A sort of Agrarian Manifesto. What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 2. Distributism

Much of this, indeed the lion's share, could be fixed by reordering the economy to be Distributist.


That may seem extreme, but then, in the modern world, this is extreme, and frankly, we're in an extreme situation that we need to find a way out of or events of one kind or another will take us out of them for us.  

To be more extreme, we'd note what Cardinal Sarah has above, once again, the barbarians are alrady inside the city.

I've started off with agrarianism, and I mean it, but I'd also note that an aspect of agrarianism is distributism. All agraraians are distributists, not all distributist are agrarians.  We'll start with distributism.  

What the hecks is it, anyway.  We'll, we'll turn to an old Lex Anteinternet post, where we discussed that (we just bumped that post up here).






A Distributist economy, therefore, would discourage, or perhaps even prohibit, the concentration of the means of retail distribution in the hands of corporations in favor of family or individual enterprises.  So, rather than have a Walmart, you'd have a family owned appliance store, a family owned clothing store, a family owned grocery store, etc.  That's a pretty simple illustration the retail end of the economy, but that's a major aspect of Distributism. Distributism also has an agricultural aspect to it that's frankly agrarian, although agrarianism predates Distributism.  What that means is that farms would be owned and operated by the actual farmer.  That sounds simplistic but it stands contrary to much of what we see today, with agricultural land held by absentee owners, or by the wealthy who do not work it, or by agricultural corporations.


In short, Distributism favors the smallest economic unit possible.  And it does this on a philosophical basis, that being that small freeholders, or small businessmen, or small artisans, should hold the reins of the economy, as that concentrates wealth in their hands, those being middle class hands.  By doing that, that makes much of the middle class more or less economically independent, but not wealthy, stabilizes wealthy in the hands of the largest number of people, and strengthens the ability of the people to decide things locally.  In other words, that sort of economy "distributes" economic wealth and production to the largest number of people, and accordingly "distributes" political power to the largest number of people, on the theory that this is best for the largest number of people.



So why is that important here?

Because what people don't have, is well. . . anything.  People are consumers, and servants.  They lack something of their own, and they accordingly lack stability.  Increasingly, on certain things, including economics and science, they lack education.

And, like the ignorant and have-nots tend to be, they're unhappy and made.

The unhappy and mad masses always make for ignorant revolutions, whether it be the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, or the revolutionary period of the Weimar Republic that concluded with the Nazis coming to power.  Not having anything, they're willing to try something, whether that something be Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, or Donald Trump.

It was Jefferson who noted that republics were grounded in yeomen farmers, for the reason that they were independent men.  Through Corporate Capitalism, we've been working on destroying the yeomanry for quite some time now.

The failure of people to have their own has been significant in creating the crisis that we face today.  People who worked for other entities, and that's most people, find themselves either adrift without them or slaves to them.  People live where they don't want to at jobs and careers they don't want to, in conditions they don't want to, even if they do not fully realize it, as their corporate masters compel them to.  It gets worse, all the time, and people are powerless against it.

Indeed, not only are they powerless, but they can be compelled to act against their own best interests, and often do.  People who love one thing as their true selves, will work to destroy the ability to do it for their corporate masters.  You don't have to look much beyond the Wyoming legislature to see this, where some advocate policies that would deprive average Wyomingites to access to public lands, for example, something that only serves the interest of the wealthy.

 What does a Distributist Economy look like?












Banks, as concentrations of economic maladies, usually only develop real problems when they are largely unregulated. When the old school Distributist formed their thoughts on the matter, that was the case. And the recent banking problems the United States has had largely flowed from the concept that regulation of banks was passe, followed by an actual effort on the part of the government to encourage banks in areas that they shouldn't go.  An overarching aspect of all of this is that an old policy of encouraging home ownership via home loans is a remaining nonsensical central American governmental goal that creates problems in and of itself.  Finally, the consolidation of banking into larger and larger remotely owned banks contributes to the problem. There still are locally owned or regionally owned banks, but not nearly as many as there once was.



