Distributism vs. Fascism

by Roy F. Moore

Of the few today who have heard of Distributism, some mistake it to be Socialism. And some mistake it to be Fascism. The Fascist bogeyman still taunts Chesterton’s memory and his followers even now simply because at one point in his life, Chesterton expressed certain admiration for Mussolini, being somewhat taken in by the lying charm of Mussolini, thinking him sympathetic to what Chesterton stood for. But when Mussolini enslaved Rome and Hitler was on the rise, Chesterton said clearly and without mistake: “The intellectual criticism of Fascism is really this: that it appeals to an appetite for authority, without very clearly giving the authority for the appetite." In 1999, an edition of the Chesterton Review devoted an entire issue to the question of Chesterton and Fascism and a series of scholarly articles demonstrated quite clearly that Chesterton was anything but Fascist.

Chesterton wrote about the subject in his book, The Resurrection of Rome. On its pages, he debated the pros and cons of the system Il Duce used to bruise and crush the Italian people. Some readers consider this one of his weakest books. He himself described the book as “a warning against Fascism.”

The very term “Fascist,” like its counterpart “Bolshevist,” has almost lost its meaning, becoming an all-purpose insult used to stifle debate. But the ideology behind the insult still remains a constant temptation for men in power to concoct policies based on those of the Mussolini regime. Many hold that the Patriot Acts and the recently passed Real ID Card Act, mandating a national ID card for all citizens, have that same basis in such an ideology.

The average American probably believes that Fascism is “right wing,” but Libertarian columnist Ron Mexico - better known by his pen name “Vox Day” - has recently argued that this is a fallacy. He notes that the Fascists accepted all but two of the ten points comprising Marx’s Communist Manifesto. Further, both Mussolini and Hitler were more nationalist in their focus unlike their internationalist rivals, Lenin and Trotsky.

Other than these deviations, the essential core of Fascism is Socialism. For like their Communist rivals, the Fascists also believed in centralization of finance and transportation, state control over children’s education, progressive income tax, national government control over production and distribution of goods and services and so on.

Distributism, on the other hand, advocates subsidiarity, meaning decentralizing political and economic decisions to the lowest levels in society. That means the family, the neighborhood and city or town authorities. Or in modern lingo, running things from the bottom-up, rather than the top-down. Only when events get too big to handle does one turn to higher authorities, and even then, only for certain things, not for everything.

Furthermore, Distributism also believes in “class cooperation.” That is, the poor and middle classes pool their resources together to build up and strengthen the local economy and community. Hence, there is no need for state micromanagement of affairs nor for the dominance of big business or big finance. Neighbor helps neighbor for the sake of all, without - as Chesterton called them - “Hudge” and “Gudge” sticking their noses into things.

And like the Reds, the Fascists either tried to control religious authority or made up their own under state control. As William Shirer wrote in The Rise And Fall of the Third Reich, the Nazis set up their own “National Reich Church,” with the infamous Mein Kampf as their banal substitute for the Bible. And their ersatz messiah was their idea of the Nordic race as some collective divinity, come to rid the Earth of supposed “inferiors.”

Mussolini himself, in a 1925 speech, pronounced the maxim that has ever defined Fascism: "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State." Thus it shares with Socialism and Communism the trait of making a “god” out of the national government. A “god” who, however, was endowed with the bloodthirsty traits of a Baal, Moloch or Quetzalcoatl. As Chesterton warned us in Christendom in Dublin, "Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God."

Distributism, by contrast, knows how to do something Fascism never could: reject every pretense to be a substitute “god.” It refuses to assimilate everything into itself, like the Borg of the later Star Trek sagas. It embraces humility and sane limits, which the Hobbits embodied in Tolkien’s epic The Lord of the Rings. It rejects every pretension to become the reason for existence. It condemns the notion that an iron-fisted rule of race, class, party or ethnicity can enliven a society better than that of Our Father in Heaven and His guiding hand.

The standard boast about Mussolini was that “he made the trains run on time.” Like Fascism, that isn’t something to boast about, as Chesterton wrote in All Things Considered:

"It is a good sign in a nation when things are done badly. It shows that all the people are doing them. And it is bad sign in a nation when such things are done very well, for it shows that only a few experts and eccentrics are doing them, and that the nation is merely looking on."

Gilbert! Magazine
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Much Ado About Cheese

by Roy F. Moore

In his 1910 book Alarms and Discussions, Chesterton wrote his essay on ‘Cheese’, including his witty complaint that “poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.” He could only remember two poets, Virgil and an unnamed writer of a nursery rhyme, who wrote of such. Certainly with a twinkle in his eye, he cheerfully boasted: “If all the trees were bread and cheese there would be considerable deforestation in any part of England where I was living. Wild and wide woodlands would reel and fade before me as rapidly as they ran after Orpheus.”

