Distributism in a time of economic insanity.

The heavy duty, or at least heavy, premium American automobile of the golden age of American manufacturing which Trump seems to dream can be restored through tariffs.

In reality, capitalism is based on the idol of money. The lure of gain gradually destroys all social bonds. Capitalism devours itself. Little by little, the market destroys the value of work. Man becomes a piece of merchandise. He is no longer his own. The result is a new form of slavery, a system in which a large part of the population is dependent on a little caste. 

Robert Cardinal Sarah.

I don't use the term "insanity" here lightly.  Donald Trump is, I am convinced, rather dumb, obviously economically ignorant, and suffering from dementia.  That nearly half the country could vote for him is simply beyond me, but they did, and the Republican Party, which was once the party of business has fallen right into line.

I suspect Americans voted for him as they have a poor grasp of economics themselves and see it only through what they've experienced in their own live and that of their immediate predecessors.  Americans, came to view the economy sort of like Billy Joel expressed it in Allentown:

Well, we’re living here in Allentown

And they’re closing all the factories down

Out in Bethlehem they’re killing time

Filling out forms

Standing in line

Well, our fathers fought the second World War

Spent their weekends on the Jersey shore

Met our mothers in the USO

Asked them to dance

Danced with them slow

And we’re living here in Allentown

But the restlessness was handed down

And it’s getting very hard to stay

Well we’re waiting here in Allentown

For the Pennsylvania we never found

For the promises our teachers gave

If we worked hard

If we behaved

So the graduations hang on the wall

But they never really helped us at all

No they never taught us what was real

Iron and coke

Chromium Steel

And we’re waiting here in Allentown

But they’ve taken all the coal from the ground

And the union people crawled away

Every child had a pretty good shot

To get at least as far as their old man got

But something happened on the way to that place

They threw an American flag in our face

Well, I’m living here in Allentown

And it’s hard to keep a good man down

But I won’t be getting up today

 

And it’s getting very hard to stay

And we’re living here in Allentown

Problem is, a sense of economic nostalgia evolving into economic rage doesn't grasp economics at all.

1968 Oldsmobile 442.

The US didn't become an economic and manufacturing giant because of something really special in the American system or some amazing native genius.  It was the simple forces of economics that apply to corporate capitalism, combined with the Second World War, that caused it.

Largescale industry can really only be developed through capitalism or socialism.  In Europe, it was capitalism that introduced it in the form of the Industrial Revolution.  The US as a manufacturing titan came about as the Industrial Revolution came to the US late, not because we were better at it.  The arrival of industrialism in the United Kingdom and a united Germany reflected the eras in which it occurred, and it occurred there first.  Capitalism, in the end, just like socialism, seeks to serve itself, and in the case of capitalism it does it by viewing human beings as consumers, as opposed to the socialist workers, and trying to get them to consume as much as possible.  It does that by seeking to make products faster and cheaper, amongst other strategies.  Seeking efficiency products not only relentlessly advance, but manufacturing methods do as well.  But manufacturing method require massive investment of capital.  Once machines are in place, the economic incentive is to use them as long as they can be, given the investment.  This means that new start ups always have the advantage in equipment, as they are starting with newer stuff.

Added to that, industrial Europe was destroyed during World War Two to a large extent.  The Allied air forces bombed German industry into rubble.  What was left after the war was taken back to the Soviet Union if was east of the Elbe.  The Soviets themselves had suffered massive economic dislocation in of their factories, which were forcibly created in the Communist system.  Japan's industry, which was real, but not nearly as advanced as the other major combatants, had been destroyed by the United States Army Air Force.  The US, however, remained untouched and with a massive consumer demand built up due to the war and the Great Depression, US industry came roaring back and dominated the globe. . . right up until other countries could rebuilt, which very much started to show itself by the late 1960s.

One of the things nearly destroyed during the Second World War was Distributism.  Distributism really came up as a line of thought as a "third way" between Communism and Capitalism during the 1920s and the Great Depression   The tensions that came out of World War One saw the Socialist far left dramatically rise in power and take over the government of Russia, and briefly Hungary.  They vied for control of Germany, and effectively did take over Poland in a modified form.  Wars and struggles broke out in numerous places as Socialism sought to effect global change.  In opposition to it rose not only fascism, but extreme capitalism.  Distributists sought to effect a more sane and humane path.  But when the war came they, and their intellectual fellow travelers the agrarians, put aside their efforts to support the war effort, which in the West meant unleashing capitalism in aid of the war effort.  When the war ended, the economic crisis that it had brought about in Europe and the Cold War caused it to carry on, and very successfully, with Distributism being all but forgotten.

