I'm not. I'm on Team Distributism, which is the natural form of capitalism rather than the state created system we have, which overall, in its late stage, is destructive and soul crushing.
Part of that soul crushing nature is creating people like Musk and Bill Gates, people so wealthy that they are destructive merely by having so much wealth.
Movie poster for And Quiet Flows the Don. What on earth does this have to do with anything? Well, maybe more than you might figure, as the main character is a local Cossack trying to live a local, and not always all that admirable, life but ends up getting carried away with the tied of events which destroyes all of that.
So what, he must be thinking, is the freaking problem?
Well, people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and the entire Trump family are the problem (and people like Jeff Epstein are as well).
In other quarters people like to debate whether or not the United States is a "Christian nation". Whatever the answer to that might be (I think the answer is yes, but that it's a Puritan country) it was definitely a small freeholder country. That is, the country was mostly made up of small yeomanry and small tradesmen early on.
Indeed, the widespread use of corporations was illegal in the 1770s and for many years thereafter. Part of the rebellion against the crown was based on what effectively were export duties, a species of tariff, on chartered businesses, i.e., team importers, that the colonist had no control over and they reacted by destroying the property. Ironically the very people who emblazon themselves with 1776 themed tattoos in 2026 would have supported King George III doing what he did, just as they support King Donny doing them through executive order. Shoot, Parliament had actually voted on the tea duties.
Nonetheless, teh country has always had some very large business interests that, when allowed to, operate against the economic interest of everyone else. They don't want to "share the wealth". They think their getting wealthy is sharing enough, and good for everyone. Up until 1865, or instance, we had the Southern planter class, a market set of agriculturalist who destroyed land and people in their endeavors, but believed in it so strongly that they'd argue for the perversion of the Christian faith to support slavery.
It wasn't just Planters, however. Coal magnates, industrialists, foreign ranch owners, the list is pretty long.
It wasn't until later that absentee merchants dominated "main street", both the actual one or the metaphorical one. The first chain store is claimed by some to be The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P), which was founded in 1859. Woolworth's started twenty years later in 1879. Piggly Wiggly, the grocery store, showed up in 1916, and proved to be the model for "grocery stores" that would wipe out locally held grocery stores, for the most party, in the next couple of decades.
Since the mid 20th Century this trend has continued unabated and unaddressed. Every Walmart represents the destruction, probably, of a half dozen or more locally owned family supported stores. The appliance section represents the closure of local appliance stores. The entertainment section of record and video stores. You name it.
None of this had to be.
There's been a lot of ink spilled on the rise of Donald Trump and what caused it. We've done that ourselves. Others have noted the presence of small businessmen in the MAGA ranks, but it's been underreported in contrast to the blue collar Rust Belt members of the MAGA rank and file.
It shouldn't be.
When I was young, which is now a very long time ago, the Democratic Party was still regarded as the part of the working class. Unions, which have never been strong here, were still strong enough to host the annual Jefferson Jackson Day that backed the Democratic Party. But by 1973 the Democrats started to board the vessel of blood that would end up causing thousands to get off the boat. By the mid 1990s the party that had been the one hardhats joined became one in you had to be comfortable with a focus on disordered sex and infanticide. The Democrats, for the most part, forgot the working class.
At the same time, the Republican Party was widely accused of being the Country Club Party, with good reason. If you were a member of a country club or chamber of commerce, you were probably a Republican or you were weird. The thing is, however that the economic outlook of the hardhat class and the country club class was closer to each other than they thought and the same neglect hurt both of them severely.
As early as the 1960s, successive Democratic and Republican administrations were really comfortable with exporting business overseas. Nobody ever outright admitted that, but they were. And both Democratic and Republican administrations simply stopped enforcing anti trust legislation. Aggressively applied, entities like Walmart would be busted up, but it just doesn't happen. Aware of what was going on at first, and trying to struggle against it nearly everywhere, local business failed to arrest the destructive march of the giants. In part, their efforts were so local that they were like those of Russian peasantry trying to arrest the Red Army. They tried, but doing it locally just won't going to work. You can't wait until the Red Army is in sight of the village. Nobodoy lifted a finger at the national or state level to help.
The march of progress (which it wasn't) and free enterprise (which it also wasn't) and all that.