Yet perhaps Chesterton would think twice about dwelling in such a Eden if he heard about this story.

It was reported in June that Hilmar Cheese - the world’s largest cheese maker - wants to drill a well three-fourths of a mile deep into the Earth’s crust. This well would hold the millions of gallons of waste liquids produced by the California company’s mass production of cheese. They make a million pounds of cheese every day.

Let me repeat that: a million pounds of cheese made every day. Even, I fancy, Gilbert’s mind would reel from such a feat. Perhaps he would renounce his bread-and-cheese fantasy in light of what he wrote about the virtue of temperance: “We should thank God for beer and burgundy by not drinking too much of them.”

Hilmar has been fined millions of dollars for violating California water pollution standards. According to reports, the company was illegally flushing around 700,000 gallons of wastewater daily on fields in Merced County - where Hilmar is based - for nearly three years. The co-founder of the company, who became the state’s undersecretary of agriculture, resigned perhaps in light of such reports.

The company is vigorously fighting this fine, employing lawyers from both Sacramento and San Francisco to challenge both the fine and the standards set by the regional water quality board. But the board’s attorneys point out that the fine comes to only one percent of the cheese giant’s yearly income. It is quite certain that the whole matter will end up in court, with both sides committed to victory no matter what.

And like so many other large companies and conglomerates in America, Hilmar made campaign contributions to both major political parties. Hilmar supported former Democratic governor Gray Davis, but then contributed to current Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger during the controversial recall campaign.

Does this sound awfully familiar to our ears? Do company names like Enron, WorldCom, Philip Morris, GM and the like ring a bell? Does it not also apply to way too many compartments of both Federal and state governments? Does it not show, once again, the consequences of believing the lie that “bigger is better, all the time”? How many times have we been told that this is “progress” and that it is inevitable?

In his essay “The Nameless Man,” Chesterton writes – prophetically, of course - “It is the final sign of imbecility in a people that it calls cats dogs and describes the sun as the moon - and is very particular about the preciseness of these pseudonyms. To be wrong, and to be carefully wrong, that is the definition of decadence.”

It is decadence when we allow behemoths like Hilmar Cheese to operate as it does and define it as “progress” and a “celebration” of the free market. No, it is a distortion of a market economy to permit huge companies like Hilmar to operate as it has. We are still dazzled by the illusion that the bigger the business or government department, the better it will be. If it were not so, then the merger-mania of the last twenty plus years would not have occurred.

As I wrote in an earlier column called “Piggish on Farming”, on the financial and environmental woes of Nebraska’s Furnas County Farms, “factory farming” giants hurt us all by the scale of their operations. Whether gallons of hog waste from Furnas or gallons of milk waste from Hilmar, running a farming concern on a mass-production basis hurts us all in the long run.

But in a Distributist society, there would be no monstrosities like a Hilmar. There would either be thousands of individual cheese makers or a few hundred worker-owned cooperatives supplying the demand, aiming for the local markets first. At the very least, such an arrangement would have less negative environmental impact than what Hilmar is doing today.

We, in turn, can help spur trends toward this by buying locally-made cheese where possible. Or if so inclined, learn how to make our own home-made cheese for our families or neighborhoods. This way, we can begin, in small steps, to break the stranglehold of the huge agribusinesses on our nation’s food supply.

Again, to quote Chesterton:

“A good civilization spreads over us freely like a tree, varying and yielding because it is alive. A bad civilization stands up and sticks out above us like an umbrella - artificial, mathematical in shape; not merely universal, but uniform.”

A future Distributist America will be such a good civilization. Let us work and pray to make it so, for its opposite is just too painful to bear anymore.

Gilbert! Magazine
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Distributism vs. Evolution

by Roy F. Moore

“It is absurd for the Evolutionists to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into anything.”-G.K. Chesterton

One of the ripple effects of evolution’s impact is the dehumanization of society. With the supernatural removed from the foundation of a society, mankind begins degrading not just toward the bestial but toward the demonic. Have a society treat its citizens as mere talking animals and genetic accidents, mere units of production and consumption, and it will end up as a soulless parody of itself. It will be a Hyde without a Jekyll, and that is on a good day. Or as Chesterton so put it: “Evolution. . .does not specifically deny the existence of God; what it does deny is the existence of man.”

As well does it deny our obligations to our fellow man, to “love your neighbor as yourself” as Christ commanded us in the Gospels. Such was the stand of the philosopher Herbert Spencer, who applied Darwin’s theory to the workings of human society and invented “Social Darwinism”. It was Spencer who coined the term "survival of the fittest," believing that a dog-eat-dog view of economics and politics could only benefit society. It was these views that he drew from Darwin that convinced the robber baron and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie to renounce his Protestant faith, as Darwin did when he was forty. Paraphrasing his new mentor, Carnegie proclaimed: "The concentration of capital is a necessity for meeting the demands of our day, and as such should not be looked at askance, but be encouraged."

