A friend of mine had the recent misfortune to ask me straight out what was up with all this Distributism stuff. Rather like asking Boswell to give you a quick rundown on that dude Johnson, except he actually knew what he was talking about.

Eager for any chance to avoid the story I’m supposed to be writing, as well as this overdue blog, I tapped out a quick sketch that was so pithy, so succinct, so succulent, that (you knew this was coming) it was perfect for a blog that hasn’t gone economic since May or so.

Notice the classy Roman numeral? You can get away with a certain lengthiness in a letter, but rather than serve you a blog that would have been on the order of an End-User License Agreement, I’m going to split it into chapters, like a nice little book. Thanks to the magic of blog time, it will eventually be backwards, but if life was meant to be easy, we wouldn’t have skulls. And speaking of famous Frenchmen who decided to live in England, what better way to begin than with a quote from that master of mellifluity, Hilaire Belloc.

“Capitalism” does not mean a state of society in which capital has been accumulated, its accumulations protected, and itself put to use in producing wealth. Capital so accumulated, protected and used must exist in any human society whatsoever, including, of course, a Communist one.

Nor does “Capitalism” mean a state of society in which capital is owned as private property by the citizens. On the contrary, such a society of free owners is the opposite of Capitalism as the word is here used.

I use the term “Capitalism” here to mean a state of society in which a minority control the means of production, leaving the mass of the citizens dispossessed.

Hilaire Belloc, An Essay on the Restoration of Property

(Paragraph breaks mine.)

People usually equate Capitalism with a “free market,” but is our market totally free? Of course not. We have tons of laws, such as anti-trust laws (supposedly) to safeguard the goods we think are greater than profit, such as justice (supposedly).

Yet with all this government intervention, we manage somehow not to be Communist. So it’s not either Communism or no laws on the market. The market will always have laws. The question is: do we have the right kind of laws?

Rather, what’s the whole point? What kind of society are we trying to build?

If you accept Belloc’s definition of Capitalism, our current system deliberately aims for a few rich and many poor. It’s in the very word—capitalism—whoever has the most capital wins. The more capital you have, the more you can get, the faster you can get it, and the more dirty tricks you can pull to freeze out the little guy (for instance, temporarily selling below cost, which in some societies was a crime.)

For those of the Catholic persuasion, it might be worth noting that this radical take on our economy has been with us for awhile, cropping up here and there in the writings of various fringe socialists such as Pope Pius XI.

“…it is obvious that not only is wealth concentrated in our times but an immense power and despotic economic dictatorship is consolidated in the hands of the few, who often are not owners but only the trustees and managing directors of invested funds which they administer according to their own arbitrary will and pleasure…”

Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno

Now the obvious response is that although there can only be a few rich, at least anyone can become one of those few rich. The small business dream. You can be the next Bill Gates, Domino’s Pizza Guy, Adam Sandler. This is a bit optimistic, but I’ll grant it for the sake of argument because even if it is true, it doesn’t solve one small problem.

You can only become rich by making or keeping many other people poor.