled under Reagan-Bush XLI (from $700 million to $2.1 trillion), more than doubled again under Clinton (to over $5 trillion), and more than doubled again under Bush (to nearly $11 trillion). What is really troublesome about the deficit, however, is not the absolute number itself, but the size of the interest payments, which now amount to about half-a-trillion dollars each year. This works out to about $1,500 per person, or $6,000 for a family of four. This means that the first $6,000 of each family's taxes goes to financing the past, with nothing for the present or the future. Sooner or later, the past must overwhelm the present and foreclose the future. Then the beast will indeed be starved, but so will the rest of us. Financing the present by mortgaging the future is not only bad economics, it is bad morals; we pay for our profligacy by burdening our children, thereby reversing the natural order of family and national life.
But the Reagan administration had another reason for their “starve the beast” strategy: they really had no philosophy of governance. They only knew that they wanted “less government,” but they were not quite clear on what that meant in practice. By and large, they were followers of Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian economist. The Austrians limit the role of government to “protecting property,” but they are vague as to what that actually means. Indeed, they are vague about what “property” means, since this is a term that has had many definitions over the course of the centuries. Nor could they give clear reasons why this should be the only function of government; after all, if everything is to be privatized, why not privatize this function as well, and leave property to those who can protect it from their own resources? Hayek himself equivocated on the issue of government, allowing that it could provide basic incomes and health care, handle externalities of the market, and other functions as well. In the end, Hayek ended up refusing the question of the proper role of government and hence could give no clear guidance to his acolytes in the Reagan administration. In practice, Austrian economics proved to be a faster road to socialism than the socialists themselves could build, but it was mainly a socialism for the rich. Since it is a woefully incomplete theory, its unintended consequences overwhelm its theoretical bases with the result that Austrian theory leads to socialist practice, which is exactly the result that Hilaire Belloc predicted for such theories in his book, The Servile State. Until we answer the question about government, we cannot answer the question about taxes; unless we know what the government ought to do, we cannot know how much it ought to cost or how to fund it. And we cannot know what it ought to do without first knowing what purpose government has and upon what principles it rests.
The Purpose of Government
Human beings are not self-sufficient as individuals. We are born naked against the elements and helpless in ourselves; we are dependent from the beginning on others, and apart from them we would not last our first day on earth. This dependency continues throughout our lives, since none of us can or should acquire all the skills necessary to grow our own food, make our own shoes, provide our own education, etc. We are by nature social beings and thrive only in community. The purpose of government is to provide the conditions under which all the other communities that make up the social fabric can flourish. And first and foremost among these other communities is the primary community of the family, the one that first calls us into being through an act of love and gives us the gifts that will form us. Not only the material gifts of food, clothing and shelter, but the gifts of language, of culture, of our first experience of love and belonging and most importantly, the gift of a name, a name that ties us to family but is uniquely ours, the name that lets us know that we are both part of something and unique beings.
At once we note that we are at odds with the modern political and economic theories, which are built on the individual as the prime social and economic unit. But this is not correct because the individual, apart from the social order, is not capable of providing for himself. Indeed, the individual is not even capable of reproducing himself. The individual flourishes in and through the community. This is not to denigrate the value of the individual person, since the purpose of the family is to allow the person to flourish; it is to note that persons only exist in and through communities, first and foremost the community of the family.
Therefore, we can judge the success or failure of government by noting the strength of the family units that make up the society. If they are barely surviving and chronically in debt, if mothers are forced to work by economic conditions and unable to attend to the education of their children, if families seem to be temporary and chronically subject to dissolution, if the children have only limited educational opportunities, if they are more concerned with the getting (and destruction) of more things for their happiness, then we may say that the family is materially, morally, and spiritually weak. Alas, these are the conditions that describe too many American families today, and the failure of the family leads to failures in the economic, political, and social orders, failures which have no solution apart from repairing our damaged families.
Starting with the family, we can go on to assess the health of larger communities, not only governmental ones like cities and states, but those communities of work and social life in which we find ourselves and through which we contribute to the common good and to our own development. In order to flourish, all of these communities require certain things. They require a material base by way of access to productive property which they can own or share; they require training and education; they require relatively free markets; they require a culture of liberty in which they can grow; they require a certain set of shared values if they are to share a common cultural space; they require certain infrastructures such as roads, a money system, courts, etc. Some of these things are or can be directly supplied by the government and others are merely influenced by its decisions. But all the decisions of government must be based on a recognition of their effect on these communities. Government is not, of course, solely responsible for the flourishing of these communities (that would be socialism or paternalism), but it is often responsible for their failure. In order to assure that the government is acting on behalf of these communities, there are certain bedrock principles that must be followed, no matter what the form of government.
The Principles of Government
It seems today as if government is no more than a competition among special interests each fighting for a share of the public purse and a list of privileges from public law. Along with this we note a centralizing tendency that transcends party rhetoric and leads to an ever-growing central government, which displaces all lower units of government and even private association. And, of course, such competition for power must favor the powerful. This self-aggrandizing tendency of government mirrors a similar cult of bigness in the commercial realm. Companies grow “too big to fail,” and hence can act with impunity, knowing that no matter how foolish their actions, they can always have recourse to the public purse; they can rely on economic blackmail: “If we fail, everything fails; bail us or be damned!” And they get their way with the public purse. As I write this, the government is committing trillions to private bailouts, a perfect socialism for the rich necessary to save everybody else. But this is not the first time this has happened; indeed, it is a chronic condition of corporate capitalism. There have been about 19 bailouts in the last 100 years, making them fairly predictable events. The bailouts get bigger as the corporations and the government grow in size.
Yet bailouts have never reached the size and scale of today's crises, and it is likely that the system will not work and must be reformed, probably after a complete collapse. A reform of the system will require an understanding of the proper principles of government. And these principles are the exact opposite of the practice of modern government. Against the the clash of special interests, we assert The Principle of The Common Good; against the centralizing tendency, we assert The Principle of Subsidiarity; against the tendency to favor the rich and powerful, we assert The Principle of Solidarity. The Common Good
The idea of the common good would seem self-evident, but in fact most modern political and economic thought is based on the priority of private and personal goods. “Greed is good” has become an implicit assumption of our political and economic lives. This idea was first advanced in 1714 in Bernard de Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees, which was subtitled Private Vices, Publick Benefits. Mandeville offered us the paradox that private vice was the key to public virtue, that the water of private interest could be transformed into the wine of the common good. But this view is far too mystical. It is based on the view that the common good is no more than a summation of individual and particular goods, and that there is no transcendent good which unites us all.
But clearly, this is not true. The individual good of a father, for example, could run counter to the good of his family. The father who spends the bulk of his earnings on himself and his own pleasures and leaves little for the feeding of his family and nothing for the education of his children indulges a private good at the expense of the common good of the family. It is only by realizing himself in and through the family that his good and the good of the family can be united. And this is the key to realizing the common good: we must develop the sense that our particular goods are bound up with the common good. We cannot truly be successful at the expense of our neighbors; their success and ours are connected.
The great difficulty of recognizing the common good is that we are all members of the community mostly through participation in particular communities, each of which makes a partial contribution to the common good. That is, we participate in the over-all community in and through our participation in, say, the arts community, the business community, the educational community, etc. The end of each of these communities is partial and private, in the sense of the Latin term, privatus, which connotes a lack of something, a privation. The tendency of private communities is to let their partial and private ends dominate over the contribution they make to the public and general good. But the common good cannot flourish unless we recognize that our particular communities depend on, and are ultimately successful through, the success of the whole community. This takes a constant recognition of the wider community and a constant effort of the will to limit our demands on the community only to what is necessary for, and proportional to, our contributions to that wider community.
Subsidiarity
As members of vast, modern nation-states, especially those governed by the principles of pure individualism, we cannot help but see ourselves as mere infinitesimal cogs in a vast machine over which we have very little control, save for annual, semi-annual, or quadrennial plebiscites in which we get to choose “leaders” from a very limited list. Indeed, due to the miracle of national television, the government official most remote from us, the President, is a daily presence in our living room, while the person who might be our neighbor, the local mayor or city councilman, remains a stranger whose very name we cannot recall. In other words, we have stood the natural order of government and social life on its head, with the most remote becoming more important than the local.
