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On the issue of agrarian disasters, Distributism long ago learned from Pope Pius XI the importance of subsidiarity, whereby layers of government covering a wider area can organise cooperation and sharing by less distressed communities, rather than have distressed communities going into the cities to add to the burdens these already impose on the residual agriculture supplying them.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with solum pretium per se. We all shop. The problem comes in how the prices are formed. If they are formed in the face of externalities and subsidies, prices will not reflect costs, and the price mechanism will be distorted.

I don’t understand why a general crop failure would force people into the cities. Cities have the same source of food as do the farm. A local failure is a different matter, but that can be handled, as it usually is, by shifting around the food supplies. However, since the cities often have greater political power than any particular rural area, they are often able to have first claim on the available food supplies. But surely it is in the cities’ real interest to keep the farmer in place, and insure an adequate sharing of resources in such times.

1) It seems to me that the current consumer mindset is a “price alone” (solum pretium) system of procuring something at the cheapest price. Is this a peculiar by-product of the waning stages of the collapse of Capitalism? Or is it an innate desire in human nature that is unfortunately manifested today in visits to Chain Shops and Retail Boxes?

2) What about natural disasters that shatter crop yields for a community for an entire year? Certainly one or two of these events would be enough to shake most people out of the Distributist mindset rather quickly in an re-exodus to the cities.

I patiently await any response.

In Christ,

Matthew Wade

That “Indian” thing on land redistribution began as a bit of banter in response to Bob’s, and maybe differences between libertarians and distributists are as much down to personality as nationality. As 1 Cor 12 suggests, “it takes all sorts to make a world”. I’m personally interested in truth, not wealth or power, choosing for a confirmation name Simon (for St Simon Stock, as in our folk song):
“Once in a bright green wood lived a hermit wise and good
Whom the folks from far and near,
For his counsel sought, knowing well that what he taught,
The dreariest of hearts would cheer”. …
Had I not married I could have been happy in a Benedictine community. Reflecting on the measure of truth in Bob’s harsh words about the British: “I think [the] flaw [in your brand of Christianity] is in its ennui that reflects what appears to be the sad, unfortunate British decline”, the point perhaps is that for a thousand years since the Normans took over we Brits have had nowhere to go except to sea or perhaps the remoter mountains of Scotland and Wales.

Doubtless it was those of us with libertarian genes who fled to the States once they were able to, that explaining both our shortage of them and your perhaps having an excess. However, our tendency to greater introversion should not be mistaken for “ennui”. That is a sickness of thoughtless free spirits and old age rather than of more thoughtful minds busy finding their freedom in truth.

It was elegant program. The government sold land it didn’t own, bought with money it didn’t have, to fuel demand that wasn’t there, which was filled by businesses that didn’t exist. The fiscal and monetary magic was astounding. The same program (designed by the same person)also worked in Japan and Korea. Oddly enough, it failed in Vietnam, for some peculiar local reasons.

In any case, I am not sure if I can offer a resolution to the controversies engaging Bob, Dave, and D.W….. other than to note that I, too, sometimes suffer from a libertarian twitch which spoils my Distributist longings. I think it may be a distinctive American malady.

In any case, I would like to offer a commentary on land redistribution.
The whole question actually depends on one’s assumptions about ownership. Aboriginal peoples in America and Australia had little, if any, sense of family or individual ownership…. and for several centuries they lost out (in America, at least, we’ve made up for any injustices here with Indian Casinos)…. Short of a broad return to some conception of tribal property, it would be unwise to make any changes.

Yet there have been successful redistributions of property in recent memory. Moving beyond Ireland’s Wyndham Act of 1903, there was the restoration of small farms to the Bulgar peasantry after the defeat of their Turkish overlords in the late 19th Century; there was the restoration of small farms to the Czecho-Slovak peasantry after driving out the absentee Austro-German overlords in 1918; there was the post World War I restoration of property in Finland, Poland and Romania. In each case, the principle followed was that: the family that tills the soil should own the soil. Sometimes compensation was paid; sometimes not. In general, however, justice was advanced, only to be swamped by the fascists and communists. To read more, see my chapter on “The Green Revolution” in THIRD WAYS.

