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“Distributism
is just capitalism with morality.”
- Robert Laskey
(www.RemnantNewspaper.com)
In recent years spokesmen for neo-liberalism who call
themselves “conservatives” and libertarians have labored
to take out of commission a growing movement for
economic independence that goes by the name of
Distributism. The neo-liberal attack on Distributism is
in keeping with the process by which, for nearly two
centuries, Catholics have been chased by the boogeyman
of socialism into the domain of radical laissez-faire
capitalism, where corporations peddle everything from
pornography to human zygotes without restraint by law
and Big Business allies itself with Big Government for
the destruction of the moral order. Distributism is
under attack precisely because it represents, in the
economic realm, an alternative to the endless liberal
game of heads I win, tails you lose.
No, It’s Not Socialism
So, what is Distributism? Contrary to what our
critics suggest, Distributism does not denote government
redistribution of wealth, which is socialism, but rather
the natural distribution of wealth that arises when the
means of production are distributed as widely as
possible in society.
Distributism essentially equates with family-owned
enterprises of any sort (not just hobby farms, as
sneering critics would have us believe) or firms owned
by their employees (otherwise known as cooperatives) or
small or even mid-size corporations operating on a local
or regional scale. Small business and self-employment in
general are distributism in action. So are the growing
local produce movement (in which many traditionalists
participate) and the widespread boycotts of Wal-Mart and
other multinational giants that have annihilated small
businesses and destroyed the commerce of neighborhoods.
Chesterton formulated the Distributist idea with his
usual genius for stating the essence of things: “Too
much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but
too few capitalists.” Distributism looks to
increase the number of owners of private property by
encouraging individuals and families to acquire or
create means of production for themselves instead of
being dependent upon wages. In practice it might well
mean Chesterton’s “three acres and a cow,” but in the
modern economy it might just as likely mean “three
computers and a home office.”
Because it seeks to restore microeconomic life—commerce
between neighbors in neighborhoods—Distributism is a
movement for liberation from the globalized,
interlocking, government-dependent, and dangerously
fragile economic order that laughably describes itself
as “free enterprise” today. Anybody who thinks “free
enterprise” means Wal-Mart, with its legions of Chinese
wage-slaves toiling for the benefit of American
shareholders while under the yoke of a Communist
government that will not even allow them to have
children, needs to consult Catholic social teaching
immediately. Something is drastically wrong in the moral
order when the founders of Wal-Mart sit on an $84
billion stock portfolio built largely on virtual slave
labor while Wal-Mart’s “sales associates” cannot support
their families or pay their medical bills, even though a
small fraction of the Waltons’ billions could fund in
perpetuity a self-insured medical plan for every
Wal-Mart employee.
I am not suggesting government confiscation of the
Walton family’s wealth. The point, of course, is that
the Waltons should be doing justice to their struggling
employees without any government mandate. That is, they
should be applying the law of the Gospel to the conduct
of their business. In The Church and the Libertarian
I show how Costco, whose co-founder and CEO is a
Catholic steeped in Catholic social teaching, pays its
employees a family wage along with 92% of their medical
bills.
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|
 The Church and the
Libertarian
obliterates every argument economic liberals think they have,
while simultaneously mounting a powerful defense of the Church’s
Social Teaching.
With the wit and penetrating analysis Remnant readers
have come to expect from him, Ferrara carefully considers all
the arguments, even those advanced by radical libertarians,
exemplified by the so-called “Austrian School,” to help you
answer the one question that matters most: What am I --
Capitalist? Libertarian? Socialist? As a Catholic, where must I
stand?
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Distributism succeeds to the extent people simply refuse
to participate in the culture of mass capitalism. It is
a way of life, not a government program. It is a form of
peaceful secession from an economic order dominated by
multinationals that scour the world for virtual slave
labor, corrupt public and private morality by peddling
innumerable vices, destroy domestic industry, receive
government advantages at every turn, and demand treaty
concessions and bailouts whenever necessary to prevent
the collapse of their surreally bloated and otherwise
unsustainable structures. Distributism is a justified
reaction against moral and material excesses condemned
by the Magisterium in encyclical after encyclical and
summed up by that renowned Lutheran defender of the free
market, Wilhelm Röpke, in one memorable phrase: “the
cult of the colossal.”
Socialism and distributism are thus antithetical.
Let me repeat: socialism is the opposite of
distributism. Whoever suggests that distributism is
a form of socialism is either uninformed or dishonest.
Even the Wikipedia entry gets it right: “Distributism
(also known as distributionism, distributivism) is a
third-way economic philosophy formulated by such
Catholic thinkers as G. K. Chesterton and
Hilaire Belloc to apply the principles of Catholic
social teaching articulated by the Catholic Church,
especially in Pope Leo XIII's
encyclical Rerum Novarum and more
expansively explained by Pope Pius XI’s encyclical
Quadragesimo Anno... Essentially, distributism
distinguishes itself by its distribution of property
(not to be confused with redistribution of wealth).”
