- How would a distributist society prevent big corporations from other nations from taking over the economy with the mass produced and cheap products? Would there be high tariffs or possibly bans?
Don’t antitrust laws already do similar things? I would presume that it would be something similar. For example, Ma Bell existed from 1877 to 1984 before it was broken up into about eleven different companies, and then some of those companies were broken up into smaller companies as well. Or somesuch. We were on Southwestern Bell in the day, so I didn’t pay much attention. But there are still plenty of antitrust lawsuits in the news… Google, Microsoft, Apple, American Express, MasterCard, Visa, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner… Presumably, with a distributist society, the bar for an antitrust lawsuit is set much lower than in ours.
- If the goal is for most people to have workable land, what do people who don’t need land do with it? What do engineers and lawyers do with their land? Would they rent it off to people who would use the land?
I don’t know about other people, but when Belloc talks about the definitions he uses in his writing, he says:
This human energy so applicable to the material world and its forces we will call ‘Labour’. As for that material and those natural forces, we will call them, for the sake of shortness, by the narrow, but conventionally accepted, term ‘Land’.
So, the three factors in the production of wealth are going to be Land, Capital, and Labor, but “Land” isn’t necessarily limited to dirt or territory. It’s going to be the tools of your trade-- suppose you have a factory that produces widgets. In a distributist society, the land, the factory, and the machinery would all be owned by the people who work the factory, rather than the land and building perhaps being owned by one entity, the machinery owned by another entity, and the people who work the 12-hour shifts just own the value of their time.
- How would bigger projects get done, like airports and hospitals? Especially in large cities, it would be almost impossible for a single family to be able to build or maintain a family owned city airport.
We don’t call it that anymore, necessarily, but the guild system is alive and well in modern society.
For example, one person might want to be an attorney. He has to apply to a certain school and graduate, but that’s not sufficient to be an attorney. He also has to pass a bar exam. It’s not a straight score; the State Bar Association will determine the passage rate. And someone who’s able to practice law in New York won’t be able to practice law in Texas without passing the Texas Bar Exam.
Belloc said:
…Thus industry of every kind in the towns, in transport, in crafts, and in commerce, was organised in the form of Guilds. And a Guild was a society partly co-operative, but in the main composed of private owners of capital whose corporation was self-governing, and was designed to check competition between its members: to prevent the growth of one at the expense of the other. Above all, most jealously did the Guild safeguard the division of property, so that there should be formed within its ranks no proletariat upon the one side, and no monopolising capitalist upon the other.
There was a period of apprenticeship at a man’s entry into a Guild, during which he worked for a master; but in time he became a master in his turn. The existence of such corporations as the normal units of industrial production, of commercial effort, and of the means of transport, is proof enough of what the social spirit was which had also enfranchised the labourer upon the land…
The same thing could be applied to things that require a large amount of infrastructure. The hospital in my little town of 3,000 is nothing like, say, world-class hospitals like St. Jude’s or MD Anderson or Johns Hopkins. The little airport in my town of 3,000— or even the little airport in the city of 100,000 to my north— is nothing like D/FW or La Guardia or Washington Dulles.
- How would cities be planned around distributism? Would you be able to possess less land in cities than in the country?
Don’t think of it necessarily in terms of “land footprints”, perhaps. My brother lives on the third floor of an apartment building. He owns no dirt.
But, in a distributist society, he would control his “means of production”.
- What would be done when the country needs massive amounts of production, such as in times of war? Where would the factories be to build the tanks and warplanes?
Where are the factories now? But imagine they were controlled by Armaments Guilds, perhaps, or something like that. So suppose in WWII, the US built about 90,000 tanks. About a fourth of them would be built at the Detroit Arsenal Tank Plant, which was designed to make armaments in time of war, and transitioned to ordinary production in peacetime. It was GOCO – Government-Owned, Contractor-Operated-- by Chrysler. At one point, perhaps 42,000 people worked there. So imagine the $$ pie not going to the top people at Chrysler, but being split between the 42,000 individuals. Or rather than a handful of mega-factories, employing tens of thousands of people at a time, and exerting great impact upon one city in one state, you have a hundred times that number of factories spread throughout forty or fifty states, exerting economic influence on people in hundreds of different communities.