Capitalism, however, if not heavily regulated, results in the same end result as Socialism, single entity control of a machine that serves itself.  In Socialism the machine claims to serve the workers, but claims to identify itself as the workers.  In Capitalism the machine serves itself while claiming to serve "consumers".  Neither system really cares about people at all.

American capitalism, particularly after Ronald Reagan, favored unyielding corporate growth, with one corporate machine eating another.  As foreign economies rebuilt after the war, or started up after the war, corporations naturally moved manufacturing overseas, and the American government did not stop to do anything about it, believing fully in capitalism.  To a certain extent, it favored manufacturing moving overseas as it conceived as many manufacturing jobs as less than ideal, and with some reason to look upon them that way, but just as the nation had a "cheap food" policy that hurt family farmers, it had a "cheap goods" policy that hurt the domestic manufacturing sector.

It can well be argued, and it has been, that something should have been done to arrest the relocation of American manufacturing.  But in reality, that day was long ago.  It was clear in the 1970s what was occuring, but the nation, lead by a much more sober and serious group of politicians, did not elect to intervene.  Now, of course, we have Donald Trump, who doesn't seem to grasp even basic economics and who has made his money, it might be noted, in a highly anti distributist industry.

It's nearly impossible to define what Trump's economic vision is, as he probably doesn't have one.  It seems to be ruled by nostalgia and a complete failure to grasp basic economic principals.  Trump seems to look back on the econmy of his youth as a natural one, and believe that if tariffs are imposed all the old industries will come home.  A very wealthy man, he doesn't seem to care what that does in terms of imposing his tariffs all at once, and if it creates a devastating trade war, so be it.

What Trump has no interest in, however, is disrupting capitalism.  He's okay with whipping corporate entities into relocating into the US, or devastating the economy with the thesis he can make it happen, in what amounts to a type of autarky, but the basic evils of capitalism are of no interest to him.

Some closer to Trump envision something more sinister, it seems, a jump starting of an AI driving manufacturing economy.  The concept is that tariffs will not only pressure industry to relocate here, but when it does, the next stage in the relentless Industrial Revolution evolutionary cycle will occur.  Basically, baseball caps now made in Vietnam (none of them seem to be made here) will be made by robots in the US.  Human laborers in Indochina, who depend on their jobs to feed their families, will be made unemployed while factories owning robots here in the US will profit.

It's immoral.

But what of Distributism?

Some of this probably should make any distributist rethink some basic propositions, as frankly Distributism, like Trump's tariff policy, would have the impact of making some things more expensive.  Maybe many things.  But the economic impact of it would be distinctly different.

Distributism policies, as long noted here, would take the corporations out of retail and agriculture.  In agriculture, for the most part, that would not actually have a great impact on prices, save in certain instances (poultry for sure, perhaps pork).  But it would also have a levelling effect.  Virtually nobody would get fantastically wealthy in these industries, but many rank and file workers would get back up into the real middle class.  Therefore the economic impact would be levelling, more than anything else.

Manufacturing, as we've noted here before, is a much tougher nut to crack.  We've  had some suggestions in the past, but frankly the lesson of the Trump tariffs is that they may frankly be unrealistic.  We'd favor partial employee ownership of larger manufacturing entities.  We could still argue for that, but it's tough for industries like the clothing manufacturing industry, whose workers are mostly overseas.  I suppose it could still be argued for, however.  A person here, however, can't be nativist.  Economically, that is, it can't be argued that ownership in the corporation by Nguyen is any less important than Johnson, all things being equal.

It'd be pretty hard to effect, however, in countries whose economies are state run.  Again, perhaps something could have been done about that, but it would have had to start in 1975, rather than 2025.  Trump's policies, which don't fit this mold, are coming all at once, and fifty years too late. That might suggest, of course, that something could be done, but it would have to be done gradually.

If nothing else, however, Trump and his spastic policies might serve to give Distributism a little voice.  Corporate Capitalism resulted in the situation Trump seeks to address.  There's no reason to believe Corporate Capitalism is going to get us out of it.  Distributists have been warning about capitalisms long term impacts for years. Socialism has demonstrated what its were, and that's what killed it.

Perhaps the Distributist Lament can get a little more heard.