It is true that home ownership is not enough to achieve the Distributist ideal. Chesterton believed that the private home should also encompass vegetable garden and chicken coop: so that the family would be secure in its basic sustenance through its own exertions. Real freedom is summarized in the great Country Music song, “Take This Job and Shove It.” The ownership of productive property (land and basic machine tools)and the skills to use them are essential to that elemental form of liberty.

Allan is implying that Distributists have actually worked a third way; they have salted the thinking of the existing powers with Christian values to at least make their policies taste better. (I have in mind a stark contrast between Britain’s 1930’s begardened Council housing and slums from our nineteenth century). As always, Chesterton expressed the difficulty with expecting things to stay better in a nice epigram in a chapter in Orthodoxy, on “The Eternal Revolution”: “If you particularly want [a post] to stay white you have to keep painting it”.

Things have moved on. Now we can use plastic posts with paint built in. Similarly we have learned technological jujitsu and no need to overpower our opponents: the long lever and float of a toilet/fawcett flush has been replaced by a minature which turns on water pressure to switch itself off. When I was an apprentice working on the earliest computers, the first type on one side of the corridor was said to require half a power station to run it. Our work on the other side, transistorising it, made a standby generator feasible and now we can put much better computers in our pocket. Significantly, we have learned how to “repaint” faulty information, this enabling us to automate powered machines for the physical repainting of posts. I’m going on a bit because, in the political world of people seeing themselves as jumped-up monkeys or fighting each other to become top dog, the significance of this has not been sinking in. We humans have become top dogs in the animal world not because we are powerful but because we have brains capable of comprehending the possibility of God and adept at DIRECTING power. The problem addressed in Chesterton’s “Orthodoxy” is that we are NOT USING half our brains: the intuitive/imaginative half required for conscience and error-correction. The “jujitsu” imaginative engineers have developed here is unfortunately the one I cannot illustrate in a words-only blog: imagination of invisible flows with the help of schematic diagrams.

That is the point, anyway. That is why Bernard Lonergan’s economics are so significant. The only way the powerful are likely to become capable of changing course and continually correcting it as necessary is if they can be shown how to visualise what is happening overall, including what can go wrong and what can be done about it. That is possible in a schematic diagram of the already existing theory of navigation (applicable to any course). That particular example of error-correction logic involves the tasks of course setting, steering by compass, correcting for positional errors and looking for danger ahead – then plotting a different course next time if ports turn out not to be worth visiting! There is no point in overthrowing the powerful and putting equally ignorant people in their place. The Christian way is to pass on the truth to whoever will listen, until even the powerful are converted by the fact that it makes sense.

I suggest for discussion that the most important truth just now is not our values: it is the existence of error-correction logic, as in “confession, correction, reparation and a firm purpose of amendment”. What do you think, Allan?

The fact is, Bob, if Plato, Marx and myself look at the same problem, it is very likely there will be similarities in the structure of what we see. We will almost certainly differ in our still developing understanding of what that means in terms of what can be done about it. There Plato advocated wise kings, Marx mechanical forces, I myself virtually powerless information servo systems – echoing Christ’s service: conveying the truth which sets us free. To paraphrase Chesterton on Browning, a mirror image looks like reality, yet is an “everlasting opposite”.

I can’t access Voegelin’s works easily but Wikipedia suggests he was a buddie of the dishonest Hayek, and “that ain’t for me”. The index of Vol 34 shows his philosophy of history doesn’t take account of information science. This however looks more interesting:

http://www.voegelinview.com/ev/eric_voegelin_table_of_contents.html.

He seems to link consciousness with understanding through concepts, which is about a quarter of the way to the unexpected truth revealed by understanding how languages, logic, communication and brains work. He’s also interested in how things come into existence, and I’ve cracked that too. Seriously, you will learn more by asking questions than by underestimating someone who tries to explain things simply.