In opposition to this centralizing tendency, solidarity implies a “bottom-up” view of society. It starts with the family as the basic unit of society. All economic, social, and political activity is built around the family and serves its needs. But because no family is self-sufficient, families in turn require economic and social contexts, including government. Higher social formations have a right to interfere in the affairs of lower organizations, including the family, but this is only a limited right; such interventions can only be used to correct egregious failures, and may last only for as long as necessary to correct the failure. Some problems, of course, don’t go away, such as unemployment: as long as the economic system is unable to offer all persons meaningful employment, then society must provide other means for their dignified subsistence. But this must be clearly seen as a defect of the system, in the same way that the need for a police force or an army is really a defect arising from original sin. From the viewpoint of subsidiarity, society is highly “textured”; instead of a simple system of an “individual/government” relationship, there should be a rich collection of levels within society, each with its own realm of competence and authority. At present, government has absorbed functions which used to belong to the Church or other authorities such as the guilds. Marriage, education, charity, and commercial regulations had been guided by other bodies, even if their decisions were enforced by the state. The all-powerful, centralized state has displaced all of these other and (I contend) more natural authorities. Other authorities, even the family itself, exist only by the sufferance of the central administration.
According to the principle of subsidiarity, the higher-level organization can only justify its existence by the necessary support it gives to lower-level one. Assuming that most functions of political, social, and economic life can be adequately handled at the local level, the higher levels are therefore the least important, and their importance diminishes the higher up they are. This does not mean that they they have no meaningful authority, nor any right to intervene. For example, we know that African-Americans would not enjoy full citizenship in America were it not for forceful interventions by the central government. But even this intervention is instructive, since it involves a community that extends beyond any local jurisdiction, and was clearly oppressed in many jurisdictions, indeed, perhaps in most or even in all, at least to some degree. And since the oppression was egregious, it was clearly the right and duty of the central government to act, even in disregard of local rights. Nevertheless, such interventions should be made only on clear necessity, only as much as necessary, and only for as long as necessary. In general, local organizations should be free to develop in their own way and with their own resources.
One important point that needs to be made about subsidiarity is that not only should control be as local as possible, but funding as well. If the funding for governmental programs comes from afar without directly impacting local resources, it appears to be “free” money, which always distorts the decision-making process. If someone else pays, we can never have enough; when the money comes from our own resources, we tend to spend it as conservatively as we can. This does not preclude higher authorities from making contributions to local programs, but such contributions must be related to the common good, and it does the local authority no good to become dependent on the remote power. This is, as we shall see, one of the most important principles in government funding and taxation.
Solidarity
Solidarity is complimentary with subsidiarity. Subsidiarity provides the vertical dimension of life, while solidarity provides the horizontal dimension; subsidiarity is a connection between elements of society viewed as a hierarchy, while solidarity provides the connections between the elements viewed as if they were on the same level. Solidarity connects us with the common good and impels us, in the name of Christian charity, to act for the good of all. There can be no vision of the common good unless there is solidarity between all the elements of society.
Of particular importance to solidarity is the preferential option for the poor. When we act in solidarity, we act for the good of all. The preferential option for the poor serves as a practical test of whether we are acting for all, or just for some. Under the preferential option, we always examine the effects of any action on the poorest of our neighbors; if it is not good for them, it breaks solidarity. Since we are all inclined to opportunism and rationalization, solidarity, particularly when it forces us to look at our actions from the standpoint of the poor, helps in ensure the common good.
If what we have said so far is correct, then we have provided a purpose for government and the principles of government, and with these tools we can examine our actually existing government to see how well it conforms to purpose and principle, and ask what can be done to change it. Posted by John Médaille Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Remembrance of Things Past
Conservatism is, in large part, about memory; you cannot conserve values if you do not remember them, if you do not remember the time when values where embedded into active and functioning social systems. There are powerful weapons turned against memory these days, including ideologies of “creative destruction” whose main function is to constantly destroy the past and the values associated with the past. But when we destroy the past, we also destroy the future, and that is a process that is becoming painfully apparent today. Politically, both the right and the left have become ideologies of destruction; the right for commercial reasons and the left for cultural (or “multi-cultural”) reasons. But without remembering our past, we cannot rebuild our future. The memory of the past comes not so much from histories and essays; the main tools of memory were song and story. Today our stories are more likely to be about science fiction, about a future that never arrives, and our songs are not anything we actually sing. Indeed, we don't even share our songs, but listen to them plugged into a tiny box, where no one else can even here them.
R. R. Reno of First Things has brought to our attention some songs that do recover the past, that are worth singing and worth sharing. They are from the English group, Show of Hands. Writes Reno: The background for the song is the post-Thatcher boom in England that has transformed social patterns. Whatever was left of nineteenth-century industrial society has been swept away. Global agricultural markets have changed farming. The explosive growth of wealth, almost entirely focused in London, has created a large class of the well-to-do. The end result for a great deal of southern England: failing village economies now sustained by money infused by London weekenders, many of whom have bought charming cottages as second homes.
Our free-market friends like to remind us that this is all part of the process of creative destruction. And anyway, aren’t those country folks making their own decisions to sell out and pocket the cash? All good and well, but Show of Hands sings of a different, existential truth: “Redbrick cottage where I was born / Is the empty shell of a holiday home. / Most of year there’s no one there. / The village is dead and they don’t care.” The kitchens have been redone tastefully, but the village empties during the week.
If “Country Life” gives you a Chestertonian tingle, then strap on your seat belt and click over to “Roots.” This song crashes onto the shore of contemporary multiculturalism like a Cornish storm surge. The major premise of “Roots” is simple: “Without our stories or our songs / How will we know where we come from?” The minor premise is implied: England now encourages cultural forgetfulness rather than memory. The conclusion: an urgent imperative of cultural renewal that gives this song extraordinary emotional power.
Like last year's hit, Dégénération from the French Canadian group Mes Aïeux, these songs remind of us where we came from and what we have lost. And until we recover our past, we cannot rebuild our future.
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Active content removed Active content removed Posted by John Médaille Saturday, October 25, 2008
The RINO Party
When Colin Powell endorsed Barrack Obama, Rush Limbaugh had a convenient explanation, shouted into the microphone: “It was all about race.” Of course, the whole point of a program like Rush's is to provide his listeners with sound bites so that they won't have to think; thinking is hard and it is simply more efficient to farm the task out to people like Limbaugh. It's a division of labor sort of thing. But others proposed another explanation, namely that Powell was a Republican In Name Only (RINO) and so his endorsement was hardly a surprise.
The RINO argument, though more coherent, breaks down in the face of the slew of defections from the entire spectrum of the Republican Party. Christopher Buckley, Ken Adelman, Christopher Hitchens, Scott McClellan, Bill Ruckelshaus, William Weld, Lilibet Hagel (wife of Senator Chuck Hagel), Jeffrey Hart, C.C. Goldwater, and a host of other life-long Republicans have switched sides, calling the RINO argument into question. Even Bruce Bartlett has called for conservatives to “reach out to Obama.” Only part of the problem can be laid at the feet of the McCain-Palin ticket. True, McCain continues the Cheney-Bush policies of replacing taxes with borrowing, expanding the federal government and especially the powers of the executive (the so-called “unitary executive” theory), foreign adventurism, and a slew of other policies that cannot be reconciled with the traditional Republican stance. Even on social issues, McCain is unreliable. As Tom Piatak points out in Chonicles Magazine: Even on abortion, McCain is unreliable. On February 3, The Washington Post reported McCain's statement that 'it's not the social issues [that] I care about.' And on August 19, 1999, McCain told The San Francisco Chronicle, ' ertainly in the short term, or even the long term, I would not support the repeal of Roe v. Wade which would then force X number of women in America to undergo illegal and dangerous operations.' I the same interview, McCain stated he would not have a 'litmus test' for judicial nominees. McCain's former senate colleague, Rick Santorum, an indefatigable champion of the unborn, has stated that McCain did his best behind the scenes to prevent pro-life legislation from coming to a vote on the floor. Robert Novak has reported that McCain has described Justice Samuel Alito as 'too conservative.' Novak has also reminded his readers that, back when Vermont Republican Jim Jeffords became an independent and began to caucus with the Democrats, McCain was in negotiations with the Senate Democr
Over the last few yrs, a lot of people ask me about politics, who I am going to vote for in such and such election.What Party I am affiliated with and why.
Catholics do not and should never have the opinion that Sunday is for Christ the King, but the rest of the week is for work, play and political questions. Catholic life not divided into little boxes, separated in categories. This compartmentalization is largely the result of the individualism of the “reformation” and the resulting culture, first Protestantized, then through it s natural course, secularism.
As good friend of mine would say, we are the lost children of Luther and the Enlightenment.
It was about this time 5 yrs ago, I really bean to open my eyes and see the “big picture”, that neither major Big Box Parties-Democrats and Republicans-were serious in their rhetoric about economics, social issues or foreign policy. Both had members in the Trilateral Commission, the Council of Foreign Relations, Bilderbergers, etc.