Lex Anteinternet: The worst immigration argument

Lex Anteinternet: The worst immigration argument: 

The worst immigration argument

Victory Farm Volunteers registering in Lane County. Oregon.  Lovina Wilson, farm labor assistant, routes the first three children, and that is what they are, to register during the Mobilization Day program at the Frances Willard School in Eugene. The enrollees in the photo are, left to right, facing table front row: Glenn Cash,13; Howard Cash, 11; and Don Mickelwait, 13.  This photo was taken in 1946, right after World War Two, demonstrating that wartime manpower shortages were ongoing.  This would be, quite frankly, more than a bit much today, as these individuals are way to young to seriously work on a farm, unless they are working on their family farm, and they were frankly way too young then.  Note the boys are wearing white t-shirts, with nothing emblazoned on them, and that girls are in the crowd as well.

There are a lot of varieties of this argument I keep seeing:

If you’re out here talking sht about immigrants but still going to the grocery store to feed yourself, that’s clown sht of the highest order. 

Stop being lazy & get your hands in the dirt or shut the fck up.

From, of course, Twitter.

This is baloney.

To distill the argument, it is that the US must dare not get control of its border with Mexico, or at least not a fair degree of control, as the US is dependent upon those illegally crossiong for food production.

That argument is first and foremost baloney, as it somehow makes the assumption that the huge number of immigrants arriving from Central and South America are in fact arriving in order to work on farms. That isn't happening.  They want to work, no doubt, but the migrant farm system is well established, and they aren't seeking to get jobs in cabbage fields this summer and then go back home.

In reality, most are economic migrants or migrants from Central and South American failed states.  The US is racing towards becoming a failed state itself right now.  Our government isn't working, and we're about to elect an imagined Caudillo who will have to turn on migrants like a health inspector turns on expired milk.  

But economically, the farm sector isn't employing them.

Lots of other things are, such as the construction industry, local small businesses, and back door employment, which explains who we got in this mess.  Democrats imagined, wrongly, that all future migrants are Democratic voters.*  Republicans imagined them all as somebody who was going to mow their lawn for cheap.  Turns out that they are none of those things.**

In reality, they take entry level manual labor jobs which, frankly, would go to Americans who need them, but for the price depression impact this has.

Which gets to the next thing.

The "agriculture depends on migrants" argument is, really, that American agriculture is habituated to cheap farm labor because the Federal Government, with apocalyptic visions of the future after World War Two, created a cheap food policy.

Frightened that Depression Era conditions would return after World War Two, and then frightened that conditions were going to go into the waste bin due to the Cold War, from 1945 on the government has done everything it can to keep foods as cheap as possible.  Americans bitch about food prices, but they spend about 9% of their budget on food, and it generally keeps going down.  The U.S. Government has tracked food prices since 1929, and it's the lowest ever, generally.  From 1929 to 1952 Americans spending on food consumed generally above 20% of a family's income.  In 1932, it was 22%.  In 2008, in contrast, it was 5.6%.

That's great, for family budgets, and it has ancillary impacts on a lot of industries.  Cheap food means that people can go to good restaurants (where you are actually a lot more likely to run into an illegal alien than in a cabbage patch) and have a really good dinner for pretty cheap, and then sit there over dinner and bitch about food prices.  This hasn't always been the case.  When Americans "ate out" well into the 1970s, they probably meant that they went to a diner for lunch.  Growing up, trips to restaurants for dinner were so rare that they only occured, normally, when it was some sort of special occasion, like a birthday or anniversary.  To take a date to a restaurant was a big deal, even when I was a college student.  You were trying to really impress a girl if you took her out for a meal, and later you assessed the damage to your finances that had ensued.

Even fast food joints to some extent expressed this.  We would often hit the burger joints on the weekends, but not daily.  By the time my son was in high school, however, high schoolers hit the nearby fast food joints every day.  Indeed, when I was in high school I ate in the cafeteria, the first time I'd eaten routinely at school.  I didn't particularly like it, but that's what there was.  When our high school cafeteria was condemned during my first year of high school, and prior to their building a new one, I briefly ate downtown, but it was too expensive, and I took up just brining a bad sandwich I'd made myself at home and sitting in the football stadium to eat it.

Glory Days indeed.