So the small business class became desperate, and in desperation they turned to the guy who offered no answers but who seemed like he might help, Trump.
What an irony, really. Trump doesn't "shop local" and he doesn't have the faintest grasp of what small business is like. He's spent his eight decades around the wealthy and is more comfortable with bullying smaller economic interest than helping them.
Even now, the bones a small business economy remain. In order to advance that interest, however, small businessmen have to do something they really aren't comfortable with.
They have to be militant about it.
Part of that involves being militant at the polls.*
And that involves asking some questions, but first it involves waking up to economic and structural realities.
The first of those realities is that the United States does not have a free market economic system, and hasn't for a long time. It has a Corporate Capitalist economic system that favors state created economic creatures given fictional personhood which favors economies of scale. The goal is to make prices cheaper, and part of that is to make wagers cheaper. The consumers are expected to adjust to this by getting new jobs at higher wages, sort of like the protagonist in Kansas City Star.
So, in essence, if you have an appliance store and are taking home, let's say, $150,000 a year, and with that you are trying to provide for all of your family's living expenses, and Walmart comes in, well, you should have become something else, and now this is your chance to go and do that.
Except you probably won't. You'll probably close the store and retire, if you are over 50, or go on to another lower paying job if you aren't.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
Okay, not facing that grim reality, what you need to do is find out if politicians are more interested in their super sized huge television having a low, low price, or helping you. And helping you means leveling the playing field with legislation, not "buy local" campaigns.
And I'll note here, the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, which is trying to defend the Wyoming Business Council, is a prime example of people who are there to hurt you.
And so we begin.
1. Where is his bread buttered?
In other words, how does he make his money.
That may or not may not be a reason to vote for or against somebody. In Wyoming, fore xample, there are small businessmen in, and opposed to, the Freedom Caucus at the legislature, and voting for the WFC is a complete no go. So the question is informative, not determinative.
Having said that, there are certain answers that, in my mind, are nearly disqualifying.
One is a near complete lack of private business experience, even as an employee. Wyoming in particular seems to get a lot of candidates who cite "I was in the military" as a reason to vote for them, based on a lifelong military career. Well, that isn't like working for a private business at all. There's never been a time in the history of the U.S. military in which a soldier wasn't going to get paid, save for the government briefly shutting down. And almost all member of the military don't worry about overhead and payroll expenses. They also don't have to worry about the country coming to them and saying, "Gee, U.S. Army, we've really liked you here, but the British Army made us a better offer so we're doing to close you down. . . "
It's not just a lifetime of sucking on the government tit that should be concerning. People who have a lot of family money are in the same category.
I"m not necessary saying don't vote for somebody who is rich. I am saying you need to weight it carefully. It's hard to get politicians right now, at least at the national level, who aren't fairly well off, due to the Citizens United case. But if a person is rich because they inherited it, a pause should be made on the voting lever.
Of course, when you ask this, you're probably going to get the answer of "yes", because it includes the word "American" and nobody wants to be against the American canything if they're a politician.
So you're going to have to ask them some questions or question which shows what they know what the American System is.
Okay, right now I'll note that this included tariffs to protect American industry, and I've been hard on those. I also don't live in the first half of the 19th Century when industry had barely achieved a foothold in the U.S. And, it might be worth noting, that Clay didn't propose tariffs as people hurt his feelings. At any rate, post 1890s tariffs have proven to be a disaster.
What I'm really getting at is the use of public funds to assist local businesses.
A good example of the American System in Wyoming has been the Wyoming Business Council.. The carpetbagging Wyoming Freedom Caucus is attacking it basically because it uses public money. If you are in Wyoming, a good question is whether or not the pol supports the Wyoming Business Council being defunded. If the answer is yes, this pol doesn't care if you evaporate and is instead mindlessly adopting twattle that the WBC is "Socialist". First of all, I don't care if it is socialist, I only care, and so should you, about whether its effective in generating local businesses.
3. What actual legislation would they support to help local business.
By this, I mean concrete examples.
Chances are, you won't get any, so you'll have to press them.
4. What is their position on taxation?
By this, I mean the whole smash. Local, state and Federal.
The local press always asks this position of our pols, and they rarely give any kind of a detailed answer. Right now, most of them note that they aren't fond of taxes, but they don't support the WFC's effort to gut state property taxes either.
That's not specific enough.