It seemed, as President Kennedy once supposedly said, “I keep seeing the same names and faces”
I actually see now that, terrible as they are, the Democrats are the more honest of the 2, for they do believe and act most of the time as hey present themselves-socialist, anti-life and globalsitic. In the late 90’s and into the 21st century, Republicans seemed to care little for moral issues, other than a campaign slogan and Democrats seemed to embrace capitalism. Republicans exploded spending (according to GOA, 43% during Bush’s first 4 yrs alone). Both prove they will continue to meddle in other peoples back yards, while ignoring their own.
The present financial crises, exhibit A.
So, by early 2004, I had had enough-enough of Republicans, their psychophantic cheerleaders in radio, TV and the so-called “religious right”. I, though still uninitiated to Distributism, began looking at alternative choices, other than corporate/socialist Party A and B.
Short story, I found the Constitution Party.Though not perfect, I saw a vision of America with little government doing only a few things, nor more.This meant an end to borrow/tax/spend.This meant a Party that was serious about tacking and ending dependency on the Federal Reserve cartel and its long tenderils into US and worldwide governments.
I proudly cast my vote for Michael Peroutka and did not care that the vote was tossed away.
You see, North Carolina, like Texas and Oklahoma have some of the most partisan and monopolist laws in the nation. It takes 80,000+ certifieable signatures to get ballot access in this state. Meaning that one has to talk to and get 102,000 or more pople to sign to get that magic number. I takes more than 500 signatures to get write-in status.
Most people today, despite their “I vote for the man, no the Party” rhetoric, do indeed vote for the “R” or “D”.
None the less, a vote for the righteous candidate is never wasted, it is the only vote not wasted-wasted on more of the same, battered voter syndrome doled out by both Parties, fear, etc. How many times I have heard someone say “I am voting for candidate A to stop B”. They then usually acknowledge A is a poor choice, usually more evil than the last “lesser evil”, but shrug and say “what choice hath I”.
When we are going to final emerge from this coccon and get a worthwhile “R” or “D” no one ever says, or how rewarding poor parties/candidates will accomplish this.
The CP is willing to get this country back to the closest thing we have seen to a subsidiarty model in more than 150 years. Again, not Catholic or perfect, but at least a start.
As I assumed leadership in the Party, a good friend came along and introduced me to Distributism. I spent hours combing sites and reading articles. John Medialle was great, patiently answering my emails and explaining the whole system, really a way of life-inside and out.
One passage struck me, as this was just what I was thinking:
“effective entry to the political system is controlled by the two political parties, which is in itself a extra-constitutional arrangement. Nonetheless, these parties are encoded in law by protections that make third parties difficult or impossible. The yare also the receipiants of vast public subsidies. The subsidies should be ended, and the requirements for getting on the ballot should be lightened so that politics may encompass as wide a range of views as is practical (Distributivism and Catholic Social Teaching, pgs 12-13http://www.medaille.com/distributivismandcst.pdf).
True, for past bills in our own legislature died in committee or were largely eviscerated when passed, such as HR 88, co-sponsored by conservative Republican Skip Stam and Democrat Jennifer Weiss. To date, do not really know if this bill was a honest part to make it more possible for full participation or as a ploy to hopefully weaken ones opponents. Either way, the bill is largely worthless in its present state and in limbo is the lawsuits of both the Libertarians and Greens.
In order to have any hope to implement distributism and a decentralized society, neither Big Boxers were or are going to achieve this. There is big corporate money, as Roger Ales courted by Hillary and the Republicans simultaneously. Either way, the corporate powers triumph. No one in either Party is in the least a “maverick”, nor will they really bring about “Change”. Obama in his first address, on the crises, promised to work even more closely with the Federal Reserve, the very body the supplies endless fiat currency to the drunken sailor spending spree called Congress. Many movers and shakers in the Fed are unknown, even to Congress.
Ron Paul, in comments made in the documentary America: From Freedom to Fascism, makes a good comment-no one really knows who all the players are, names or who these people are.
Yet, we are to trust them blindly and turn are very existence over to them.
Distributism at its heart incorporates not profit or power, but families, communities, Faith and Christ into is daily lives. At the heart of Christianity is reliance on Him and self sacrifice.
Few today are willing tot sacrifice. They will not even consider thinking outside the “R” or “D”. Even among today’s “traditionalists”, many will not even consider making a move toward another viewpoint. True, some “hold their noses”-as if that were any excuse-but in the end, will give the Republicans one more vote(and likely, another, and another..).
News flash, God judges our actions, not results of an election or leaves it up to us to “stop the boogeyman”,etc. God allows us the freedom to vote and choose our leaders, but our vote and actions in that booth are about obedience, not some triangulation. It is not up to us to stop anyone or elect anyone. God sets up and tears down rulers. See Psalm 2.Fear is not Christian and should never enter into the equation. We do get the people we dserve
It reminds me of a scene from Liar, Liar with Jim Carrey. When speaking to a female client ready to start divorce proceedings, he counsels her to stop being a victim, stop rolling over and saying “hit me again, Ike, and put some stank on it this time”
Continuing to vote “lesser of 2 evils” has given us worse and worse candidates-just look at the GOP lineup, Guiliani and McCain.
In effect, excusemaking and rolling over,especially by traditionalist that should know better, is the very cowardice Pope Leo XIII spoke of:
Christians are, moreover, born for combat, whereof the greater the vehemence, the more assured, God aiding, the triumph: "(SAPIENTIAE CHRISTIANAE 14)
And:
Therefore, they who cherish the "prudence of the flesh" and who pretend to be unaware that every Christian ought to be a valiant soldier of Christ; they who would fain obtain the rewards owing to conquerors, while they are leading the lives of cowards, untouched in the fight, are so far from thwarting the onward march of the evil-disposed that, on the contrary, they even help it forward. (SC 34)
Continuing to vote “R” or “D” is to continue to operate in the enemies camp. IT is time Catholics get involved in alternative ways, even if not explicity Catholic groups. Someday, possibly, we can convert organizations into Catholic ones or even form our own, but in the meanwhile, work with people of good will outside the matrix, Big Box.
For those wedded to “lesser evils”, than a simple question-who is lesser, GOP or CP? Who will be committed to pushing back the corporate, socialist state?
It is past time to leave both Big Boxers, time to look with courage in other directions and stop the apathy of “it can’t be done”. If you haven’t noticed, there is no longer a Federalist Party or Whig, so, at some time in America’s past, someone had enough.
Moving forward, we Catholics cannot become quietest, sitting in our pews or homes, letting other people make decisions for us and surrendering the fight to the Powers of the World.
Evil thrives when good Catholics do nothing.
While we engage the culture at work, in Church, at home, we fight with the simplicity of a doves, the cunning of serpents. In parting, though I could say much more-and maybe already have, let us remember the words of SOG Dorothy Day:
Catholics throughout the country are again accepting `the lesser of two evils'.... They fail to see the body of Catholic social teaching of such men as Fr. Vincent McNabb, G.K. Chesterton, Belloc, Eric Gill and other Distributists ... and lose all sight of The Little Way."
The little way…certainly not by holding noses, “lesser evils” and continuing to operate in 2 Parties that have, on principle, become one.
Chris Campbell is a former (2004-200 state Chairman of the Constitution Party of NC and current Member-at-Large. He is a Distributist, controversialist and all around fun loving guy that dreams someday of self employment.
