The Year in Review | Catholic Answers (Mid Week At Work) Distributism.

The Year in Review | Catholic Answers

Really fascinating economic discussion starting at 20:00.

I've been posting some topics on Distributism, all of which recently have to deal with alcohol oddly enough (and which oddly enough commenced on the centennial of the passage of the 18th Amendment). 

Distributism is an economic theory, or point of view, or rather both, that gets limited circulation in the modern world, but in the podcast linked in above, you can get a good feel for some of its concerns.  The comment about Capitalism and Socialism  having the same point of view is classically Distributist, and the comment about our Capitalistic society not really having a free market is a fairly pronounced and deep Distributist view.

Capitalism has been so triumphant in the post Jimmy Carter era that few even question anything about it, and those who tend to tend to stumble in the dark coming up with nonsense.  The recent flirtation on the hard left with the pig slop of Socialism is a good example. Socialism doesn't address the ills of Capitalism, it's actually a reflection of the same impulses that tend to drive some Capitalistic thought written large, and it therefore compounds the problems it supposedly seeks to address.

But that doesn't mean that there aren't problems.

A lot of my very thoughtful and conservative friends will point out that the post World War Two Capitalistic triumph has raised many people out of poverty.  Indeed, as we posted here the other day, we live in the first era in human history in which the vast, vast majority of people don't live in poverty from birth until death.  That we don't appreciate that is, in part, because we ourselves live in a society that had been Capitalistic from its onset and it saw the benefits of that exceedingly early.

But that doesn't mean that there aren't problems to be addressed.  And indeed, a lot of people have that increasing sense.  It isn't that Capitalism, in the form in which we have it (Corporate Capitalism), hasn't been enormously successful, it's rather that its hardcore emphasis on cheap goods and efficiency may have passed over a point at which it's now causing harm.

Agrarian philosopher Wendell Berry wrote an essay once entitled "What are people for?".  Agrarianism and Distributism are not the same thing, but it is the case that all agrarians are distributist.  That question is the ultimate one in any economic theory.  And once there isn't a decent answer, there's a problem.  That question is is posed in a way in this link, and the answer of what the focus ought to be is noted as well.