Our reconciliation and epiphany are to be found at 1 Cor 12. Christ is supposed to be manifest in us, as complementary parts of His Mystical Body. Now that’s challenging!

Cheers.

Re:”We thus finally come to how the logic of this scheme would distribute livelihoods and property. Quite simply, everyone would have a Citizen’s Income: a right (cumulative in a family) to borrow enough for a decent livelihood. This would replace wages and pensions, and hence any need for tax, insurance and profits to pay them; it would normally be repaid normally with gratitude by doing basic work insofar as that was necessary. (I have in mind Londoners of old migrating joyfully to the Kent countryside at harvest-time). Everyone would have opportunity to write off such debts or better their property by way of prizes for exceptional improvement work of whatever sort: these being – by way of contrast with higher wages, patent and copyright royalties – fixed and and so readily accounted for rather than on-going burdens on the community. Everyone would also have the right to borrow for justifiable property needs (i.e. for homes, businesses or development workshops), thereby taking on responsibility for work to reproduce the material used in producing them. (Payment for work during production and improvement has already been provided for by Citizen’s Income). Those already possessing property would be similarly assessed, as being indebted to local communities to the extent of its value> This is not a situation they would like, so they would want to minimise such debt by passing on to potential users what they themselves are not actually using. And that, finally, is where such a form of Distributism will have achieved its aim.”

…well, what can I say? It looks very much to me as if you’re talking a form of the old Marxists dialectic, and that ain’t for me. Let me suggest a book: “Autobiographical Reflections,” Vol. 34, Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Univ. of Missouri Press. It’ll help you see our differences and provide, perhaps, an epiphany.

Best,
RCC

Let’s start again from where we DO seem to agree: the thing you said which attracted me. We’re BOTH “here to learn”, so I’m sorry if my “preaching” sounds like criticism. For me, one of the “big ideas” A N Whitehead says “to hang on to like grim death” has been George Spencer Brown’s conclusion in “The Laws of Form”: the condition of being able to learn is that one doesn’t already know. Another, personally experienced, is that learning takes time: I do understand you will need that!

I think we also agree, really, that intelligent people do not simply switch from their point of view to someone else’s, e.g. to or from republicanism. They modify, enrich and occasionally clarify their own point of view in light of what they have learned of others.

At one time I myself used the term “confederation”, to try and tease out the difference between the original Catholic idea of European Community and the new European Union which has been foisted on us. I’ve since learned a lot more about republicanism, but I still interpret it in terms of Pius XI’s “small is beautiful” concept of subsidiarity, which as I tried to suggest does have a place for a “commonweath” (but not an “empire”) understanding of federation and world government. That I now prefer the term “commonwealth” is simply because it suggests aims rather than methods.

This, of course, is not strictly off topic: it is something Distributism needs to take a position on if it is to be practicable. However, that position itself needs to take account of the cultural equivalent of a need for parental control while growing up, and of cultural education by including the “children” in adult conversation.

I’m not preaching, really I’m not. I’m just sharing reactions which after 72 years were already there for you to stir up.

All the best.

I’m relieved that, after yesterday’s talk of ill-health, you have come out fighting! However, I’m disappointed that rather than “Be nice. Keep it clean. Stay on topic” and respond to my more up-to-date view of a Distributist way forward (which is backed incidentally by Christ’s teachings and the error control theory of practical cybernetics), you have chosen to accuse me of living in fairyland:

“To suggest that the land, now long and legally sold off to others, be “returned” to it’s “rightful” owners is, singularly, one of the most absurd ideas I’ve ever heard and it rather indicates a disordered mind, a person living in a second reality of magical construct.”