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Wednesday, March 18, 2009
It's All About Usury
With all the turmoil in the financial industry, you would think that there would be a national conversation of money and lending. You would think that this would be a good time to re-examine the way we create money and the way we lend it. You would think, especially, that it would be a good time to review the subject of usury, especially since the credit card market is about to collapse in the same way the mortgage market did. But no, that conversation has not taken place. Indeed, the last great economist to address the subject was J. M. Keynes, back in the 1930's. Keynes, who was no friend of the Church, surprised himself by finding that the Church's restrictions on usury made perfect economic sense, a sense ignored by classical economists: Provisions against usury are amongst the most ancient economic practices of which we have record. The destruction of the inducement to invest by an excessive liquidity preference was the outstanding evil, the prime impediment to the growth of wealth, in the ancient and medieval worlds…I was brought up to believe that the attitude of the Medieval Church to the rate of interest was inherently absurd, and that the subtle discussions aimed at distinguishing the return on money-loans from the return to active investment were merely Jesuitical attempts to find a practical escape from a foolish theory. But I now read these discussions as an honest intellectual effort to keep separate what the classical theory has inextricably confused together, namely, the rate of interest and the marginal efficiency of capital. [The General Theory, 351-2] What Keynes is saying in this somewhat technical language is that when returns to pure loans are higher than returns to actual investments, you will have a problem; if you can make more money lending to consumers at 25% than to auto makers at 10%, then the money for making things will dry up, and loans will shift to consumption and speculation. We have often noted this problem in the pages of The Distributist Review, (see The Utopia of Usurers, Usury!, Usury: Wealth Without Work, and many other articles) but we can't honestly claim that we have made a big impression on the public. However, Thomas Geoghagen in the pages of Harper's Magazine, has written an indictment of the current system entitled “Infinite Debt: How unlimited interest rates destroyed the economy.” Unfortunately, the article is not yet available on-line, but it is worth picking up a copy of the magazine to read it. There is an interesting parallel between the lifting of the usury laws and the abolishing of the abortion laws: both were accomplished not by democratic process, but by legislative fiat; in Marquette National Bank v. First of Omaha Service Corp., a 1978 Supreme Court opinion, the court found that an 1864 law prohibited the states from enforcing usury laws in their own state if it was legal in another state. For all practical purposes, this ended usury laws. The lifting of the usury laws had dire unintended consequences, one of which was the decline of manufacturing: It may be hard to grasp how the dismantling of usury laws might lead to the loss of our industrial base. But it’s true: it led to the loss of our best middle-class jobs. Here’s a little primer on how it happened. First, thanks to the uncapping of interest rates, we shifted capital into the financial sector, with its relatively high returns. Second, as we shifted capital out of globally competitive manufacturing, we ran bigger trade deficits. Third, as we ran bigger trade deficits, we required bigger inflows of foreign capital. We had “cheap money” flooding in from China, Saudi Arabia, and even the Fourth World. May God forgive us—we even had capital coming in from Honduras. Fourth, the banks got even more money, and they didn’t even consider putting it back into manufacturing. They stuffed it into derivatives and other forms of gambling, because that’s the kind of thing that got the “normal” big return; i.e., not 5 percent but 35 percent or even more. But in addition to the economic effect, it had a profound effect on the moral character of the nation: The change in credit-card caps also had a bad effect on the moral character of the nation. Because interest rates were so high, the banks no longer wanted borrowers with good moral character. Look at the way lending has changed just since the time I was in law school in the early 1970s. Even then, the mantra of my teachers in contracts and commercial paper was: “The loan must be repaid!” I have a friend, a professor, who still quotes that refrain. But it’s out of date. At interest rates of 25 percent, or 50 percent, or 500 percent, lenders don’t really want the loan to be repaid—they want us to be irresponsible, or at least to have a certain amount of bad character. One question, however, is why we were willing to oblige the bankers by displaying such a poor moral character. No doubt the convenience of the credit card was a factor, but there is more to it than that. One reason is that we had too. The shift in the economy from manufacturing to finance meant that workers were no longer able to bargain for wages through unions and other means. Since 1972, the median hourly wage has stagnated. We experienced a very odd phenomenon: productivity exploded, but wages remained the same. Obviously, there was not enough purchasing power to clear the markets. Workers responded in two ways. One was to work more hours and put more family members to work, with a devastation effect on family life. The other was to borrow more. Further, the best and brightest of our students no longer went into engineering or manufacturing, but into finance. We started to lose even the knowledge of how to make things. As Thomas Geoghagen points out, not only did financial companies account for 40% of corporate profits in 2003, (up from 18% in 198 but this may understate the problem. Many “manufacturing” firms, like GM and GE, actually made their profits from their finance divisions. GM became a company that manufactured cars in order to make loans on them. Our current bail-out plans are mainly directed at the banks, the hedge funds, the insurance companies, and other financial institutions. But this will not work. Without restoring manufacturing, farming, mining, and other basic industries, we cannot rescue the economy. But we have the order exactly reversed. The bankers get an instant bailout, no questions asked, while manufacturers, like the Big Three, have to crawl over broken glass to get what amounts to “chump change” in the context of the overall “rescue” numbers. Moreover, “contracts” with the derivative traders of AIG are regarded as sacred and unbreakable, while union contracts are broken at will. It is the habit of the modernists to despise the past, and so it is no surprise that a restriction which existed in most cultures from the time of the Babylonians to the time of Jimmy Carter would be overturned. Yet, even modernism posits some empiricism, actually looking at the effects of an action. It is now long enough to look at the effects of the Supreme Courts 1978 decision. And without revisting this decision, we cannot fix the economy.
Posted by John Médaille Monday, March 16, 2009
Brave New Alternative: Modern Distributism [This article originally appeared in The Geauga Times Courier. It is reprinted here by permission.]
by Jesse Yates
The United States of America, at the time of its founding, was to be a nation governed by the rule of law -- by the U.S. Constitution. The Constitution’s Preamble, naturally, articulated its goals, among which was to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity”. Set in stone, therefore, were certain indispensable means to this end: a limited federal government with powers both clearly defined and which acted to check and balance. Somewhere along the way, however, something went wrong. When states and big businesses are vying for “their share” of billions of dollars in taxpayer money, when they are groveling at the feet of a federal government, which can set any condition it wants upon them, can it any longer be said that the federal government works within the parameters originally intended to “secure the blessings of liberty”?
Many people point the finger of blame at Fabian socialists (modern Democrats), rightly decrying redistribution of wealth. What many of these people forget, however, is that welfare is welfare by any name, thus corporate welfare, money to big farms, and all sorts of Republican earmarks “redistribute wealth” just as effectively as any liberal scheme. But even aside from this type of redistribution, big business globalists (modern Republicans) wind up enabling the very ideology they claim to detest. When only a fraction of the already tiny percentage of capitalists are “too big to fail,” then government has no real choice: it’s either “bail out” or let civilization as we know it sink. To many, our current predicament is an absolute surprise. But to some, it is really no surprise at all. For a while now, in fact, there have been “voices crying out in the wilderness”, and it may be time to listen to what they have to say.
The title for this article was inspired, as a case in point, by Aldous Huxley’s work, though not so much by his classic novel Brave New World as by an alternative he subsequently offered. From works like Brave New World Revisited and a forward he later added to Brave New World, one will find Huxley speaking of the need for economic decentralization and distributing property as widely as possible in order to remedy the oppressive partnership between big business and big government; in connection to these remedies he draws upon names like Hilaire Belloc, Mortimer Adler, and Henry George.
Though none of these men are any longer with us, their ideas are still very much alive. Belloc, for instance, along with well-known author G.K. Chesterton, popularized a theory known as Distributism, and a simple Google search will turn up pages worth of modern Distributist theories, practices, and demonstrated successes. Among the successors of Belloc and Chesterton, John Médaille, who writes for a blog called The Distributist Review, is playing a part in advancing Distributism both by his insightful writing and by drawing upon allied elements -- like (Henry) Georgism, strategies evolved from Mortimer Adler by CESJ, and, in addition to Huxley’s references, E. F. Schumacher’s work (among others).
All of these men, incidentally, would agree with President Obama that change was long overdue; still, neither elitist socialists nor monopolistic capitalists, that is, neither Democrats nor Republicans have given, nor will give us anything but an insatiably power hungry “Servile State”. The an swer may be, as the song goes, “blowing in the wind,” but, then again, perhaps the “winds of change” and a brave new alternative, are only a few more Google clicks away.
Jesse M. Yates Posted by Richard Aleman Sunday, March 15, 2009
Learning from the Land: In the School of Saint Benedict [Note: Please consider making a donation to Clear Creek Monastery. The Rule of St. Benedict is and should be an example to distributists across the world. The Benedictine monks at Clear Creek tirelessly work to "...build something beautiful for God" centering their lives in Ora et Labora (Prayer and Work).]
by Br. Philip Anderson, Prior February 2009
Dear Friend,
As we enter the Lenten season — leaving behind the splendors of Christmas and looking forward now to that other pole of the liturgical year which is Easter — we discover that the greater simplicity and sobriety of this time of year lends itselfhttp://1.bp.blogspot.com/_pPwqucr9m54/Sb0gwR20kuI/AAAAAAAABw0/MaYnHzU-02M/s1600-h/clearcreek.jpg http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_pPwqucr9m54/Sb0gwR20kuI/AAAAAAAABw0/MaYnHzU-02M/s1600-h/clearcreek.jpg well to a meditation on man’s proper place in the universe as caretaker of creation.
For many years now ecology has aroused much interest, not only in regard to the immediate practical decisions that must be made by governments and businesses, but also as a topic of discussion in the broader cultural context. Our contemporaries seem to experience an ever-increasing alienation from nature and a need to somehow “re-connect” with the earth, while scientists continue to point to signs that the ecological balance of the natural world is being seriously compromised by the excesses of our technology.
The Church too has participated in the discussion. The Holy Father recently alluded to these questions in an address to the members of the Roman Curia (December 22, 200 :
Since faith in the Creator is an essential part of the Christian creed, the Church cannot and must not limit herself to passing on to the faithful the message of salvation alone. She has a responsibility towards creation, and must also publicly assert this responsibility. In so doing, she must not only defend earth, water and air as gifts of creation belonging to all. She must also protect man from self—destruction.
What does the great monastic tradition issuing from Saint Benedict have to say about this essential relationship with creation?