Large banking has given us credit cards, an aspect of the economy wholly unknown to the original Distributist.  Of course ,they were unknown to earlier Capitalist as well, and have just sort of occurred. This too may be an area where the ship has sailed, but on the other hand, it would be one that I'd have a hard time imagining modern Distributist avoiding.  But how that would be handled in the new economy, which only saw the introduction of widespread use of credit cards starting in the 1970s, is an open question.  Credit cards now make up a huge percentage of the "money" in our economy, and they are interesting an huge unregulated sector, to a significant degree.  That is ,the percentage of interest they charge are regulated, but the creation of them is not.  It's been an amazing change in the economy.


It's an interesting topic, but one that I won't be able to address fully, which is one of the problems when discussing a modern Distributist economy (we'll get to problems in a minute). As there's been no real development of the theory in decades, and as it's never been fully implemented anywhere, some of these topics need to be completely re-thought by Distributists.

Among those topics are topics like insurance.  Americans like to complain about insurance, but by and large the insurance industry is amazingly capable and it really can't be done efficiently on a local level.  This is true of all types of insurance, to include most particularly liability insurance, which people don't think about much but which is particularly important to the economy.  Indeed, topics like banking and insurance do indeed suggest that a Distributist economy might be a bad idea.



How Distributist would handle this aspect of their economic theory is an interesting question, and I don't know the answer.  Some would borrow from Socialist examples, all of which are problematic.  Some might borrow from Theodore Roosevelt's progressive era suggestion and require public ownership of a certain percentage of large corporations, to give a voice in their affairs.  Some might restrict organizing in the corporate forum until a business reached a certain size.  All in all, I don't know how this topic would be approached.  It might be approached in the same way that modern Socialism tends to approach it, which is basically not to except by regulation and taxation, which really takes a person outside of the context of the theory in general and into something else.  What is clear is that in this area the example of Corporate Capitalism would have to largely suffice for Distributist as well.




















Before going on to Distributism, which is actually a species of capitalism, I'll note the same for Socialism. Socialism in its classic form is pretty easy to grasp, thesis wise.  Socialist argue that capitalism creates an unequal distribution of wealth favoring the owners of the means of production over the actual producers, and the solution to this is to have the state be the owner and distribute back to the worker.  As Socialism fails pretty badly in the execution, modern Socialist by and large don't actually advocate that, however, and instead focus on social activism and engineering, thereby taking themselves quite some distance from their economic theorist origins.  Indeed, many Socialist now appear to actually be some sort of capitalist, but of the state intervention variety.  The interesting thing about that is that it takes them in the direction of the "managed economy", which is basically what most western nations had, including the United States, from about 1932 through about 1980, when corporate capitalism reasserted itself.

Socialism was a reaction to early laissez faire capitalism, which was really early Corporate Capitalism.  It's undoubtedly the case that early industrialization lead to a very unequal distribution of wealth, but taking the long view, any early Capitalist economic enterprise does that.  Sure, factory owners of the 19th Century were vastly wealthy and their workers on the edge of poverty, but then the creators of electronic and internet based enterprises have become vastly wealthy in our modern age as well.  This is not to say that things were not unfair on the factory floor, but often missed in that story is that those jobs attracted a steady stream of applicants in any event, indicating that they were better than whatever they were fleeing from, which was probably rural poverty for those who did not own their own land.  At any rate, Socialism was an attempt, and a radical one, to address the ills of Corporate Capitalism of its day.  Ironically, Socialism in its real forms turned out to be worse, and the antidote to that nearly everywhere was Corporate Capitalism to at least some degree, often with a fair amount of state management in the old Communist countries.  










It would matter, if it does, because the net effect would be to push down the economy to a much more local and personal level.  To be blunt, is it better to have really cheap prices, but remote ownership, and lower wages (Corporate Capitalism) vs. higher prices and locally owned self sustaining middle class business (Distributism)?  That's pretty much what it boils down to.  Under a Distributism model, assuming that it would actually work, there'd be fewer very rich people and more middle class business owners. But even being in the middle class would be probably at least somewhat more expensive than it current is, and it'd be more the middle class of fifty years ago, which most people in the middle class were in the middle, or bottom, of the middle class back, with few in the upper areas of it.  Now, quite a few in the middle class are upper middle class, and of course we have more super wealthy than every before.  So, by getting more in the middle, on both ends, we take some out of the bottom and some out of the top.