So in your opinion the New Zealanders and Australians are suffering from disordered minds? But of course, you live in a culture built on “libido dominandi”, so you would think that, wouldn’t you? Understandable; but you might understand better WHY it is understandable if you learned how and why people’s points of view differ at a Myers-Briggs personality indicator workshop. Being more like an old woman than a top dog myself, my own choice is to be human as well as Christian. Your redskins hadn’t had that choice, and it is interesting that the so-called Christian use of torture to extract information seems to have begun with Boniface IX at a time when there were rival popes. Perhaps we backed the wrong one.

If that doesn’t look like banter, well: I’m just not as clever as Chesterton and yourself at being funny as well as serious. Where I was brought up in England’s industrial North, “if you didn’t laugh, you’d have to cry”, so the humour tends to be pretty black.

Dave

Obviously, we’re coming from two different worldviews; while Europe collapses into a enviro/politically correct socialim many of us here in the colonies are holding out, rather fond, as it were, of our history, unique culture, and traditions…it’s what makes us FPR’s. The conguest of the Aboriginal Indian nations are part of our history and we are not ashamed of this conquest. Actually, we are rather proud of the courage of our forebearers.

My many times great grand-father, Thomas Dickerson, following his service in defeating your Gentleman Johnny Burgoynne at Saratoga and a rather unpleasant winter at Valley Forge, Pa. mustered out of the Continental Army and made tracks for his home along the Pennsylvania frontier at Catfish Camp. Tom joined a company of scouts who patrolled the Ohio river and worked in conjunction with other companies of frontiersman either to intercept the maurading warriors of the Five Nations of the Ohio or to bring succor to those unfortunates that were underseige and forted-up in their stockade cabins.

I’ve managed to recover a couple of stories related to Tom’s service in protecting the out settlers living along the frontier and they are fascinating.

More importantly, in the matter of this discussion, is an explanation as to why the English-American settlers hated the Aboriginal population and wished to see them either far removed or totally destroyed.

It must be remembered that these settlers, long experienced in relations with the English were accustomed to the idea of torture. Being tortured by the English soldiers to obtain information was rather a typical event and understood by these settlers as a part of war. But, the Aboriginal culture was very much different. When they tortured it was to humiliate their foeman, to rob them of their spirit, and for the pleasure the act of torture provided. The record is pregnant with horrific stories and I won’t bore you with gruesome examples of Indian expertise in these matters. Suffice it to say the usual pattern was for the warriors to participate rather generally and the squaws and children to be thoroughly and keenly involved. The settlers unequivical hatred for the “red savages” rested on the matter of torture and because of it, few whites who experienced the work of the Five Nations first hand ever grieved for a dead Indian.

Allow me one short story. I believe the year was 1790 and after more than thirty years of frontier savagery the fighting was dying down. The Indians had been soundly thrashed and were moving or being moved westward. But one day into the area that is now the border of West Virginia and Pennsylvania came four warriors from the Sandusky Towns. It’s not known for sure who they were but some accounts list them as two Wyandot, a Mingo, and a Delaware.

These warriors were looking for plunder and came upon two little girls; eleven and thirteen. They capture them, raped them, and took them with them toward the area of Catfish Camp. The alarm was sounded and Tom and his cousin, Kinzie Dickerson, were at hand and set off in pursuit armed with musket, tomahawk, and knife.

Three days later Tom and Kinzie returned with the girls and when questioned responded that the Indians no longer constituted a threat. They each carried two bloody scalps on their belts and n’er tried to hide them.

Tom served as a frontier scout and a captain of scouts for over twenty years. His story is one of heroism, of defending his community, and of killing his enemy. Tom was an honourable gentleman and lies buried in a cemetery located on a little knoll just off Route 9 near New Athens, Ohio, on land that was once his section.

To suggest that the land, now long and legally sold off to others, be “returned” to it’s “rightful” owners is, singularly, one of the most absurd ideas I’ve ever heard and it rather indicates a disordered mind, a person living in a second reality of magical construct.