In fact, for men and women living in Saint Benedict’s day, the question would have had little meaning. The vast majority of human beings lived in rural areas then, and for them life was intimately and necessarily connected to the rhythm of nature. The day’s activities were programmed according to the hours of sunlight. The year was punctuated by the various seasons in which planting, harvesting and every important task found its appointed time. In such a world, excepting the case of a few very rich people in large cities, it was scarcely possible to become disconnected from the rhythm of creation.
Nonetheless there is much in the wisdom of Saint Benedict that speaks to our present needs in terms of returning to a wiser way of life, a life closer to the land.
One of the pillars of the Rule is evangelical poverty. There would be neither an economic crisis in the world today, nor an ecological threat, were it not for the evil done by greed. Monastic poverty means being content with the simple things that sustain human existence in its inherent goodness. This poverty allows man to live in harmony with field and forest, without feeling the need to brutally strip the earth of her resources in order to realize an immediate gain. Although the economic reality in America has become increasingly complex in our day, it is still possible to recapture this joyous sort of poverty. We are not speaking of the tragic misery of the desperately poor, but of an attitude rooted in the Christian faith. E.F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful: Economies As If People Mattered (first published in 1973) offers insights that seem more timely than ever. Another important work, Flee To The Fields: The Founding Papers of the Catholic Land Movement, with a preface by Hilaire Belloc, charts a way forward in terms of an explicitly Catholic perspective.
Of course, the great corollary of evangelical and monastic poverty is work, especially manual work. Ora et Labora ("Pray and Work"') is often given as the Benedictine motto. The very early monks found that this work with one’s hands was something necessary in order to be able to pray well. Sometimes they would burn all the baskets they had woven during the year — having no need to sell them in order to make money — and start all over again, simply because this activity was good for body and mind! Saint Paul worked with his hands, even though he was entitled to live from his preaching of the Gospel. Manual work is an excellent way to put us back in touch with the wonder and beauty of creation, despite the fact that since the Fall man must toil by "the sweat of his brow" amid thorns and thistles (Gen. 3:18-19).
At Clear Creek we exercise many forms of manual labor, including carpentry, forging and much building, not to mention those domestic activities such as cooking and the making of clothing and shoes. In terms of our direct relationship to the land, the most notable activity would probably be that involving our forest, composed mainly of various types of oak trees. For several years now, thanks to a grant from the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program, we have been working to improve our land by clearing unhealthy trees from the forest, thereby letting in more sunlight. This allows certain grasses to grow, which in turn offer new pasture for our rugged-hair sheep. We intend to bring in goats as well to clear unwanted weeds and brush from the under wood. We also have planted many trees, especially pines. Monks learn many a lesson from the land.
It would all be to no avail, however, without something more. The French author and statesman, Andre Malraux, famously said, "The twenty-first century will either be spiritual or it will not be". Even if a nuclear conflagration is somehow avoided — and the threat has by no means disappeared — it will take something more than a form of "global awareness" to preserve the world’s natural resources. This is where the other half of Saint Benedict’s motto, Ora ("Pray”), enters the picture.
Among the animals of the forest only one is capable of ruining everything, the one who walks upright, the same one whom God established shepherd of all creation in the beginning. It is the spiritual struggle between good and evil being waged in his heart that causes man, either to care for creation, or to destroy it. This is what Pope Benedict XVI meant when he said in his discourse to the Roman Curia last December, "What is needed is something like a human ecology, correctly understood". It is through prayer that we realize this human ecology, transcending the limited resources of the natural environment.
Between the somewhat romantic musings of city folk, who dream of moving to the country to start a new life, and the harsh reality of having to earn one’s daily bread from the earth that has become rebellious to sinful man, there is certainly a wide margin, which is also a serious challenge. But do we really have a choice?
The well—known Catholic author and educator, John Senior, was once giving a talk to a small group of adults about this very idea of escaping from the excesses of a civilization worn thin with technology. While he was saying something to the effect that "real swimming" is done in the ocean or lakes — or more modestly in the "old swimmin’ hole" — an old-timer who was among the listeners brought forth the objection that "we used to lose a few in the ‘swimmin’ hole…'". Looking the man squarely in the eye, Senior replied, "Yes, but we are losing all of them in the swimming pool."
Monastic life does not hold the key to unlock all of the world’s problems, but a serious reading of the Rule of Saint Benedict can be an inspiration, not only for monks, but also for those living outside the monastery walls. This is especially true due to its precious sense of balance, organizing things around the poles of prayer and work. It is our hope that Our Lady of Clear Creek Monastery, by living from the Rule, can help many to recapture the joy of a human existence rooted in faith – and the non-so-common realism of common sense.
May Our Lady of the Annunciation obtain for you an abundance of heavenly blessings. Posted by Richard Aleman Friday, March 13, 2009
Distributists and the Draft Lately Rahm Emmanuel made some waves by repeating the oft-proposed suggestion of reinstating an active draft. I've often thought about this topic, and for a long time I was in favor of the draft. Two to four years of service required of every able-bodied man for the defense of his country. Who could object to such a benign proposal? Who could possibly oppose serving one's country?
You see, as I think I've mentioned before, I come from a long, long line of military folk. Longer than history records, most likely. The earliest military man in my family that I'm familiar with (my grandfather has it back to Hastings) is Edward "Redsleeves" Goodman, who fought with Henry VII at Bosworth Field, and received a beautiful coat of arms for his valor and service. My people have fought in every single declared American war, and few others besides. One of my ancestors was killed at the battle at Hayes Station in our American revolution (after the battle, actually, cruelly and quite illegally executed by a British officer, by the sword). Another fought in the war of 1812; another fought in that cruel war in which Texas was stolen from the Mexicans. My great-great grandfather, Samuel Goodman, served in the Texas cavalry during the American civil war. My great-grandfather, Charles Goodman, served as a medic in World War I, bravely saving many lives, even to the point of swallowing some of the dreaded mustard gas, which caused him health problems for the rest of his days. My father's father served bravely through the Korean and Vietnam conflicts (he did twenty-one years and was in his last year of service in Vietnam; I'm not that young), even being slightly wounded while attempted to assist another wounded soldier. (He did not request a purple heart, as he felt this was not really a battle wound.) My mother's father had a scholarship to go to college in 1940; instead, knowing that war was coming, he joined what was then the U.S. Army Air Corps and flew countless missions over Europe. Three times he was shot down; twice he was shot down over water; one of those times he was the only member of his crew to be pulled from the Channel alive. The third time was over France; he managed to find the French underground, which successfully smuggled him back to England, where he hopped directly back into a plane and started flying missions again. My own brother has served in Iraq with the Marines.
So my people are intimately acquainted with the duties and responsibilities of military service in defense of their country. Few families could be more so. And we know that it is hell.
William Tecumseh Sherman, of course, who has the negative distinction of being one of the more brutal generals of our history, uttered those famous words:
You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.
Coming from a man like Sherman, this means a lot. War is terrible, a horrible curse on a country. War takes the bravest, the youngest, the strongest, and throws them into a literal meat-grinder. It leaves homes empty, fields untended, shops unkept, wives without husbands, and children fatherless. Even those who return are scarred forever. War is the destroyer of worlds.
And here I refer only to a just war, and one in which the laws of civilized warfare are obeyed. Such wars are rarely fought in our sad times. In these enlightened days, wars kill not only brave men, who put their frail bodies between their homes and the war's desolation; it kills our women and children, destroys our fields and our factories, and wreaks havoc on everything throughout the land. Even the just war, about whose permissibility there can be no legitimate question, is a monumental tragedy, a scourge upon any land; the unjust war is unspeakably terrible, a horror which defies mortal description. War is, truly and without ambiguity, the destroyer of worlds.
Mars always rode into battle on a chariot pulled by Timor (Phobos) and Metus (Deimos). Few images could be more terrifying, more suitable for the inhuman bloodbath that is even the most just of wars: terrible, bloody War, riding to the slaughter pulled by Fear and Dread. The people that forgets this, that trivializes the horror that is war, will brutalize their country and ultimately lose their humanity. That's what happened to Europe in the early twentieth century; that's what's happened in America before; God help us, it may yet happen here again.
The draft is a means of keeping a large standing army for purposes of warfare. We've used it many times in America; both North and South had a draft in our civil war, and we had a draft in World War I. Starting in 1940, however, we had the first-ever peacetime draft, which lasted through peace and war until 1975, and then from 1980 to the present day, though no one has actually been forcibly inducted into the military since 1975. Our Supreme Court has declared it constitutional. But is the draft moral, in peace and in war? What is a distributist to think of this idea?