To the present day, those who run multinational conglomerates - of whatever industry - seem to have imbibed such an inhumane philosophy as if it were mother’s milk. By either merging their companies with one another, or buying out or undercutting their smaller competition, big business continues to devastate the workings of a true market economy with their insistence on Carnegie’s take on evolutionist thought.

Such a flawed worldview was also a part of the backbone of Karl Marx’s brand of Socialism. When he wrote his turgid work Das Kapital, he wished to dedicate the book to Darwin, expressing his deep admiration for his theory. To his credit, Darwin refused such “generosity” from the vicious Marx. Lenin, building on his work, made evolution part of the backbone of his “scientific atheism”, which became the official “religion” of the Soviet Union. And the bloodthirsty Chairman Mao with his Little Red Book of Marx and Darwin-based saying almost drove poor suffering China mad.

Hitler and the Nazis were the other socialist camp that pushed a miserable evolutionist utopia upon mankind. Combining Darwin’s theories with bits and pieces of Hinduism, Theosophy, Jew hatred, Nordic paganism and the nihilism of Nietzsche, the Nazi creed brought both Germany and Europe into the realm of nightmares and mass murder. The Nazis particularly upheld a branch tenet of evolution that, they believed, would lead to an end of all genetic diseases. It was hidden under the euphemism “racial hygiene,” but was known to all the world as Eugenics.

With its roots in Darwin’s theories, and with private support from the man himself, the Eugenics movement was guided by Sir Francis Galton whose cousin was...Charles Darwin.

In his book Eugenics and Other Evils, Chesterton took on the forerunners of the modern birth control and abortion movements, and did so with gusto. In What’s Wrong With the World and The Outline of Sanity, Chesterton tackled the two-headed dragon of capitalism and socialism, smashing it to pieces. In all three works, by implication, he denounced one of their foundational tenets. And that was the fantasies of Darwin, Galton and their successors who to this day still insist that humanity emerged by chance from some “primordial ooze” billions of years ago and continues to advance, continues to progress, continues to improve. All who dare challenge such fantasies are shunned and derided as “unscientific” and worse.

In contrast, Distributism holds to the truth that man - male and female - was made from the loving hand of Almighty God. So in a Distributist society, the eternal in man is affirmed and held sacred. The children of Adam and Eve are not treated as mere numbers in an equation. Economic competition plays out between smaller rivals, with the aim of serving the local community rather than dominating it like a colossus. Government regulation emphasizes protecting the community from both larger government entities as well as conglomerates.

Humanity is not a herd of thoughtless beasts, though too often we act like we are. We are creatures made in the image and likeness of God, a “little lower than the angels” as the Psalmist says. A truly free and fair society, or one that can be such in an imperfect world as ours, recognizes that fact and structures itself to guide it’s citizens toward their final end, which is union with Our Heavenly Father. The founders of Distributism, and those who walk in their footsteps, would expect and accept nothing less. As Chesterton said:

"The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man."

Gilbert! Magazine
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The Money Muddle

by Fr. Vincent McNabb

During a meeting at the Olympia, Glasgow, my lecture on ‘Unemployment and the Land’ led a man in the hall to ask me if I could give a definition of what I think he called National Credit. I ingenuously confessed that I could not give a definition of National Credit. Indeed, as there seemed some hesitation in taking my word, I again confessed that I did not know what National Credit was; and indeed I did not care.

To tell that truth, I had a suspicion that National Credit had to do with currency or token-wealth. Now, I have long felt that as the way into our social quagmire was by putting second things first, our only way out of the quagmire was by putting first things first. But as currency is not a first thing, or even a second thing, but only the token of a thing, to be deeply concerned with money and the money view of the world is to sink still deeper into the quagmire. Hence my indifference to all schemes based on a money-unit.

A walk throught the slums, and a study of the official reports, of Glasgow had made me perhaps unduly sensitive to the futility of the money-standard of civilization. I do not mean that I was depressed because Glasgow was Glasgow and not, say, Birmingham or Liverpool; but because, like Birmingham and Liverpool, Glasgow has a large number of human beings living in inhuman conditions thought the money-muddled thinking of a small group of not ill-minded human beings.

I cannot remember all the rungs in our exchange of question and answer. I can recall that my courteous questioner said: ‘But there must be money paid by the man who buys land from the State.’