Now, fast food fare is absurdly cheap.  Quite a few people I know hit Dirty Ron's Steakhouse every morning for a couple of Egg McMuffins and a cup of Joe on the way in to work, and frankly, they're not bad (and no, that nickname aside, that establishment is not dirty at all).  And I've met working adults, including professionals, who go to Subway, or whatever, every day for lunch.  "Value Meals" and the like are incredibly cheap.  All of this because of a "cheap food" policy.  Part of that policy is related to legal farm migrants, but they are not flooding across the Rio Grande or the desert and claiming asylum.

Nor, frankly, is an ongoing "cheap food" policy a good thing.

The cheap food policy has helped make Americans increasingly fat while driving smaller agricultural entities out of business.  It's contributed to the concentration of everything, and not in a good way.  It's made food prices unrealistically low, while divorcing Americans from the reality of the actual cost of things.  It should end.

Part of that would be, quite frankly, to end the modern version of the Bracero program that has depressed the value of farm labor.  When it came in, in 1943, it made a little bit of sense, maybe, perhaps.  But eighty years later, it doesn't.  Americans will work any job, contrary to what is claimed about them, but at wages that are realistic.  Immigrant farm labor wages won't attract them, as the wages are too low.

In an era in which thousands of Americans are out on the streets without jobs, and in which there are rural areas that are basically depopulated save for the injured and left behind in smaller towns, lying between the consolidated farms, and in which we have urban areas and reservations that are hardcore reservoirs of poverty, if people were paid real wages, there's a ready-made source of labor.  Sure, they aren't the best jobs in the world in some ways, but they are jobs.  And they're also jobs for middle class younger people, who have a demonstrated interest in topics of the soil.

The numbers involved are not small. The US takes in 3,000,000 migrant farmworkers per year.  Ending a program such as this would result in a big impact to farm production, and it'd jump food prices for sure as the positions were, and they ultimately would be, filled with American residents.  It'd frankly also spur mechanization, which I'm not particularly keen on, as right now there are very expensive agricultural implements that are not employed as migrant farm labor is cheaper.

But ultimately, the principal of subsidiarity should come into play here for lots of reasons.

None of the reasons involve the thousands crossing the US Southern border, who are people facing an existential crisis that must be addressed.  They aren't the migrant farmworkers however.  That's a completely different topic.

Footnotes:

*Democrats have long assumed that Hispanic immigrants are natural Democratic voters, without learning the lessons of demographics or history.  

Immigrants tend to be Democratic voters early in their demographic's migration history.  Irish immigrants were.  Italian immigrants were.  This frankly had a lot to do with patronage.  But as they became established, this became much less the case.  To declare yourself "Irish" today doesn't mean that somebody should automatically assume you are a Democrat.

And that's true even if you have 100% Hibernian heritage, or to take the Italian example, if you can trace your lineage back to Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus' third cousin, once removed.  Truth be known, in a species in which Joe Cro Magnon pretty quickly asked Lucy Neanderthal out on a date, those straight lines of lineage don't last very long.  To declare yourself "Irish" today, in the US, might merely mean that you think the Irish drink green Budweiser with corned beef sandwiches on St. Patrick's Day.

Moreover, Hispanics in the US have and retain (although they are rapidly losing it) a very distinct culture which is existentially Catholic and conservative.  This is so much the case that the radicals of the Mexican Revolution, in the form of the Constitutionalist, sought to stamp it out, much like their semi fellow travelers the Bolsheviks went after Orthodoxy in Russia after 1917.  And they had a similar success rate, which means lots of Mexican Hispanics, which is what most Hispanics in the US are often only semi observant, but culturally Catholic still.  Given that, the darling issues of the Democratic Greenwich Village set, which forms the central corps of Democratic thought, are deeply at odds with what most Hispanics believe. And this only becomes more the case when Hispanics from outside of Northern Mexican ancestry are considered.  So, not too surprisingly, they're turning Republican.

They are also due to the border crisis itself.  Hispanics along the border whose ancestors settled there two hundred years ago, or in the wake of the Mexican Revolution, or even in earlier recent migrant waves, are not really of the same culture, no matter how dimwitted Americans are about it, as those now crossing and the flood is wrecking their communities.  Americans may see Hondurans and Guatemalans, as well as Venezuelans, as being the same as people from Chihuahua, but people from Chihuahua who live in Eagle Pass do not.

**And they are people, which oddly seems forgotten, except as an argument over the crisis.  Democrats thinking they were mindless sheep who could be herded into the voting booths and Republicans thinking they were something akin to slaves is inexcusible.