War in general is even more harmful for the distributist society than for a capitalist one. In a distributist society, most citizens are owners of their own productive property, and themselves care for their own property. Fields and shops require constant care and maintenance; leaving them for any extended period is an extremely important decision that will not be made lightly. The farmer will not leave his fields for anything other than the direst causes; the well-being of his property, and thus of his family which depends upon it, is at stake.
For example, among the most distributist societies in modern history, the Vendée in France, began its revolt against the French Revolution precisely because Paris had passed a universal conscription program. The Vendéens couldn't send their young men to the army; they needed their young men at home, in the fields and the shops. Spreading the revolution was not worth leaving their property; but to defend their right to remain at their property until they determined the cause was dire enough, they would (and did) fight to the death.
Universal conscription requires that every young man (and, by most proposals in our degraded times, young women as well) to leave their homes and their property for two to four years to serve in the military. This will probably, given our current quagmires and all the proposed future ones, involve serving in war. The distributist should not support this.
First, as discussed above, war is terrible. Universal conscription serves only one purpose: keeping a large army ready to make it easier to fight wars. The easier it is to fight them, the more often they will be fought. While Switzerland, wealthy and cuddled by the forbidding Alps, has remained peaceful, history shows that nations with universal conscription are nations with frequent and larger wars. Wars in Europe, for example, only became universally destructive after universal conscription made them so. Given how destructive war is by nature, and how even more destructive it is to a civilized society, any policy which makes wars easier to fight ought to be opposed.
Second, the distributist wants families to be economically self-sufficient and spiritually strong; universal conscription makes that impossible. Economic self-sufficiency depends upon the head of the household being available to care for the family's productive property, and often it depends on the assistance of the head of household's older children, particularly his sons. Conscription will take away the head of household when he is young and most needed to establish his property; it will then take his sons when he is older and most needs them to help prepare that property to be passed down to their care. Then again, conscription takes the head of household when he is young, and his wife most needs his support, and his children, if he yet has any, are young and need their father as an example of just and loving rule; it then takes his sons when they are just coming into manhood, just starting families of their own, when they most need to be close to their father, who can show them the way. Universal conscription thus strikes at the very heart of the distributist agenda: it renders the self-sufficient and spiritually strong family exponentially more difficult to achieve. The distributist should not support it for this reason.
Should the distributist oppose all conscription? Certainly not. It is every man's honor and duty to defend his homeland when it is under threat, and conscription is an easy and effective way to ensure that, when needed, citizens can be brought together for that defense. If I believed that America were under an imminent threat, I'd race you to the recruitment office, and I have a wife and children I could easily use as an excuse to stay home if I wanted. Despite all of war's horror, there is honor and good in killing and dying in defense of hearth and home; distributism is most emphatically not pacifism. But it is not every man's duty to abandon his home, his family, and his property when his service is not needed for a just war.
But in today's modern wars, citizens simply aren't prepared to fight without training, and without peacetime conscription how can that training be provided? Imminent threats seldom leave time for extensive military training, after all. There are many ways, however, to prepare citizens for that sad necessity, the most reasonable being the weekend method. From the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, for example, the heyday of the Anglo-Welsh longbow, English law required all able-bodied Englishmen and Welshmen to practice with the longbow for two hours every Sunday after Mass, to ensure a citizenry prepared for war should they be required. Such longbowmen proved to be the most effective military units in Europe.
Longbows are, of course, weapons of the past, but the principle holds true. Young men, upon reaching a certain age, are trained in the weapons and equipment of warfare near their own homes. Such methods provide a citizenry trained in the weapons of war, ready to fight should their fighting be needed, but does not tear young men away from their family and friends during some of their most formative years. It better respects the principle of subsidiarity, providing more localized training for more localized units, familiar with the tactics and weapons which are appropriate for those particular areas. And finally, it trains soldiers to fight knowing that they are fighting only for what is nearest and dearest to them: their homes, their families, and their property. A distributist solution, indeed.
As distributists, I suggest we all oppose efforts at universal conscription, and instead support a "national guard" on this model. Going hand-in-hand with our opposition to all wars which do not unambiguously meet the requirements of Catholic just war theory, distributists can offer something true and practical to our society on this point as on so many others.
Praise be to Christ the King!
Note: This is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Posted by Donald Goodman
The American businessman was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.
The Mexican replied only a little while. The American then asked why didn't he stay out longer and catch more fish?
The Mexican said he had enough to support his family's immediate needs. The American then asked, "But what do you do with the rest of your time?"
The Mexican fisherman said, "I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos, I have a full and busy life, señor."
The American scoffed, "I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds buy a bigger boat with the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing and distribution.
"You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually NYC where you will run your expanding enterprise."
The Mexican fisherman asked, "But señor, how long will this all take?" To which the American replied, "15-20 years."
"But what then, señor?"
The American laughed and said that's the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions.
"Millions, señor? Then what?"
The American said, "Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos."
The Pleasures of eating by Wendell Berry (with excerpts)
..When food, in the minds of eaters, is no longer associated with farming and with the land, the eaters suffer a kind of cultural amnesia that is misleading and dangerous.Like industrial sex, industrial eating has become a degraded, poor, and paltry thing. Our kitchens and other eating places more and more resemble filling stations, as our homes more and more resemble motels.“Life is not very interesting,” we seem to have decided. “Let its satisfactions be minimal, perfunctory, and fast.”We hurry through our meals to go to work and hurry through our work in order to “recreate” ourselves in the evenings and on weekends. And all this is carried out in a remarkable obliviousness to the causes and effects, the possibilities and the purposes, of the life of the body in this world….The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared food, confronts inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived….
An Interview With Thomas Storck We are honored for the opportunity to interview author and distributist, Thomas Storck. Mr. Storck has written articles in many prestigious publications. He is the author of The Catholic Milieu, Foundations of a Catholic Political Order, and is on the Editorial Board of the Chesterton Review.
Mr. Storck will represent The Society for Distributism at this year's "Catholicism and Economics" conference.
TDR: Mr. Storck, I would like to start this interview asking a question about your book The Catholic Milieu (Christendom Press). The book is a treatment on the topic of Catholic culture. In particular, economics and technology act as integral components of it. How can they, as you mention in your book, take advantage of our fallen nature?
Thomas Storck: The fundamental difficulties that are apt to arise from both economics and technology, as you suggest, stem from man's fallen nature. Because of the Fall we are all too apt to be greedy, lazy, proud and all the other vices. Thus instead of using the economic system as a means of providing ourselves with necessary quality goods and services, we can use it for the production of useless and even harmful goods, for mere financial speculation with the aim of getting rich as quickly and effortlessly as possible, and for exploiting our fellow man. But surely that's not the reason God created us with the need for external goods and the capacity to make and use them. No, this is as much a misuse of an economy as contraception is a misuse of sex. Everything has to be subordinated to the purpose of right living, and that in turn is subordinated to the attainment of eternal life in Heaven.
With technology it's a similar matter. Without some kinds of tools and machines we would live a pretty impoverished life. Man naturally wants to create necessary tools for himself. But the phrase "appropriate technology," which has been popular since the 1970s, I think, is a good term for expressing what should be our relationship with our devices and inventions. Technology should serve mankind. I know that this is a truism, but I'm afraid it's a truism that is repeated more often than understood. Technology, like everything else in life, has to serve man's life in its totality. Thus just because we can invent some device or process that allows us to do something more quickly or cheaply doesn't mean that that device or process really serves human life as a whole. The narrow bit of good that a machine might do has to be weighed against its bad effects, on both the social and physical environment. Many think the automobile, for example, has contributed toward the destruction not only of the physical environment, but more importantly of our social environment, by loosening family and community ties, killing off local shops and businesses, all of which in turn gives rise to many other social and economic problems.
And when we built huge factories that spewed out chemicals we didn't think about whether this ultimately might be harmful to the world which is our home. But right now we have the problem of our water full of so much pollution that many kinds of fish are either inedible because of poison or at least suspect to eat. Interestingly, Christopher Dawson, the great English Catholic historian and sociologist, warned in the early 1920s about water and air pollution, long before it was taken up as a popular secular concern.
Because man is prone to be greedy and lazy, we very often take the path of least resistance. It's easy to say that technology is neutral, it's all a matter of how it's used. But that's not quite true. Given our fallen natures, if we have something at hand, we're apt to use it. In theory, for example, television could be used responsibly and in moderation, but it's so easy just to turn it on and veg out, as they say, sitting mindlessly flipping channels.
Moreover, some inventions, such as the automobile, have transformed the way we organize our lives. We design our cities around them, we separate our work from our homes. Even if we used cars only in moderation, we would still need most of the gigantic infrastructure of highways, parking lots, used car lots, junk yards, that don't exactly beautify our country. Medieval European cities have great charm precisely because they were built on a human scale and most often with an eye for beauty. Most modern cities were built with neither in mind. But surely if our technology is to serve human life in its totality, not simply make some one process faster or cheaper, then we have to evaluate technology on wider criteria than we're accustomed to.