We were thinking of the Land Purchase scheme which transformed Ireland from a country of a few large landholders to a country of many peasant-proprietors. To his question I answered a little sharply: ‘No. The proprietor who buys and bowers from the State need not pay in currency, but in kind.’ I remembered that a most efficient sliding-scale of payment was to be found in the tithe, and in the metayer system; whereby the land-worker gave a fixed proportion of his yearly harvest. This direct dealing of the borrower and lender, with its direct exchange, was more economic and efficient that another which demanded a third person who gave to the land-worker, in exchange for his tithe, a currency token which the land-worker gave to the State.

The truth was that money, which was invented to facilitate barter and measure price, has ended by darkening counsel and measuring value. Money, being a token and not a thing, could be a means and a measure, but could never be the means and the measure. Here a principle of S. Thomas was golden: 'Of things related to an end the measure is the end.' Thus the measure of a poker is not its power to add lustre to a brass-finished fire-grate, but to poke and rake a fire.

Of course, as things do not measure other things, but mind measures one thing by another, a mind can employ not the true measure, but a false - not an essential measure but an accidental - not the measure (which is the end) but a measure (which is not the end).

If, then, we measure a thing or commodity by something which is not its end, we do not give its absolute value, but only its relative value. Yet how many modern minds, when asked the value of a commodity, think in terms of the end of the commodity? If we are asked, ' What is the value of a hundred-weight of wheat?' we naturally say 'Eight, ten, or twelve shillings.' We do not say 'A hundredweight of wheat will support a man's life for six months.' In other words, by expressing a hundredweight in terms of currency we gave, not its value, but only its money-value. No wonder that minds accustomed to the atmosphere of currency find themselves in an intellectual money-muddle.

But the money-muddle is more than intellectual: it tends to become real. Money is a token, or artifice devised by intelligence to express a reality. But intelligence, as Lewis Carroll reminds us, 'can make words [or tokens] mean anything.' Thus the same intelligence which to-day has made a piece of paper marked TEN SHILLINGS mean a hundred-weight of wheat may to-morrow make it mean one pound of wheat. [N.B. -- I do not understand how this is done. I and my readers who have followed the recent startling fluctuations in currency values throughout the world only know that it is done]. Hence the real value of a TEN SHILLING note may veer from a hundredweight to a pound of wheat. But the real value of a hundredweight or of a pound of wheat never veers.

How great the plight must sooner or later befall a people that has lost the art of giving things their real value, and has entrusted the commonweal to the muddled judgement of men who are experts only in money value.

Domine! Salve nos; perimus

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Humility and Pride

by Roy F. Moore

Humility is the queen of virtues. She found her champion in Chesterton, who, besides being one of the wittiest and wisest men of the 20th Century, was also one of the most humble. With his keen insight, he could distinguish true from false humility, pointing out where the one must be sought out and the other repelled. In his work Orthodoxy, from the chapter “The Suicide of Thought”, he wrote thus:

“Humility was largely meant as a restraint upon the arrogance and infinity of the appetite of man. He was always outstripping his mercies with his own newly invented needs. His very power of enjoyment destroyed half his joys. By asking for pleasure, he lost the chief pleasure; for the chief pleasure is surprise. Hence it became evident that if a man would make his world large, he must be always making himself small.”

So it was with him, so it is with Distributism. Why?

For a comparison, look at her two rivals, capitalism and socialism. Why do they fixate on bigness, whether in government or business? Not everything constructed on a huge scale is necessarily a good thing. When economic giants like Enron or WorldCom crumbled, thousands lost their jobs, savings and futures. When political powers like the British Empire dissolved, the world changed forever for those opposed to its demise.

So why the need for bigness? It comes down to the sin that brought down our First Parents in the Garden of Eden. And that is pride. St. Thomas Aquinas defines it as “inordinate self-love.” Dante in his Divine Comedy called it "love of self perverted to hatred and contempt for one's neighbor." Chesterton describes it as the vice that is “the poison in every other vice.” Since it is root of the rest of the Seven Deadly Sins, it is the core of greed and envy. Capitalism is often accused of fostering these vices, but socialism is just as guilty of them as well.

It was the belief of John Calvin that material prosperity was a sign that one belonged to the “saved.” When the centuries-old prohibition against usury was thrown out in his system, it lay the groundwork for rapid accumulation of wealth at other’s expense. This, along with the seizing of Church lands during the reign of England’s Henry VIII, were the foundation for capitalism to build on. This “hatred and contempt for one’s neighbor,” the peasantry and craftsman who held onto Catholicism and the old ways, sowed anger and misery in many memories. Over time, the fruit of it became the poison of socialism.