5. What do they think of the out of staters buying up all the ___________and what would they do about it?
Here, and in much ag country, this would pertain to ranch land. But I'm sure it pertains to other things as well. Shoot ,around here it also would seem to pertain to tire stores, it's just ridiculous.
Expressing "concern" doesn't mean anything at all, even if you are Lisa Murkowski.
6. What do their employees, if they have any, think of them?
For some reason, this is never asked, but it should be. If the answer is that the candidates employees hate the candidate with the intensity of a thousand burning suns, that probably needs to be considered. If, on the other hand, the employees widely admire the employer/candidate, that says something else.
I'll note here that personally I had people come to me as late as the 2010s who had worked for my grandfather and wanted me to know how he had helped them out in tough times. He never ran for anything, but that says a lot about his character.
I don't think we've heard anything like that from any of Jeffrey Epstein's employees.
I'll also note that as a businessman myself, it seems some businessmen are willing to fire people the second they might have to take a little less home. That's a character defect that's disturbing, at the least.
7. Why are they in the party they're in?
Again, an honest answer.
Right now you can't be a Republican or Democrat and be 100% comfortable with either party. That would suggest that you are letting others do your thinking for you. Businessmen have a right to know what drew a candidate to the party, what ever it is.
They also have a right to know what a candidate disagrees with about the positions of their own party. If he doesn't disagree with any party position, he's an unthinking stooge.
8. What business related or policy related organizations are they in, or endorsed by?
This is often overlooked unless those organizations step out themselves, which they sometimes do.
Make Liberty Win is, in my view, a big no/go for a candidate. The Club for Growth is as well. The latter favors an economy that will screw you.
Footnotes
*They really need to be militant about it everywhere, however.
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.
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.
We have become a more juvenile culture. We have become a childish "me, me, me" culture with fifteen-second attention spans. The global village that television was supposed to bring is less a village than a playground...
Little attempt is made to pass on our cultural inheritance, and our moral and religious traditions are neglected except in the shallow "family values" arguments.
Wes Jackson, Becoming Native to This Place
Today is Earth Day, 2024.
In "Red State", which now means more than it used to as the Reds in the Red States are supporting the Russian effort to conquer Ukraine, and hence are aligned with what the old Reds would have wanted, it's not going to mean all that much. I don't expect there to be much in the way of civil observances.
I saw a quote by somebody whose comments I wouldn't normally consider, that being Noam Chomsky, in which he asserted that a certain class of people who are perceived (not necessarily accurately) as something beyond evil, as they're putting all of humanity in jeopardy for a "few dollars" when they already have far more than they need. That is almost certainly unfair. Rather, like so much else in human nature, mobilizing people to act contrary to their habits is just very hard. And some people will resist any concept that those habits are harmful in any fashion.
Perhaps, therefore, a bitter argument is on what people love. People will sacrifice for that, and here such sacrifices as may be needed on various issues are likely temporary ones.
Of course, a lot of that gets back to education, and in this highly polarized time in which we live, which is in part because we're hearing that changes are coming, and we don't like them, and we've been joined by people here locally recently who have a concept of the local formed by too many hours in front of the television and too few in reality. We'll have to tackle that. That'll be tough, right now, but a lot of that just involves speaking the truth.
While it has that beating a horse aspect to it, another thing we can't help but noting, and have before, is that an incredible amount of resistance to things that would help overall society are opposed by those who are lashed to their employments in nearly irrevocable ways. In this fashion, the society that's actually the one most likely to be able to preserver on changed in some fashions are localist and distributist ones. Chomsky may think that what he is noting is somehow uniquely tied to certain large industries, but in reality the entire corporate capitalist one, which of course he is no fan of, as well as socialist ones, which he is, are driven by concepts of absolute scale and growth. That's a systematic culture that's very hard to overcome and on a local scale, when people are confronted with it, they'll rarely acknowledge that their opposition is based on something that's overall contrary to what they otherwise espouse. We see that locally right now, where there are many residents opposed to a local gravel pit, who otherwise no doubt make their livings from the extractive industries.
But I'd note that this hasn't always been the case here. It was much less so before the influx of outsiders who stayed after the most recent booms. And that too gives us some hope, as the people who are of here and from here, like people of and from anywhere they're actually from, will in fact act for the place.
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).
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.