TDR: The work of English writer R.H. Tawney left a lasting impression on you. Who is he and what were the consequences of your study of his work?
Thomas Storck: Richard Tawney was an English economic historian and social theorist who lived from 1880 to 1962. I discovered him in high school, chancing upon two of his books in a bookstore, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism and The Acquisitive Society. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism is his most famous book, and is basically a history of late medieval and early modern economic thought, especially in England. Tawney was an Anglican, not a Catholic, but he seems to have been a sincere Christian.
Tawney was important in my own life because he showed me that the Catholic Church had a doctrine about social morality that included economics, and that economic activity could not be separated from morality. His thinking is pretty much in line with Catholic social teaching and parallels the thinking of the best Catholic commentators and interpreters, such as Amintore Fanfani, Christopher Dawson, Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, Heinrich Pesch, John A. Ryan, John F. Cronin and many others.
Tawney shows the relationship between early Protestantism and capitalism. This relationship was complex. Luther and Calvin were by no means friendly to most of the new economic ideas and spirit that was already about a hundred years old by then. But Protestant ideas nevertheless ended up giving capitalism a huge boost, at first mostly indirectly it is true, but nevertheless crucially. The kind of mind produced by Protestantism, especially Calvinism, fit in very well with the spirit of capitalism, with its desires and aspirations. This has been noted by other writers, including Dawson and most famously Max Weber in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
TDR: The increased interest in Distributism is bringing together disenchanted disciples from the left and the right who are looking for alternatives. Social reformer Msgr. John A. Ryan argued against labels like “liberal” or “conservative.” He didn’t believe it was necessary “to be tagged with either designation.” Do you believe our political markers should inform our economic and social perspectives?
Thomas Storck: Well, I'm certainly against our current use of liberal and conservative, and I've written more than once about those confusing and harmful terms. Certainly what you call "our political markers" ought to be related to our economic and social ideas, but first we need better political designations.
I have several fundamental objections to the words liberal and conservative as we use them today in the United States. First, both the liberal and the conservative positions are a hodgepodge of conflicting viewpoints, with no internal philosophical consistency. For example, why should it be considered conservative to be against abortion and likewise conservative to be against labor unions or in favor of the war in Iraq? What relation do these positions have with one another? I would even argue that they're opposed to one another. If we see, for example, that state action is necessary to protect the defenseless unborn, why should there not be action to protect the poor and the worker from those trying to exploit them? The Catholic Church, of course, in her social doctrine has always linked positions in such a way that she is neither conservative nor liberal. She might seem very conservative on some issues and very liberal on others. But that's because the Church is consistent and her social morality flows logically out of her doctrine about man and society.
But our categories of liberal and conservative are basically accidental conglomerations of viewpoints. In the 1940s, for example, it was the Republican party that was championing a constitutional amendment for so-called equal rights for women, and Democrats and unions were generally opposed because they saw such an amendment as an attack on the working man by the rich, an attempt to lower wages. But around 1970 much of this began to change and the Republicans emerged as the self-professed upholders of what we call traditional morality, while the Democrats more or less embraced the feminist critique of sex and the family. But in each case it was an uneasy alliance, since capitalism and market society are probably the greatest means of undermining the family, and yet the Republican party claims to support both market society and the family. On the other hand, the Democrats profess to support organized labor and the working man, and yet these workers are often quite opposed to the feminist and homosexual critique of Christian sexual morality. That's why we had the so-called "Reagan Democrats," workers who voted Republican because of the takeover of the Democratic party by feminists and homosexuals.
When you look at some of the examples which are often taken as representing either right or left, you see big contradictions with our understanding of those terms. For example, the Fascist and quasi-Fascist parties of the 1930s in Europe are always classed on the extreme right. Yet their economic policies often had more in common with socialism than with any free-market sort of capitalism. And before the late 1960s the Swedish socialist party held a pro-family position which championed wives and mothers staying at home and concentrating on raising their children. All these conflicting views cannot be placed on a simple left/right spectrum.
Much of the liberal/conservative debate presupposes a Lockean state, that is, society organized according to the ideas of John Locke, who saw the purpose of society as simply the acquisition of material goods. Government in Locke's view has nothing to do with honoring God or promoting the religious and moral welfare of citizens.
Pope Leo XIII, in a series of encyclicals in the late nineteenth-century, encyclicals such as Libertas, Immortale Dei and Sapientia Christiana discussed the foundation of the State, and stressed that the State had a concern with more than man's material needs. In fact, man organized as a State had duties toward God, including the duty of worship. This doctrine was in the tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas and even in that of such pagans as Plato, Aristotle and Cicero, who could not have conceived that men organized into political communities would somehow officially ignore supernatural realities. It's absurd, when you think about it, that a family, for example, would make sure to worship God and inculcate duty to God to their own children, yet when those same parents join with other parents to organize a State, they would act as if God did not exist or as if it didn't matter what religion we have. If God exists and if he has revealed how he wishes to be worshipped, then it's as necessary for the State as for the family to conform to those duties toward God.
TDR: Ryan’s books should be required reading, specifically The Living Wage and Distributive Justice. Why do we speak of justice in the marketplace? Isn’t charity the optimum avenue for achieving it?
Thomas Storck: Pope Pius XI, who reigned from 1922 to 1939, wrote much on social justice and other themes of Catholic social teaching. He explained that charity, while vitally important in creating bonds between citizens in any society, can nevertheless not be a substitute for justice. "Charity cannot take the place of justice unfairly withheld," he wrote in Quadragesimo Anno. If workers are denied the living wage that is due to them in justice, charity cannot make up for that debt of justice. The lack of interest in justice on the part of many Catholics today is astounding. In part it stems from ignorance, in part from an identification on the part of so many not with Catholic orthodoxy, but with conservative ideology. Of course, there are other Catholics whose primary identity lies in liberal ideology. Often these Catholics say a lot about justice, but for them it's just as likely to be moral error or heresy, such as claiming that women have the right to be ordained or that same-sex couples have the right to contract a marriage. When we make any secular ideology the center of our thought we move away from Catholic orthodoxy, which is the only sure touchstone of reality that we have.
TDR: If we follow the evidence, most of us would say the theories of “economic growth” (among others) lead back to the 18th century’s Adam Smith. Yet, an acquaintance of mine suggests looking further, to philosopher David Hume’s influence on Smith. What are your thoughts on the development of financial expansion and the results of so-called “worldwide prosperity”?
Thomas Storck: In José María Gironella's novel, The Cypresses Believe in God, a venerable professor of law remarks that if they begin a discussion of the origin of the usurpation of government by force this might lead back to the murder of Abel by his brother, Cain. "You are mistaken, sir," remarks one his students. "It would lead back to the revolt of the angels." So it's hard to know where to begin tracing the genealogy of an idea.
It has been argued by some, including Richard Weaver, that the intellectual origins of modernity can be traced to the nominalist philosophers of the late Middle Ages. I think this is probably true. But I think that the proximate intellectual cause of the new commercial society which was coming into being in the eighteenth century, and which Adam Smith and others gave the intellectual framework for, can be found in John Locke. Locke was earlier than Hume, and as I remarked a little while ago, Locke rigidly separated government from any real interest in religion, in God. Under Locke, religion must always be a private and ultimately trivial affair, for it concerns only the individual and perhaps the family, but not real affairs of state, matters of importance. Of course, I would not deny that Hume played a part in this, as did many other writers of that era.
But what we have to understand is that an utterly new conception of social life came into being. Instead of seeing mankind as brothers headed toward eternity, and seeing Christian men as brothers in the Mystical Body, and all their other practices, whether of economics or whatever, as needing to be subordinated to our eternal destiny, the so-called Enlightenment began to see human beings as so many competing individuals and society as a place where their competing interests would be worked out according to quasi-mechanical rules. The consequences of this are enormous. Karl Polanyi's book, The Great Transformation, is essential reading for understanding what happened, as is Tawney's book that I mentioned earlier. Max Weber is also very good, although he was not a Christian believer. Christopher Dawson likewise has much good material on this point, some scattered in his essays. Dawson's "Catholicism and the Bourgeois Mind" is as good an introduction to this whole topic as any.
TDR: As the result of an expanding government, many Christians are turning to the Austrian school of economics for answers. I want to ask your thoughts on that, and then focus on Friedrich von Hayek. Altruism is absent in his thinking, as self-interest is the pivotal agent in the execution of all economic transactions. From this behavior there arises a spontaneous social order. Is this acceptable from a Catholic point of view?