As the 19th Century rolled on, Europe roiled under the twin burdens of excess wealth and excess poverty. With the rise of the Communists and their spokesmen Marx and Engels, the bloodletting against real and perceived persecution of the poor rose. Both private property and the market economy, though distorted by the ideas of men like Adam Smith and David Ricardo, were seen as the very source of the common man’s misery. A state where the government controlled all and supplied all needs was seen as its cure.

But the very rich whom the socialists strove against where also the very ones who, more often than not, supported and financed Socialist ideas. Engels himself came from a wealthy family and supported the lazy Marx and his suffering family. In time, the fortunes of the Rockefeller and Carnegie families in America would go to fund causes promoting monopolization, eugenics and population control. Again, “inordinate self-love” by this self-proclaimed elite manipulated the poor as if they were toys. And, they claimed, for the poor’s own good.

Both capitalism and socialism tend to see humanity as a conglomeration of numbers, not men with immortal souls. The one treats men as “units of production and consumption“, potential markets to tap into, customers with needs to fill at the lowest cost possible. The other treats men as only the “oppressed masses“, drugged by religion and exploited by bosses, in need of a revolutionary vanguard, either Marxist or Fabian, to lead it into a glorious classless society.

Both are materialistic systems, full of themselves and empty of God, Who is considered an dangerous illusion by one and an extraneous add-on by the other. Both desire to envelop the globe with their influence, with every society colored in a monotone of dull socialist brick red or a brash, unnatural capitalist electric blue. All growing larger and more powerful, certain of triumph, convinced of never making mistakes or at least huge ones. Pride is at the core of both.

But Distributism believes in limits, treasures the small, cherishes the common pleasures of the common man. In the language of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, it prefers the Shire to Mordor. It holds that small government and small businesses, fair trade and family farms, a clean Earth, big families and frugal comfort are more natural to man than mansions and empires. The local is preferred to the global. All is based on humility, contentment and gratitude for what we have from the hand of God.

As Chesterton wrote in The Outline of Sanity:

"There cannot be a nation of millionaires, and there never has been a nation of Utopian comrades; but there have been any number of nations of tolerably contented peasants."

Pride and world systems based on it dissolve nations. Humility – in which Distributism finds its roots - preserves and sustains nations because it preserves and sustains the family and the home.

Gilbert! Magazine
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The Kelo Keelhaul

by Roy F. Moore

Chesterton was a defender of both hearth and home. He and his wife Frances had built their splendid house called Top Meadow west of London in the small town of Beaconsfield. After one of his speaking tours, they hurried joyfully back to their warm house and garden, their slice of Heaven on Earth. As he wrote in What’s Wrong With The World:

"Making the landlord and the tenant the same person has certain advantages, as that the tenant pays no rent, while the landlord does a little work."

Thanks to a US Supreme Court ruling of June 23rd of this year, home ownership as we know it is in peril.

The Pfizer Corporation, makers of Viagra and Listerine, made a deal in 1998 with a private development corporation and New London, Connecticut to build a new research facility. Hotels, office buildings and condominiums would also be built on the land. The main obstacle to this was a group of families and their homes on the proposed site. The city condemned their houses under “eminent domain,” and then transferred the land to another private developer who would build the facility as planned. Both Pfizer and New London would benefit from the increase of both jobs and revenue. But the homeowners would be out of luck.

The homeowners, led by Susette Kelo, refused to be mowed down by the city‘s actions. Ms. Kelo and the others contacted the Washington, DC-based Institute for Justice for legal help. At the end of 2000, the Institute filed a suit against both the private developer and New London to stop their attempt to seize the homes. The suit wound its way through the courts until in early 2004, Connecticut’s Supreme Court ruled 4-3 against Kelo et al. In July of that year, the Institute appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. One year later, the Court sided in a 5-4 decision with the Connecticut court. On July 18th, The Institute filed for a rehearing of the case.

While writing this column, a word came into my mind that sounded like Kelo, and that was “keelhaul”. And that word describes exactly what has been done to Ms. Kelo, her neighbors and ourselves. So please permit a momentary digression.

In the early days of sailing ships, this often fatal punishment was used especially by the English and Dutch navies. The convicted sailor, hands and feet tied and heavy weights attached to him, was thrown overboard. He then would be slowly dragged under the keel of the ship and hauled up the other side. He would be thrown over the other side and hauled again, until either he was drowned or cut to pieces by the barnacles on the hull.

In the case of the co-defendants in New London, and all of us now as a result of their loss, property ownership has been itself both half-drowned and cut to pieces. To quote the retiring Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who dissented:

“The specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the State from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory.”

As was noted by the Institute for Justice, the nation's only libertarian public interest law firm, private property can only be taken for “public use,” such as a road or a public building. That limitation was written in both the U.S. Constitution and every state constitution. But with the Kelo decision, following an earlier Connecticut Supreme Court ruling, a home, small business or farm can now be seized under the eminent domain rule and given to a private developer. Even if there is nothing wrong with the home, business or farm, it can still be stolen from the rightful owner if the local or state government believes some big developer can create greater tax revenue for their coffers.