I hasten to add that to be a Distributist is not to
endorse every practical suggestion Chesterbelloc
advocated, but only the goal of widely distributed
ownership of the means of production and with it true
economic freedom for the individual and the family as
the basic unit of society.
What is meant by a “third way”? Simply that
Distributism is neither socialism nor capitalism. As
Thomas Storck has put it: “both
socialism and capitalism are products of the European
Enlightenment and are thus modernizing and
anti-traditional forces. In contrast, distributism seeks
to subordinate economic activity to human life as a
whole, to our spiritual life, our intellectual life, our
family life.” This is precisely what the Popes have
counseled in their social teaching.
The Sordid Love of Wealth
As Pius XI declared in
Quadragesimo anno
(1931),
social and economic liberalism have a common root in
abandonment of the precepts of the Gospel on account of
sin:
The root and font of this defection in economic and
social life from the Christian law, and of the
consequent apostasy of great numbers of workers from the
Catholic faith, are the disordered passions of the soul,
the sad result of original sin which has so destroyed
the wonderful harmony of man’s faculties that, easily
led astray by his evil desires, he is strongly incited
to prefer the passing goods of this world to the lasting
goods of Heaven. Hence arises that unquenchable
thirst for riches and temporal goods, which has at all
times impelled men to break God's laws and trample upon
the rights of their neighbors, but which, on account
of the present system of economic life, is laying far
more numerous snares for human frailty.
It was nothing other than
an “unquenchable thirst for riches and temporal goods”
that caused the Meltdown of 2008. Indeed,
Quadraegismo could have been written to describe the
corporate climate surrounding that event:
For what will it profit men to become expert in more
wisely using their wealth, even to gaining the whole
world, if thereby they suffer the loss of their souls?
What will it profit to teach them sound principles of
economic life if in unbridled and sordid greed they let
themselves be swept away by their passion for property,
so that “hearing the commandments of the Lord they do
all things contrary.”
Since the instability of economic life, and especially
of its structure, exacts of those engaged in it most
intense and unceasing effort, some have become so
hardened to the stings of conscience as to hold that
they are allowed, in any manner whatsoever, to increase
their profits and use means, fair or foul, to protect
their hard-won wealth against sudden changes of fortune.
The laws passed to promote corporate business, while
dividing and limiting the risk of business, have given
occasion to the most sordid license.
For We observe that consciences are little affected by
this reduced obligation of accountability; that
furthermore, by hiding under the shelter of a joint
name, the worst of injustices and frauds are penetrated;
and that, too, directors of business companies,
forgetful of their trust, betray the rights of those
whose savings they have undertaken to administer.
The contention that the Meltdown resulted simply from
the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve is ludicrous.
It was a perfect storm of greed arising from the
combined avarice of (a) mortgage originators and brokers
who made loans they knew would fail in order to earn
processing fees and commissions, (b) borrowers who
borrowed far more than they could afford to repay in
order to acquire far more than what they really needed,
(c) usurious interest rates on variable rate mortgages
and credit card balances, (d) the packaging of risky
mortgages palmed off by the originators into bundles of
worthless securities sold as hot investments by
investment firms based on fraudulent AAA ratings by
rating firms, and (e) the practice of hedging these
toxic assets with credit default swaps that allowed the
same firms that peddled the toxic assets to their
clients to bet that the very investments they had
recommended would go bust, triggering massive insurance
payouts to the investment firms while the clients
suffered catastrophic losses. (Cf. The Church and
the Libertarian, Ch. 13).
All of this happened in a de-regulated environment in
which depositary banks once prohibited from engaging in
risky investments were no longer restrained from doing
so, investment firms once limited to their partners’ own
capital were allowed to amass vast pools of risk capital
from public offerings of their stock, and credit default
swaps were allowed to be traded as unregulated
securities, creating a vast and unstable pile of
pickup-sticks just waiting to collapse if someone pulled
out the wrong one.
The Meltdown, in short, represents what Pius XI called
“[t]he
sordid love of wealth, which is the shame and great sin
of our age...”
The Fed’s lowering of interest rates did not cause the
sordid love of wealth that led to a worldwide economic
collapse any more than a pistol causes someone to commit
suicide. In any case, the Fed—which of course should be
abolished—is itself a creature of capitalist
manipulation of state power: a quasi-private banking
cartel that is not even accountable to government, which
is why the same libertarians who deplore the Fed (while
conveniently ignoring its seamy capitalist origins)
demand an audit that Congress refuses to compel.
A Movement for Economic Freedom According to the Gospel
There could be no Meltdown in Catholic social order
because in Catholic social order economic activity will
be governed, as Pius XI wrote, by “the gentle yet
effective law of Christian moderation which commands man
to seek first the Kingdom of God and His justice, with
the assurance that, by virtue of God’s kindness and
unfailing promise, temporal goods also, in so far as he
has need of them, shall be given him besides.”