Thomas Storck: From the standpoint of sane and realistic economic thinking, Austrian economics is simply a variety of the same kind of economic thinking that produced the current neoclassical synthesis. Such thinking is not grounded in reality. It looks on the economy as largely a self-regulating machine, whereas in fact, it is relations of power, and the existence and shape of various institutions and customs, that primarily determine economic outcomes, e.g., how high wages are or what profits corporations will receive or what CEO salaries will be. If you look at papal encyclicals, you will see an understanding of how an economy works that is very different from that of most of our economists. This is particularly clear in the encyclicals of popes Leo XIII and Pius XI. They understood that the rich oppressed the poor and the poor needed aid, either from government or from their own collective efforts or both, to protect themselves from exploitation. The notion that wages, for example, are primarily determined by the law of supply and demand is utterly foreign to Catholic thinking as contained in the papal social encyclicals.
In order to highlight the contrast between these two approaches, let me take Paul Samuelson, author of an economics text that has been used continuously since 1948 and has been translated into numerous languages. In fact, it's probably the most widely-used economics textbook in the world. He writes that "Wages are really only the price of labor; rents are similarly the price for using land. Moreover, the prices of factors of production are primarily set by the interaction between supply and demand for different factors - just as the prices of goods are largely determined by the supply and demand for goods."
But the social teaching of the Church has a different understanding of this. For example, Pope Leo wrote in Rerum Novarum (1891) that a worker who receives less than a living wage "because an employer or contractor will give him no better...is the victim of force and injustice." Leo XIII understood that in economic relations human freedom, and thus the abuse of human freedom which allows for injustices, has plenty of room to act. The economy is not some self-regulating machine in which prices and wages are determined solely by mechanical laws of supply and demand. Market forces are real, certainly, but they are never the only factor in determining economic outcomes, and often not even the most important. But when one group of men has power over another group, very often the first group will abuse that power. Thus there is always the possibility of injustice among sinful men.
TDR: Mr. Storck, if we could shift gears for a moment to the topic of liberty. John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle” has influenced this nation, which is still wrestling with a profound belief in the sovereignty of the individual. As a result, we toss around the term “liberty” capriciously. You, on the other hand, summon it cautiously, and insist it cannot be placed as the highest objective for human existence. Isn’t liberty the cornerstone of a just society?
Thomas Storck: Leo XIII gave the most profound analysis of this entire question in his encyclical, Libertas. Liberty on the one hand is inseparable from a rational creature. No one can take away my free will, except perhaps by drugging me. Political freedom, the freedom from restraint by political authorities, while obviously a good, for we don't want adults treated as if they were children or led around by their noses and fed like animals in the zoo, must have limits. And I see no reason to think that such liberty is the most important or the highest thing in a political community. It seems to me that justice must hold that place. I have no legitimate liberty to do anything contrary to justice or to the common good. And this includes not just commutative justice, but distributive justice and social justice. The distinctions between these kinds of justice, as well as what is called legal justice, are important parts of the Catholic intellectual tradition, though they hardly figure at all in Anglo-American political thought. Many people think social justice involves working in a soup kitchen or collecting clothes for the homeless. Those are acts of charity, admirable acts to be sure. But they are not acts of social justice.
TDR: In one of your articles, you contrast Lockean political philosophy with Catholic tradition. The former restricts government attention to man’s property and freedom, while the latter defines the state as a “natural institution” with “care for man's moral development” as you put it. How can Distributism (or any system) foster virtue while limiting government coercion?
Thomas Storck: Clearly man is a creature with his feet in two worlds, as it were. Our souls are spiritual, our bodies corporeal. We share something with the angels, but much with the other animals too. We should never forget that we are rational animals, and both parts of this traditional definition are equally important. To overemphasize one of the parts of this definition always has bad results for human life, both individual and social. Now, if we admit that we have an eternal destiny beyond this earth, it seems silly for us, when we establish governments, or any other sort of human society for that matter, to pretend as if life beyond the grave did not exist or was only a private matter. That is my fundamental objection to Locke and his political philosophy. He would have government, the state, which both Aristotle and St. Thomas call a perfect community, ignore what was most important about us.
Now you ask, how can distributism foster moral virtue. No earthly system can guarantee virtue. But we ought to frame all our systems so that they contribute as much as they legitimately can to our attainment of eternal life. At least we do not want them to be an occasion of sin. My contention is that capitalism, by fostering greed, unnecessary competition, concentration upon wealth, cooperates with some of the worst tendencies of our fallen nature, and as a result makes it that much harder to reach eternal life. Distributism, on the other hand, while promoting our legitimate efforts to satisfy our human temporal needs and build a good society, tends not to foster the ills of capitalism that I just mentioned. This does not mean that no one will be greedy under distributism. But it does mean that there will not be a built-in stimulus for greed, for the piling up of useless goods, for enriching oneself at the expense of others, such as there is in capitalism.
TDR: Earlier this year, you spoke about co-housing in a lecture series sponsored by the organization Building Catholic Communities. May we ask you to explain how it works for the benefit of our readers? Co-housing appears to be a potential solution given today’s housing crisis, wouldn’t you say?
Thomas Storck: The Cohousing Association of the United States defines cohousing in this way: "Cohousing is a type of collaborative housing in which residents actively participate in the design and operation of their own neighborhoods. Cohousing residents are consciously committed to living as a community. The physical design encourages both social contact and individual space." This is certainly one legitimate way of approaching mankind's need for shelter. It needn't be the only way. My wife and I live in a housing cooperative, which has a few of the features of cohousing, but is less intense than what I understand the typical cohousing community is. But in our housing, as well as in everything else that we make, we should remember what St. Paul said about being content with what we need.
If we have food and clothing, with these we shall be content. But those who desire to be rich fall in temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and hurtful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is the root of all evils; it is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced their hearts with many pangs" (I Tim. 6:8-10).
St. Paul doesn't mean, of course, that food and clothing are all we need and we don't need houses, medicine, books, etc. He is rather calling our attention to seeking to satisfy our genuine temporal needs and not aiming at more than those needs. Since about 1970 the average house size in the United States has been growing. I don't know if that's begun to level off or not, but for several decades the average house size was growing while the average family size was shrinking. That's not a rational approach to housing. It's certainly far from St. Paul's exhortation to be content with what satisfies our needs. So I welcome exploration of all types of housing alternatives which can satisfy our legitimate needs for shelter without fueling greed for unnecessary possessions.
Another thing that our housing arrangements can either promote or make more difficult is community. For example, in the housing cooperative in which I live, our townhouses are grouped into what are call courts. We live in a court with fourteen units, fourteen townhouses, that is. The design of the court does a lot to promote community, for generally one will know his neighbors, often see them coming and going, have occasion to talk to them, and so on. Many cohousing communities, as I understand it, are designed even more to encourage community, and some, I think, have communal meals once a week or so. The point, as I see it, is not so much whether we fulfill the exact definition of cohousing, but whether we try to make the way we live, including the physical design of our living spaces, an aid for promoting genuine human goods, and as a result something that will help promote the ultimate human good, gaining eternal life.
TDR: We've heard supporters of capitalism claim John Paul II's encyclical Centesimus Annus unambiguously supported the capitalist position. What would you say to those who make this assertion?
Thomas Storck: I've dealt with that at some length in an article called "What Does Centesimus Annus Really Teach?" published in The Catholic Faith magazine in the May/June 2001 issue and I refer you to that.
TDR: On April 4th, you will participate in a debate on Long Island, New York. Michael Novak and Dr. Charles Clark will join you and respectively present the capitalist and socialist positions, while you represent the distributist. What do you hope will be the fruit of this event?
Thomas Storck: The debate on April 4th at Nassau Community College is probably the biggest distributive event in this country in years. As such, it's an opportunity to make distributism better known. Now, for the most part, people think that we have to choose between either capitalism or socialism, neither of which they even understand well. But I hope that distributism will begin to be seen as a legitimate alternative to both of those systems, and an alternative that avoids the bad features of both. Posted by Richard Aleman at http://distributism.blogspot.com/2009/01/interview-with-thomas-storck.html
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ertainly in the short term, or even the long term, I would not support the repeal of Roe v. Wade which would then force X number of women in America to undergo illegal and dangerous operations.' I the same interview, McCain stated he would not have a 'litmus test' for judicial nominees. McCain's former senate colleague, Rick Santorum, an indefatigable champion of the unborn, has stated that McCain did his best behind the scenes to prevent pro-life legislation from coming to a vote on the floor. Robert Novak has reported that McCain has described Justice Samuel Alito as 'too conservative.' Novak has also reminded his readers that, back when Vermont Republican Jim Jeffords became an independent and began to caucus with the Democrats, McCain was in negotiations with the Senate Democr 
state Chairman of the Constitution Party of NC and current Member-at-Large. He is a Distributist, controversialist and all around fun loving guy that dreams someday of self employment.
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