Dana Berliner of the Institute wrote, “Government is using force to replace middle-income citizens with richer ones and small businesses with larger ones.” In just five years, the government filed or threatened condemnation of more than 10,000 properties for private parties, according to the Institute. That is all types of properties, even churches! And to throw salt in the wounds from this judicial keelhauling, just hours after the Kelo decision, Freeport, Texas officials condemned two family-owned seafood businesses in order to build a privately owned marina project.

In one of his best known works, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, Chesterton writes of a man leading the defense of a borough against a proposed highway that would cut it apart. He always had a love for the small shops, the comfortable homes and lively neighborhoods that made human society humane in spite of its sins and misery. Even in his day in the early 20th Century, he knew that both big government and big business had their eyes on such neighborhoods and hamlets. Those places needed a champion. And so Chesterton said, "I drew my sword in defense of Notting Hill."

The Institute has joined with other groups to form the Castle Coalition. Their “Hands Off My Home” campaign aims to change Federal and state laws to stop cold the abuse of “eminent domain” for private gain. Protecting the home from both big government and big business is a tenet of Distributism. So let’s all back this campaign to the hilt.

Let Chesterton, writing in The Coloured Lands, have the last word:

"It is the main earthly business of a human being to make his home, and the immediate surroundings of his home, as symbolic and significant to his own imagination as he can."

©Gilbert! Magazine
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Distributism vs. Capitalism

by Roy F. Moore

Most of Distributism’s critics consider it as a form of Socialism. They point to the fact that both Chesterton and Belloc started as Socialists, and that is where their command of the facts comes to an end. Both Chesterton and Belloc clearly pulled away from the dark path of Socialism, and openly attacked it. But they never ceased their assault on Capitalism. So, in the minds of certain defenders of Capitalism, Distributism must still be Socialism.

Why do people insist on misunderstanding what we support and oppose? Why do folks believe we are against a “market economy”? It is because we have been indoctrinated in the belief that a “market economy” and a “capitalist economy” are one and the same.

But they aren’t.

A market economy has been with us ever since civilization began. The buying and selling of goods, trade across borders, barter and exchange and competition among rivals are part and parcel of a society’s life. From the days of ancient Babylon to our computerized age, the ebb and flow of production and commerce goes on like the tide and the seasons. After the coming of Christ and the spread of His Church into European society, the laws and life of commerce gradually became more humane, and the greed of the powerful was mostly held in check.

In western and central Europe during the High Middle Ages, as Belloc notes in his classic book, The Servile State, the guilds regulated the markets and the crafts, while the Crown kept tabs on financial and legal matters. High quality of goods and services were protected and preserved, competition was allowed to flourish, but within certain boundaries. And under-girding all was the authority of the Church, vigilant in defending God-given rights and the good of souls in both government and marketplace.

But between the late Renaissance and the birth of the Protestant Reformation, all that began to change and for the worse. The Church found its authority weakened due to internal corruption and heresy, and a Protestant legal system ushered in by John Calvin enabled the kings and princes of northern Europe to seize the Church’s lands and enrich the powerful few. Usury, no longer condemned as a sin, became the legal norm, and the wise prohibitions against usury that once protected the lower classes were tossed aside as if they were filthy rags. Bankers and wealthy merchants took advantage of the chaotic times to worsen the lot of the workers, farmers and craftsmen.

As the centuries plodded on, the ancient restraints on the market and finance crumbled away. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the poor and the farmers were fed into the factories, working themselves into their graves. Such abuses were the stuff of Charles Dickens’ fiction that was clearly based on fact, since he himself was forced to work as a boy in such a factory. He wrote eloquently and heart-breakingly of those black years and the poverty and shame.

This state of affairs which would be called Capitalism would have its explainers and defenders, the primary one being Adam Smith and his magnum opus The Wealth of Nations. In it, he posited an “invisible hand” that guided economies toward the good, believing that “enlightened self-interest” would keep any forces of chaos unleashed by this system in check. Chesterton thought otherwise when he wrote:

It was the mystical dogma of (Jeremy) Bentham and Adam Smith and the rest, that some of the worst of human passions would turn out to be all for the best. It was the mysterious doctrine that selfishness would do the work of unselfishness.

Such abuses and turmoil brought forth moral revulsion, which emerged in the reaction of Socialism. But since, like Capitalism, it believed in centralization of economic and political power, the cure it promoted for the ills it protested was worse than the disease. And since, like Capitalism, it had a materialistic core, it saw the religious and spiritual as a dangerous drug for the masses, an “opiate of the people” as the foul Karl Marx put it. Neither system prizes the common man owning his own means of earning a living, not depending on a wage paid either by big government or big business.

