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David_Castlen
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How will society determine when an organization (business) is too big? Who will be the decision makers?
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Abu
Guest
How strange when no one stands in its way.
Distributism has never had wide-spread support. One of the reasons may be that “the market economy consists of voluntary property exchanges. There is no mechanism of ‘distribution’ whatsoever.” (Thomas E Woods, The Church And The Market, Lexington Books, 2005, p 161, 201). While Distributism may be impractical as a societal norm, especially as Catholic social teaching recognises the tremendous benefits of free enterprise, condemns socialism, and proposes no “third way”, anyone is free to practise it.
Anyone is free to follow the idea.
“Those who care to support locally based and smaller-scale agriculture have already been doing so for two decades now by means of community-supported agriculture, which is booming. On a purely voluntary basis, people who wish to support local agriculture pay several hundred dollars at the beginning of the year to provide the farmer with the capital he needs; they then receive locally grown produce for the rest of the year. The organizers of this movement, rather than wasting their time and ours complaining about the need for state intervention, actually did something: they put together a voluntary program that has enjoyed considerable success across the country. Perhaps, if distributists feel as strongly about their position as they claim, this example can provide a model of how their time might be better spent.” What’s Wrong with ‘Distributism’, Thomas E. Woods, Jr., October 6, 2002, at: lewrockwell.com/woods/woods136.html
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frankpearson
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Really all of this dialogue about who will enforce distributism is getting old. Just like how we create laws to prohibit child labor and regulate a just wage and a just work day (all of these things are required of us as Catholics in Rerum Novarum, by the way), we the people decide. We can decide by competing in the private market and we can decide by electing politicians that will enact laws that ensure small businesses can get into the market and that discourage monopoly and even enact laws that discourage one person owning another person’s labor.
We manage our society through enacting laws or through electing others to enact laws as we would (we the people).
I am really quite convinced that many involved in this discussion just still don’t understand what distributism is.
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frankpearson
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Sorry Mises’ brand of capitalism cannot claim these successes.
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Abu
Guest
How strange to advocate the dictate to “enforce distributism” – yet this is the Belloc’s “consistent, sustained aggression against private property, involving punitive taxation, and restrictions on the use of private property. It rests on coercion and threats of violence and imprisonment…” (Thomas E Woods , Jr., The Church and the Market, Lexington Books, 2005, p 168).
Post #406: “a democracy has the right and duty to enact laws to seek and punish those who steal, cheat, swindle, and to prevent monopolies, and we’ve seen many jailed for such as these.”
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frankpearson
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I would like you to flesh out more the “threats of violence” that distributists make.
And the text you are quoting was written by somebody arguing AGAINST distributism who said we don’t need it to control monopolies since he seemed to think that monopolies or trusts are being sufficiently managed in our current system already.
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Jonatello
Guest
a couple questions, no snark intended:
1: would you describe yourself as an anarchist?
2: how do you believe private property (in regards to natural resources, like land) is established?
I’m curious about your answers to these, because you seem to consider any use of a societal vessel for rules and decision-making to be aggression or threats of aggression, which (I agree) has some degree of fundamental truth. I feel like your answers to the above 2 questions could help me (and others) interpret accurately your expressed point of view.
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David_Castlen
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**This is my sixth reading of RR - a very easy read - very clear - succint. It clearly supports, encourages and recognizes the value of private property; it abhors interference into ones production process and especially the taking of property. It encourages the right treatment of employees and condemns its violators. it condemns the force that Distriubtism implies. It condemns socialism and any force by a government on a person holding property. Distributism (if it is implimented) will put a force on those who own (a lot of) property. it is wrong. It is stealing. It will create envy: one of the reasons the Church condemns socialism (CA).
But I ask, if a monoploy will provide a cheaperr product, better product, quicker availablity of a product, add more jobs, better jobs, better pay and create an atomosphere where people are likely to serve Our Lord and Savior; what is wrong with it?**
The only monopoly I fear is the one one that currently exist and has since 1914. It has killed more people, stole more money, created more envy, enslaved more people than any monopoly otherwise: the US Government.
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Jonatello
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yes, but all governance implies force.
To stop there is a mistake though.
With or without government, any claim of natural resources, like land, for one’s own private control and ownership implies force.
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David_Castlen
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"Implies"
Eating could imply hunger; but I eat seldom when I have hunger, but (rather) out of habit
Work could imply need; but I do not work out of necessity, but out of satisfaction.
Fishing could imply food; but I fish for pleasure
Fighting could imply an effort to retain safety; but history tells me that the cause has often been ego or greed or honor
How does ownership IMPLY force; could not owenrship imply inheritance, purchase, taking possion of something which is owned by on one etc
One may infer force, but ownership does not imply force
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Jonatello
Guest
How is a claim of ownership over say, land, established?"Implies"
Eating could imply hunger; but I eat seldom when I have hunger, but (rather) out of habit
Work could imply need; but I do not work out of necessity, but out of satisfaction.
Fishing could imply food; but I fish for pleasure
Fighting could imply an effort to retain safety; but history tells me that the cause has often been ego or greed or honor
How does ownership IMPLY force; could not owenrship imply inheritance, purchase, taking possion of something which is owned by on one etc
One may infer force, but ownership does not imply force
The force (real or implied) of the self-proclaimed owner of “that lush hill with the creek” matched with the force (real or implied) of the rest of the people around who might wish to use said resource, and the decision either falls to the might of the “owner” or the might of the others who deem as a “communty/society” that his ownership to is okay by them and implement a legal mechanism to protect his claim via real or implied force.
