Posted on 10/18/2011 8:36:07 PM PDT by MeNeFrego
NEW YORK — Can an Anglican theologian from Britain revive an 80-year-old Catholic social justice theory and provide a solution to America’s economic woes and political polarization?
Philosopher and political thinker Phillip Blond thinks so, and he’s giving it everything he’s got.
Blond, who has been a counselor to British Prime Minister David Cameron, just wrapped up a two-week U.S. tour to pitch his retooled version of “distributism,” a theory that argues that both capitalism and government are out of control.
In that sense, the thinking goes, both Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party are right...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
explains why most catholics i meet are leftists.
What’s your opinion on this, new FRiend?
Interested in it.
I have heard the James O’Keefe is very interested in distributism. The great Catholic intellectuals of the early to mid 20th Century,like Chesterton, Belloc, Tolkien, joined by the great Anglican C.S. Lewis provided great material for thought, especially today. This article may send me back to my high school days to reread Rerum Novarum.
It is just another variant on statism.
“Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party are essentially different expressions of the same phenomenon,” Blond said. Both are angry at the concentration of power, but both are on rocky ground when they demand salvation from either the gods of the market or government.
Notice that this dovetails with what Christie said today, and Obama said yesterday.
The meme they seem to be pushing is: The Tea Party and OWS are MORALLY EQUIVALENT. They are equal. They cancel each other out because they both want the same things.
Not sure how this strategy is good for Obama & Rinos, but let's watch to see if they keep pushing the same meme.
And most of the ones who claim to be conservative are ideologically to the left of conservatives!
He had obviously never read the constitution of the United States. I love these lefty “thinkers” who think they can rewrite the constitution at their superior whim.
Centralized health care and education? Get lost! No mention of National defense nor border protection - two of the central constitutional functions of the US government.
Let the states and locals handle health care and education however the citizens want.
But he’s right about this: Tea Party is right that the government is too big and powerful. Some of the wall street protesting stinkies are right that corporations have too much power and influence in the government due to global trade. Globalism has to go if America is to recover.
Distributism is hardly leftism. It’s founded on the principle of subsidiarity, that it’s evil to assign to a higher level of hierarchy what a lower level of hierarch is capable of. In other words, it supports not only states’ rights in the face of the federal government, but county rights in the face of the state, village rights in the face of the county, and family rights in the face of the village.
Distributism is the economic side of that model. As corporations become massive, they invariably restrict competition, and seek to manipulate government to prevent competition. Distributism seeks ways to keep the marketplace free, so that conglomerates don’t get to write the rules in ways which that favor “synerigism,” “supply line dominance” (the lethality of which for an economy was demonstrated by the Japanese earthquake), regulation, and exclusive contracts.
An artifically imposed distributism might have effects that might please liberals, such as defeating Walmart in favor of local grocers. But an organic distributism (which is necessary as not to violate the underlying principle of subsidiarity) would see Walmart diversify into niche subsidiaries, while local grocers get the leg up with microdistribution, farmer’s markets, etc.
There’s some natural limits to distibutism in bricks-and-mortar companies; a smallish manufacturing plant is going to develop the expertise and scale to efficiently produce automobiles. But, surprisingly, new markets tend to start out better distributed: remember Mom & Pop video stores were the norm before Blockbuster? And that they were cheaper than blockbuster? The problem is Americans mistook 500 spaces with one video as indicating a better selection than all copies of one video being in a single stack... because we naturally believe bigger is better. Well, the internet is the ultimate is distributism.
Correction: distibutism has found a very unlikely foothold: banking. Microloans are revolutionizing the third world, and reversing poverty.
Centralized health care is the antithesis of distributism. Distributism would be every doctor acting independently; every person providing their own health coverage.
Distributism in education would be home schooling.
Distributism in national defense would be a heavily armed citizenry.
The folks on this thread who take anything from this brief article as an excuse to oppose it are being hasty.
thank you, never heard this one before.
assuming the article has the concept right and i understand it. one minute of thought suffices to spot the fallacy at the center of this idea:
power cannot be distributed in a “collective.” corrupt human nature trumps theoretical communism (the distribution of power equally among individuals). any morally rudderless individual or oligarchy will then, again corruptly, maintain, defend and extend it’s power over others, who will be rendered slaves.
if power is allowed to concentrate at all, and in communism there is no barrier to factionalism as madison defines it, it will recursively concentrate itself within a smaller and smaller circle of individuals.
the genius of our Founders was to erect institutional barriers (our Constitution) and leverage God’s law (morality) to retard and block it’s concentration.
the other proposition in the article is provably absurd. if all power is concentrated in the libertarian individual, it can only be defended by just and dispassionate government. but governments are by definition a concentration of power in the few. thus we have the reductio absurdio.
Centralized health care is the antithesis of distributism. Distributism would be every doctor acting independently; every person providing their own health coverage.
Distributism in education would be home schooling.
Distributism in national defense would be a heavily armed citizenry.
To try to associate communism with the Tea Party is laughable.
Well there's your problem from the get go.
Do you really think that G. K. Chesterton, Hillaire Belloc, and C. S. Lewis would spend significant portions of their lives supporting communism?
Or have you never heard of Chesterton, Belloc, or Lewis?
Phillip Blond is an Englishman. Regardless some of his ideas may do well here despite the differences in are founding documents.
It's not that difficult to google distributism, Phillip Blond, G. K. Chesterton, etc.
You might find that you like some of the things they have to say.
Of course you'll probably find one thing you disagree with, then decide their all a bunch of commies, including that damned leftist C. S. Lewis! /sarc
This assumes that Christie and Obama are thoughtful people, rather than just triangulating politicians.
Distributism has a long, respectful heritage. It was supported by luminaries such as G. K. Chesterton, Hillaire Belloc, and C. S. Lewis. Those gentlemen supported distributism because it made sense to them, not because they hoped to get more votes.
Whatever the MSM or egotistic politicians decide to do with distributism is besides the point. If the distributists have even a couple of good ideas that can help us through our current economic troubles then good for them!
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