Yet another verse in our Ballad of Distributism

So far, I’ve had a lovely time bashing Capitalism. An important first step. If Capitalism was nifty, we could all drop this nonsense and go back to waiting for Jackson to make The Hobbit.

Unfortunately, both for the blog and for the rest of civilization, and New Jersey, Capitalism is unjust. It stands in need not of reform, but replacement.

So what can we do? We have a lot of people, we have a lot of land and resources. Capitalism is a giant war to see who can get the biggest piles. How about a new goal?

That each of us own the means to provide himself with a decent, secure livelihood. Or, God’s gifts distributed justly.

Clarifications. First, “just” isn’t “equal.” Distributists never talk about a Dystopia of identical farms. Humans are unique. We’ll all provide for ourselves differently. With the free choices of buyers, some businesses will do better than others, just like now. Difference is, bigger businesses won’t be allowed to commit injustice in the name of competition. Your one-man startup won’t get squashed by Crap-Mart.

Second, we emphatically do not visualize the government confiscating everything and then, pretty please, doling it out us nicely. Need I repeat that? Okay, good. People often think they’re the first to notice that distributism has an unsettling connotation of some Big Force doing the distributing. Sorry. It is a remarkably inept word, but the point is the goal. We want land and resources to end up distributed. We’re not Confiscatists.

So how do we escape our current ridiculous inequality without committing injustice ourselves?

This is only a blog; Belloc laid out a whole program in An Essay on the Restoration of Property. Briefly, the idea is to give the individual the maximum freedom (e.g., from taxes) to pursue his business, while making it fiscally impossible for any one business to grow too huge. Get too big, we tax you down to size.

We already have anti-trust laws; why not anti-corporation laws? As I mentioned in another blog, this precise plan of taxation was outlined hundreds of years ago by a kooky Communist named Thomas Jefferson.

Granted, we already have some encouragement for small business in thls country. That’s great. No one ever said this economy is pure hell. At least I didn’t. But small businesses are the exception, not the rule. (And many fight to grow up and be big corporations.) We need a paradigm shift.

We can begin by not taxing small businesses at all and taxing corporations precisely enough to prevent their expansion. We can use that money (and maybe even those few thousands of other tax dollars that are somehow being funneled to less than vital causes) to subsidize the instruction of workers who want to learn a trade and start in for themselves.

Nothing apocalyptic here. No overnight disbanding of corporate America that kicks millions of clueless workers onto the street. Distributists don’t expect to fix this in a year, or ten, or fifty. Instead, we seek a gradual process, and we want to start now.

If we legally favor small business, hundreds and thousands of alternatives to the corporate giants will flourish. As corporations wither from high taxes and honest competition, their discharged workers will either find jobs with the new small businesses or seek aid and start their own. A rocky journey at times, yes, but the other option is our current paradise where no one ever gets laid off.

When the market eventually acclimates to small business (and we reform our insane socialist tax burden) the need for subsidy will shrink. Then we can introduce moderate taxes on small businesses. We’ll never have the huge tax flow we had from the hemorhaging corporations, but if we have a culture of owner-businesses and secure self-reliance, will we need it?

That’s about as rough and quick a sketch as I can give. You’ll have a million questions (send them along), but that’s the basic idea.

Note that everyone doesn’t have to be a farmer. Many people might like to step in when poison-based agribusiness collapses, but almost any business can be run by one or a few people. Many already are, but are dwarfed by their corporate peers.

There’ll be exceptions. It might make sense to have all a state’s railroads owned by the same company. Fine. But does one man have to own the company? Democracy works for the country, why not try it in business?

We don’t realize it, but most needs could be met locally. Food, clothes, shoes— we could make room for the farmer, tailor, cobbler, for local people who provide for local needs. People used to know they’d never get rich, but they also knew they’d never go out of business except by their own folly. If we can let go of the lottery dream, we’ll all find economic freedom.

Or is it freedom? If you’ve liked what you’ve read, you see Distributism as a new system that will protect everyone’s freedom. But if you’re an unconvinced Capitalist fan, you probably see the plan above as an outrageous bid to swell Federal power to maniacal proportions. Isn’t the State bloated enough without handing it the axe that’ll chop our last defenses to pieces? Control the market? You call that freedom?

Well, yeah. Obviously.

As will be explained with almost morbid lucidity next time. In rhyme. With a lime.

Ha! Just kidding. Who eats limes?