In America we still have men who remember the hard service of their ancestors and honour that service. The blood of my people has soaked this land, their graves mark this country. It’s one of the reasons why this place is my home, why it is part of me, and will always be part of who I am. Perhaps, I’m the last of my line, here at this place. So be it, there’s not much about that that I can do. But in my time here I will remember and honour my people: Tom, Vachel, and Kinzie Dickerson (American Revolution and Border Wars), Capt. Tom Dickerson (dead at Stones River), Cpl. Billy Cheeks (Veteran volunteer, Burnside’s command, died of hard service), Pvt. William Cheeks (6th North Carolina Inf.), Cpl. Tom Connelly, (58th Ohio Regiment, died under Bosch artillery barrage in the Argonne, 1917), SSgt. Robert Cheeks, 305th Combat Eng., 80th Div., 3rd Army, combat vetern.

I must put a meatloaf in the oven and will finish this latter!

Death is a good time for drawing lines. The Australians redistribute rural land fairly intelligently: when occupiers die and/or walk away from responsibility for it. The son of a cheat (e.g. one grown rich by gambling with other people’s money) might reasonably be entitled to inherit a house that was his home, along with the responsibilities which would go with living in it; but not vast estates effectively storing ill-gotten value while depriving former communities of it. The point of Distributism, in short, is not to deprive anyone of an honourable livelihood independent of the state and its princelings, but precisely to enable any honourable person to have one.

Contrast that with States gaoling penniless people for not paying taxes – these, it turns out, being required only because the rich have taken over the money supply and will lend out their superfluous IOU’s only at interest. Contrast it with fraudlent private banks charging honourable people interest on IOU’s they themselves merely printed, seizing the honourable people’s homes if misfortune or bank misconduct should happen to leave them unemployed.

As I see it, therefore, a Distributist scheme has to neutralise the power of both the State and the Banks. That happens automatically insofar as we recognise that the State is competent only to advise more local communities and Banks only to issue and account for the honouring of other people’s IOU’s. Nothing changes but the way we see things; the sun still appears to traverse the heavens, but knowing that the earth is rotating enabled us to completely rethink and correct what we had been assuming and struggling with for centuries. The love of money being still manifestly the root of all evil, that radical rethink of political economics is what we now need to do.

Since this is evidently not a socialist redistribution scheme, you want me to let you know how it [presumably its Distribution] is to be effected. Imagine interest payments and taxes to be gone, and money understood as a title for debt. Businessmen and Statesmen already borrow most of the money they need, and minimising actual debt by not spending one’s entitlement is equivalent to saving. If one were paid at the beginning rather than the end of the working week, that would illustrate the general truth that in reality, borrowed IOU’s are repaid not by paying them back with still more IOUs added as interest, but by our actually doing the work that was needed of us. However, that work can be divided into basic reproduction of necessities and improvement work (maintenance, development, arts and education). With automation the former takes a relatively small proportion of the man-hours available, so the disabled and those otherwise occupied need not necessarily be involved, while timesharing would enable everyone to have enough free time to join in the latter.

We thus finally come to how the logic of this scheme would distribute livelihoods and property. Quite simply, everyone would have a Citizen’s Income: a right (cumulative in a family) to borrow enough for a decent livelihood. This would replace wages and pensions, and hence any need for tax, insurance and profits to pay them; it would normally be repaid normally with gratitude by doing basic work insofar as that was necessary. (I have in mind Londoners of old migrating joyfully to the Kent countryside at harvest-time). Everyone would have opportunity to write off such debts or better their property by way of prizes for exceptional improvement work of whatever sort: these being – by way of contrast with higher wages, patent and copyright royalties – fixed and and so readily accounted for rather than on-going burdens on the community. Everyone would also have the right to borrow for justifiable property needs (i.e. for homes, businesses or development workshops), thereby taking on responsibility for work to reproduce the material used in producing them. (Payment for work during production and improvement has already been provided for by Citizen’s Income). Those already possessing property would be similarly assessed, as being indebted to local communities to the extent of its value> This is not a situation they would like, so they would want to minimise such debt by passing on to potential users what they themselves are not actually using. And that, finally, is where such a form of Distributism will have achieved its aim.