As Chesterton put it:

Our society is so abnormal that the normal man never dreams of having the normal occupation of looking after his own property. When he chooses a trade, he chooses one of the ten thousand trades that involve looking after other people's property.

In Distributism, productive property is owned by the many, rather than the few. In practical terms, it means small business, co-operatives and worker-owned and managed businesses run the day-to-day workings of commerce. Big businesses are encouraged by government to break up into smaller, independent units. Government, in turn, is reduced in size and scale, with local government handling most of the responsibility thus eliminating the need for overregulation and reducing the size and scope of government, as well as the demand on taxpayers. Hence, a true market-based economy arises, one not plagued by the lust for dominance that infests both Capitalism and Socialism.

Chesterton knew that the word Distributism sounds suspicious to the ear. He admitted it so, saying it was “awkward but accurate”. And we are waiting for a better name. But in the meantime, better to be accurate and awkward than to be false and flowing.

Gilbert! Magazine
Reprinted with Permission

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The Madness of Bigness

by Roy F. Moore

To the insane man his insanity is quite prosaic, because it is quite true. A man who thinks himself a chicken is to himself as ordinary as a chicken. A man who thinks he is a bit of glass is to himself as dull as a bit of glass. It is the homogeneity of his mind which makes him dull, and which makes him mad. It is only because we see the irony of his idea that we think him even amusing; it is only because he does not see the irony of his idea that he is put in Hanwell at all. In short, oddities only strike ordinary people. Oddities do not strike odd people.

Hanwell, which Chesterton is referring to here in the chapter of Orthodoxy called “The Maniac,” is, as you probably know, an insane asylum. His description of the ordinariness of madness would make Hanwell a good name our present economic system.

It has become oh so ordinary for big companies to buy out smaller ones or merge into bigger ones. During the last two weeks of January 2005 a Distributist can see how this trend of homogenized madness in the business world effects us all. It is the same in the halls of government of course, but these events I will relate hit home hard in the Boston area, where I live.

During this period of time, the conglomerate Proctor & Gamble bought out the local-based razor and battery giant Gillette with the latter’s permission. As is par for the course, this merger will result in factories closing, with thousands of workers losing their jobs, throwing their futures into agonizing doubt. Gillette claimed that they would be treading water if Proctor & Gamble didn’t take them over.

However, the Massachusetts Secretary of State is launching a probe to inquire whether Gillette’s financial strength was as weak as it claimed. According to Boston Herald, the CEO of Gillette would take home a financial package worth a now estimated $185 million. Reporter Brett Arends noted two days earlier that an employee making $50,000 annually there would have to slave away for more than 3,000 years to make the amount the CEO will receive.

In the other major economic event, the Boston Globe, owned by the infamous New York Times Corporation, is attempting to buy a forty-nine percent share in the free daily paper the Boston Metro. The Times is offering the Swedish-based Metro International, owner of the free daily, $16.5 million in exchange for the share. The Herald has filed an anti-trust suit against the Globe in light of the attempted purchase, citing concerns over monopolizing news coverage and advertising revenue in Boston, thus reducing competition.

But there is further controversy yet. Two officials of Metro International had to resign their positions over racist remarks they made during gatherings held for their corporation. Black leaders in Boston have demanded the Times and the Globe to scrap their attempt to buy into the free daily because of the racist slurs by the two executives. Furthermore, the parent company of the Metro has a partial owner, Modern Times, who owns twenty-eight percent of the company. Modern Times controls a Swedish network that, among other programs, telecasts European porno films.

We have seen such shenanigans before and worse in companies like Enron, WorldCom, Bechtel, Halliburton, and Wal-Mart. The maddening idea that “bigger is better, all the time,” devouring small competitors like they were snacks at a buffet table, is rampant among too many in the circles of big business. Like their counterparts in big government, those in the boardrooms of huge conglomerates feel the need to always grow and spread. They are not satisfied with living within limits.

Can this trend toward larger companies and conglomerates be stopped and reversed, along with the similar trend toward a World State run by a self-proclaimed elite? Yes, it can. It will take long, hard efforts against those who believe in the fantasy of “bigger is better.” More and more people realize these trends are wrong and they are galvanizing to fight against them, but they lack one important thing. They have no comprehensive vision of what they would replace it with. Without a vision the people perish.

We have a vision to offer. It is Distributism. It is grounded in common sense, sane limits and the Good News.

As Chesterton wrote in The Outline of Sanity:

The world has woken up very late; but that is not our fault. That is the fault of all the fools who told us for twenty years that there could never be any Trusts; and are now telling us, equally wisely, that there can never be anything else.

