Yesterday I mentioned a few of the men who’ve helped me untangle the more confusing messes of our time (in my own head, at least). Today I’d like to add another name to the honors list — Thomas Jefferson.

Not that I’ve drunk deeply of old TJ’s wisdom. Aside from the Declaration of Independence, I’ve read few (strictly speaking, none) of his other works, except for the following paragraph. Now I want to read more.

The paragraph is quoted by Wendell Berry on page 220 of his phenomenal book, The Unsettling of America. Though Chesterton is my favorite writer, others like Wendell Berry and Gene Logsdon have the current advantage of having resided on Earth more recently than 1936. Thus they can use words like ‘agribusiness’ which Chesterton had the good fortune to miss.

Before I let Berry introduce TJ, I should explain the label ‘Distributist’ with which I’ve wantonly festooned his noble name. If I put more work into this blog, I’d hunt down Chesterton’s definition in The Outline Of Sanity (no link, it’s not on the Net yet). But that book’s up at the cabin, twenty minutes away. You’ll just have to read the book yourself.

For now, here’s the Bill Powell Working Defintion of Distributism:

An economic system where the economic goods most avidly pursued are not total government control (socialism), nor the greatest amount of stuff produced while paying the least possible amount of cash to the people who actually make it and shaving off as much profit as possible for the people who sit on their butts and ‘manage’ (capitalism), but are instead the ownership of the means of making a good living by the greatest number of individuals possible, and the resulting quality, not quantity, of goods produced.

That’s a mouthful, but do you get the idea? We’ve all seen or heard of family-owned restaurants, hardware stores, farms, etc. A Distributist doesn’t just think it’s “nice” that those places are “still around”; he wants to work so that more people have a chance to escape the cubicle or factory and have their own business, too. Wherever possible, he wants to make the employee an owner.

Of course there’s a thousand wrinkles to the idea. Like life, it’s complex. A family farm is one thing–what about a family airplane factory? Well, even in a factory, why must there be one owner who works the least and get paid the most? Couldn’t each worker own a share in the company, elect a representative to or even sit himself on the board that makes major company decisions? Once ownership is your goal, you can be just as creative to find solutions as conventional entrepreneurs are to hijack their millions.

Anyhow, Distributism is a concept best savored gradually. There are many excellent books on it: Chesterton’s What’s Wrong With The World and The Outline of Sanity, Belloc’s The Restoration of Property and The Servile State, and E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful (which was originally to be subtitled, Chestertonian Economics), to name a few.

If you’ve ever felt a slight tinge of frustration that everything around you is made by wage slaves in foreign countries, you owe it to yourself to get educated. There are other ways to run this whole shebang. Catholics, in particular, who think anything other than Good Old Capitalism (hear! hear!) is sneaking Communism should avoid jumping to conclusions. A glance at encylicals like Rerum Novarum, Laborem Exercens, Quadragesimo Anno and Centesimus Annus shows that a few Popes, at least, favored other methods.

What does all this have to do with Thomas Jefferson? Apparently, he too favored a nation of owners. As Wendell Berry explains…

To assume that ordinary citizens can compete successfully with people of wealth and with corporations, as our government presently tends to do, is simply to abandon the ordinary citizens. Restraint by taxation is the smallest, most obivous, simplest, and cheapest answer. This is not my idea. Writing to Reverend James Madison on October 28, 1785, Jefferson spoke of the desirability of freehold tenure of property. And then he said:

“Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometric progression as they rise. The earth is given as common stock for man to labor and live on. If for the encouragement of industry [he means, of course, mainly agriculture] we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that employment be provided to those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not, the fundamental right to labor the earth returns to the unemployed…it is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land. The small landholders are the most precious part of a state…”

The small landholders are the most precious part of a state. Really? Even more precious than the fat bank accounts that flourish in the magic of Made In China? Maybe he’d change his mind if he saw how cheaply we can pump out DVDs.