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frankpearson
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Rerum Novarum gives explicit support for the right of the government to enact laws related to the relationship between labor and capital.
It also explicitly addresses the Laissez Faire treatment of valid contract between employer and laborer. Again, you are on the wrong side of the issue here.
Your caricature of distributism, your “straw man” that distributism involves some form of theft or coercion is no more justified than calling it stealing for a government to tax the people for relief of the destitute, another thing explicitly supported by Rerum Novarum.
Wake up and decide which side you are on. Are you on the side of the Church or on the side of Socialism’s big brother, the revolutionary and irreligious unrestrained capitalist.
“It is one thing to have a right to the possession of money and another thing to have a right to use money as one wills.”
Please reread sections 33 through 37. And again, please remember that the caricature and straw man that the distributist calls for violence or revolution, is exactly that; it is dishonest. To argue that taxation is theft is in direct opposition to Rerum Novarum.
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David_Castlen
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I will. Keep the matches away from that man… wouldn’t want to see him on fire; otherwise how will we be able to confiscate all that excess land from those horrible greedy "excessors"
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frankpearson
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I am actually in the process of burning that straw man now.
“Taking things away” doesn’t actually have to be done. You can make things more or less advantageous through things like taxation. And, as you know, there are many distributists who don’t believe it should be pursued with government involvement except in lessening restrictions on small businesses, removing unjust regulation. I disagree with them. But there are many who think that.
Discouraging through regulation and taxation (not confiscation) a practice in society that is hurtful to the common good is quite clearly encouraged by Rerum Novarum. Exercising public authority for the common good is not only not prohibited but is advised by Rerum Novarum.
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Abu
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It is necessary to face reality since the theme advanced by frankpearson (post # 356) is that “the rule….is that the person who labors at land and capital own that land and capital.” This ridicules the clear affirmation of free enterprise by Bl John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI developed by the Catholic Late Scholastics, the first real economists, which enabled untold millions to escape from poverty.
The first examples of free enterprise appeared in the great Catholic monasteries, about the ninth century. (John Gilchrist, The Church and Economic Activity in the Middle Ages, St Martin’s Press1969, I; cf. op. cit (Stark) p xii, 55-58).
The fact is that Catholic philosophy and theology, based on reason and faith, enabled the birth of free enterprise. From the great monastic estates in the ninth century, immense increases in agricultural productivity grew from “such significant innovations as the switch to horses, the heavy moldboard plow, and the three-field system” away from subsistence agriculture to specialised crops and products, sold at a profit to initiate a cash economy. “As their incomes continued to mount, this led many monasteries to become banks, lending to the nobility.” The Victory of Reason, Rodney Stark, Random House, 2005, p 58].
It is investment, the systematic risking of wealth in the pursuit of gain that separates the entrepreneur from those who exact their wealth through rents, taxes, conquest, or banditry; compared to just an investor, the entrepreneur invests in productive activities that create new wealth.
The control of monopolies is part of free enterprise and the Schoolmen criticized both
entrepreneurs or workers who engaged in conspiracies to establish a monopoly. (Dr Alejandro Chafuen, Christians For Freedom, Ignatius, p117, 177).
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Abu
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Post # 355:
“Capitalism” is a derogatory term coined by Karl Marx, and that’s perhaps why Bl John Paul II dislikes it, as he makes clear as he affirms free enterprise in Centesimus Annus, 1991:
CA 42. ‘If by “capitalism” is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative, even though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a “business economy”, “market economy” or simply “free economy”.
‘CA 43. The Church has no models to present;’
Free enterprise is affirmed also here: “Society does not have to protect itself from the market, as if the development of the latter were ipso facto to entail the death of authentically human relations…Therefore it is not the instrument that must be called to account, but individuals, their moral conscience and their personal and social responsibility.” (Caritas in Veritate, Benedict XVI, 2009, #36).
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frankpearson
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I will go through both of the encyclicals linked again. While I have yet to read statements of a pope in context in support of a Laissez Faire market, and have certainly seen it condemned. Remember that distributism is a system that every proponent affirms has a free market.
Certain malevolent impulses enter an unrestrained market and capture the market, putting it into the hands of a few; and they proceed to exploit children and to work people beyond what is safe and conducive to health, and to degrade the dignity of the person.
Distributists simply recognize that there are other dangerous and destructive tendencies in the market toward concentration of capital and land into the hands of the few. Markets have responded by opposing monopolistic impulses. Many are of the opinion that monopolistic activity has not been controlled to the level it should be. Distributists simply work toward the ideal of a market defined by ownership. The absolute ideal would be the state in which the laborer owned the means of production and land that they labor at.
However, distributists are not revolutionary. I have never met one who was. They, instead simply are trying to work toward an ownership market. Certainly most believe government intervention that prohibits small businesses from entering or succeeding in the market should be removed. And some believe that the government should look at affecting wealth concentration beyond that already in place through more or less anti monopoly regulation such as antitrust laws.
It will probably be a few days before I am finished reviewing the two encyclicals you referenced.
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St_Francis
Guest
David, Abu, Monte…
Just a quick question, under the system you advocate, is “maximizing profit” necessary?
Just a quick question, under the system you advocate, is “maximizing profit” necessary?
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