In a Distributist society, companies like Gillette, Proctor & Gamble, the New York Times and Metro International would not be so huge. Both balanced legislation and consumer action would keep such companies from expanding to their current size. Likewise, the powers of government would be kept in check by similar methods, so as not to fill the vacuum with the tyranny of a heartless bureaucracy.
We can defeat the twin giants of big government and big business. Giants are made to be defeated by the likes of us.

©Gilbert! Magazine (The Distributist)
Reprinted with Permission

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Distributism vs. Socialism

by Roy F. Moore

G.K. Chesterton said that one should "never let a quarrel get in the way of a good argument." He followed his own advice when he had bracing but loving arguments with his brother Cecil, which continued from the time they were children. Nowadays, it is far too easy for an argument over rival ideas to degenerate into a quarrel.

I saw this recently in a discussion about Distributism among a group of traditionalist Catholics. It became increasingly sharp-tongued when those who advocated Chesterton's and Belloc's ideas were denounced in favor of Capitalism. The epithets came fast and furious. Distributism was dismissed as "utopian" and the other usual tactics, but there was one charge that stuck in my craw: a respondent claimed that Distributism was just "Marxism with a rosary." A rather gross misrepresentation, but unfortunately quite typical from those who defend Capitalism against Socialism and assume that anything that is not pure Capitalism reeks of Marx.

Chesterton said that perhaps the worst thing about Capitalism is that it has achieved all the things that Socialism set out to do: "It is all very well to repeat distractedly, 'What are we coming to, with all this Bolshevism?' It is equally relevant to add, 'What are we coming to, even without Bolshevism?' The obvious answer is—Monopoly. It is certainly not private enterprise."

This is why we Distributists oppose Marxist Socialism as much as Capitalism and Fascism. But for the sake of argument, and not quarreling, indulge me while I explain the differences between Marxism and Distributism.

Marxist Socialism believes in centralizing the means of production and distribution into the hands of the government, as well as all decisions relating to politics and social matters. It is opposed to the very idea of private property. Marx's Communist Manifesto includes the phrase, "from each according to his ability; to each according to his needs." Who would decide who has the ability to do what, and who needed what? The government.

Marxism and most Socialist philosophies put more power into the hands of central government. But as Chesterton notes, it still favors the trend toward monopoly nonetheless, only with big government holding all the cards rather than big business. The average man is simply "one of the masses," just a unit of production that can be replaced if it goes "counter-revolutionary" or "deviationist" at any time.

Further, like Capitalism and Fascism, Socialism has a materialistic core to it, a belief in the utmost importance of the things of this world. It operates under the assumption that life on this side of the grave is all there is. Religion is an enemy to the system, lulling people away from responsibility, an "opiate of the people." Socialism tries to direct man's inherent religious energy to the substitutes offered by the government, whether it be in the Leader, the Party, the State, or Humanity itself.

But Distributism does the opposite. It believes in personal freedom and in de-centralizing political power into the lowest level possible. (Subsidiarity is one of the core principles of Distributist thought.) It also holds that private property—especially private productive property—is not evil in itself. But it needs to be widely distributed to as many as possible. In the practical sphere, that means breaking up the big conglomerates running and ruining our economy, as well as cutting the size and power of big government from the bottom-up.

Further, Distributism knows that materialism is no substitute for the love and light of God Almighty and obedience to His holy laws. As C. S. Lewis, who was greatly influenced by Chesterton's works, noted, "Whenever you find a man who says he doesn't believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later."

During these days of continual big corporate buyouts and mergers, as well as constant expansion of big government power and loss of freedom under the guise of "fighting terrorism," it is vital to teach people what Distributism is about. It is just as vital to show them how it isn't some form of Marxist tripe. Calling Distributism "Marxism with a rosary" is as silly as believing in "dry water" or "flaming snow."

What to do first then? Here is a suggestion from Chesterton in The Outline of Sanity:

Do anything, however small, that will prevent the completion of the work of capitalist combination. Do anything that will even delay that completion. Save one shop out of a hundred shops. Save one croft out of a hundred crofts. Keep open one door out of a hundred doors; for so long as one door is open, we are not in prison.

As for the march of big government toward a tyrannical future, get involved in local politics, for that is the level most responsive to change. Run for local office if you can, and network with other like-minded folks who are doing the same. It may not seem that much good can be done at all with such little steps, but take heart from what Chesterton wrote about such steps:

A hundred tales of human history are there to show that tendencies can be turned back, and that one stumbling-block can be the turning point. The sands of time are simply dotted with single stakes that have thus marked the turn of the tide.

©2006 The American Chesterton Society

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