Some would argue that the depression of economic classes from the upper end down, while taking the bottom and bringing it up, was a good collateral byproduct from a social point of view, although that really takes us out of economics, and Distributist economics, into something else.  Certainly bringing the bottom up undoubtedly has it merits, and is the point of any economic theory really.  Depressing the top down is another matter when it extends into the middle class, and very few in our economy would openly admit that. Even modern Socialist always claim to be acting on behalf of the Middle Class, when formerly they would have condemned as being bourgeois.  The arguments on that would vary, but basically it would be that there's something bad about having too much wealth in an economy, which again really gets beyond economics and into social theory. That's a problematic theory, but it is interesting to note that wealthy societies do tend to become effete. 



Well, one reason may be in that in the long history of Corporate Capitalism it seemingly goes through stages over time where it truly does concentrate vast wealth into the hands of very few, with bad results for almost everyone else.  The mid 19th Century history of Corporate Capitalism heavily featured that, which as we know gave rise to Communism and hardcore radical Socialism.  In the US, it gave rise to Progressiveness, a movement that flirted with Socialist ideas (and which flirted with some Distributist ones).  The ills of the mid 19th Century ended up being addressed, one way or another, and in most localities that ended up with labor coming out pretty well. But in our new highly global economy that does seem to be not so much the case anymore, at least if the arguments of individuals like Thomas Piketty are to be believed.  Indeed, individuals like Piketty argue that the economy is yielding to a new type of oligarchy, at the expense of everyone except the oligarchs.


As part of that, the high state of development of Corporate Capitalism like we know have has very much worked to divest people from business. That is, localism has really suffered as a result of it.  People have little connection to the stores that provide much of their goods, and for that matter the people providing them have little connection with the people they're providing them to.  In some agricultural sectors the people owning land have next to no connection with the states where they own them.  Indeed, one of hte more amusing, and at the same time sad, aspects of modern Western ranching is that sooner or later everyone doing it is going to run across a photo in some journal of a smiling wealthy man whom the journalist writes up as a "rancher", when what he really is a hobbyist with clothing that makes him look a bit absurd to locals. But that same individual keeps those locals from actually being ranchers, as they cannot compete with him economically. All of that hurts the local, and over time people become divorced form their own localities, with negative results.

For these reasons, I suspect, we're starting to see some really serious flirting with Socialism for the first time in about thirty years, which is interesting, and scary to anyone who has any passing familiarity with the history of Socialism in actual practice.  By and large, people are doing well economically but there is something they don't like about what their seeing, maybe.  Bernie Saunders now stands a real chance of being the nominee of the Democratic Party even though he's an avowed Socialist, the first time that a Socialist has advanced in Democratic politics since the late 1940s.  While none of this may have anything to do with economic thought, as earlier noted Australia and Canada have taken slight left turns in recent parliamentary elections, and Greece took a huge left turn.  Of course, some nations, like Denmark and Hungary, have taken sharp right turns.  We can assume that all of these voters don't know what they are doing, but that's not a safe assumption.  Some state of general discontent on something seems to be lurking out there, with some pretty radical solutions in the mix here and there.

And for that reason, it's to be lamented that there aren't any Distributist candidates in any party, anywhere.  Distributism is a subtle economic theory, but it's clearly more of a realistic one than Socialism is, and yet it seems to address many of the aspects of discontent that drive people into leftist economic theories.  As with our national politics, in which everyone has to be a Republican or a Democrat, no matter what they actually think, in our economy it seems you have to be a (Corporate) Capitalist or a Social Democrat, which makes very little sense.  There's no reason to believe that these two camps are the only natural ones, and taking a look at some Distributist ideas seems to be well overdue.  It's clear that no purely Distributist economy is going to come about in our day and age, but that doesn't mean that some of the ideas do not indeed have merit.  Some should be looked at.  Indeed, that's where the disappointment in a lack of such ideas being floated, except by some theorist and seemingly the Pope, is a shame.  It isn't as if any modern country is going to wholesale adopt Distributism.  But maybe some Distributist ideas are worth seriously considering, and right now they aren't getting any air.  It would be nice if they could, particularly when we see the failed theory of Socialism getting some, amazingly.

So, what about agriculture, and this agrarian thing?

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