Distributism is nothing other than free enterprise
conducted according to the Gospel as summed up in Our
Lord’s two great commandments: love of God and love of
neighbor. Subtract “the sordid love of wealth” and
boundless ambition from free enterprise, add love of God
and love of neighbor, and you will see emerging
naturally the very economic order many of us are old
enough to remember: the economy of the local grocer,
hardware store, and savings and loan; an economy in
which one could provision a household entirely on the
basis of exchanges with one’s own neighbors in one’s own
neighborhood; an economy conducted on a human scale by
human beings rather than fictitious corporate “persons”
created by government fiat that display all the
personality traits of a psychopath.
Nor is the recovery of what Röpke called a humane
economy merely a question of “personal” morality a given
capitalist could choose to observe if he wishes, as the
libertarians would argue. The imperatives of the Gospel
must be reflected in laws and institutions. In the
realm of economy no less than the realm of politics
there is no disjunction between public and “private”
morals, but rather one divinely ordained moral code
governing the whole of society. A capitalist does not
love God or his neighbor when he exploits his workers,
sells pornography and otherwise pumps moral filth into
society, provides abortions, engages in usury and
price-gouging, recklessly speculates with his clients’
money, systematically defiles the Sabbath with the most
vile commerce, extracts unconscionable bargains from
weaker parties, discharges toxic waste into rivers or
the ground, or commits a thousand other offenses against
the moral order and the common good.
Civil authority—especially at the local level in keeping
with subsidiarity—has every right to restrain the
capitalist’s depredations with appropriate legislation,
including penal sanctions. We are not, after all, at the
mercy of corporate boards of directors who have not
received any authority from God to govern us with
decisions affecting the common good in its moral,
spiritual and material totality.
Pope John Paul II was teaching in line with all his
predecessors when he declared on the anniversary of Pope
Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum that the Church cannot
approve capitalism if it means that “freedom in the
economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong
juridical framework which places it at the service of
human freedom in its totality, and which sees it as a
particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is
ethical and religious...”
Distributism, as a movement for a humane economy on a
human scale—that is, an economy more in keeping with the
Gospel—respects the ethical and religious limits on
economic activity and naturally leads men away from the
corporate cult of the colossal toward an economic order
that subordinates the pursuit of material goods to man’s
eternal destiny.
Distributists at Occupy Wall Street
In an article for the Remnant Richard Aleman noted that
he, John Rao and I went the site of the Occupy Wall
Street demonstration in order to present the Catholic
case for economic justice. We did not go there to
commune with the hippies or to lend support to any sort
of Leftist ideology. We went there because we recognized
that many of the wandering souls who had gathered in
Zuccotti Park suspected that something was radically
wrong with the modern economic order but had no clear
idea of what it was.
We saw the Occupy demonstration as a neo-pagan search
for the Unknown God. We told those who would listen
that the God for whom they seek is the one who gave us
His Gospel for the good of both men and nations. We
handed them excerpts from Quadragesimo Anno and a
flier containing the elements of what a humane and
distributist economy would look like—without a single
government intervention—if people would only order
their pursuit of material goods to the highest good of
eternal beatitude. We felt compelled to tell as many of
these people as we could that the fundamental social
problem that had brought them together—unwittingly or
not—is the apostasy of Western civilization, and that
there could be no approach to social justice that did
follow the path the Catholic Church has marked out for
men and nations. As Pius XI put it:
All experts in social problems are seeking eagerly a
structure so fashioned in accordance with the norms of
reason that it can lead economic life back to sound and
right order. But this order, which We Ourselves ardently
long for and with all Our efforts promote, will be
wholly defective and incomplete unless all the
activities of men harmoniously unite to imitate and
attain, in so far as it lies within human strength, the
marvelous unity of the Divine plan. We mean that perfect
order which the Church with great force and power
preaches and which right human reason itself demands,
that all things be directed to God as the first and
supreme end of all created activity, and that all
created good under God be considered as mere instruments
to be used only in so far as they conduce to the
attainment of the supreme end.
It is really very simple: to apply the two great
commandments to the pursuit of material goods is to be,
more or less, a Distributist. A Distributist, trusting
in Providence, will want for nothing his family needs,
and he will be the first to defend private property as
essential to ordered liberty—and not only against
government, but also against the corporate hegemons that
are relentlessly snuffing out the God-given right to
make one’s own way in the world with one’s own means.
How ironic it is that Catholics who consider themselves
libertarians defend government-assisted corporate
collectivism on a scale so vast as to amount to
privatized socialism, while attacking Distributists for
their truly libertarian defense of economic independence
for the individual and the family in an economy that
does not depend upon the labor of Chinese wage-slaves.
Let us have an end to this demagoguery. And let the
Remnant help lead Catholics toward the humane economy
the Magisterium has always had in view. |
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