From League stalwart Joe Grabowski via Facebook, I am informed that The Distributist Review is showing off a snazzy re-design of their website. Very inviting it is, too. I hope it serves to draw more people to spend more time digging into this wonderfully helpful magazine (It's been added to our links at right>>>).
Distributism, that economic ideal championed by Chesterton and Belloc, is built on the foundation of the Catholic idea of subsidiarity (say it three times, slowly, and you'll have it)... which is a fancy term for a very simple moral principle... that everything ought to be taken care of at the lowest practical level. This means first the family, then the immediate community (ideally the parish), and on upward. Any system that turns that order on its head amounts to a kind of tyranny, eventually. Economic freedom is real freedom compared to which elections and so forth are just window dressing.
In the economic realm, Capitalism is a narrower reflection of true subsidiarity, and so contains some useful truth, but it is inadequate and those inadequacies have been showing more and more, lately.
One of those philosophical inadequacies is the unconscious confusion of "money" with "property". Money can certainly serve as a handy representative medium, a symbol of property... but it is no substitute for property. In a sane world, a farmer who lost all his money might still have his property, and so would not have lost everything. The way things are, few of us are able to really own much of anything in a full and final sense. So, for instance, when someone asks if you are a "homeowner", what they really want to know is if you are a mortgage holder.
This confusion spreads to the concept of work. Work, for most people is now defined as some-or-other money making activity. The early feminists rightly complained that this was nonsense, that work in the home was at least as valuable as any paycheck-earning gig, but in the end they abandoned this moral high ground in favor of a pale substitute; that is, Equal Pay in the workplace. They should have held out for real respect. As it is, they have helped make the word "homemaker" into a kind of joke. "Little Suzy Homemaker". But it takes work (and more than work, a kind of inspiration) to make a house a home. Presumably, this is what a "homemaker" does... or did. It is a high calling, but if no one is now willing to do this work, it will not get done, and our houses will remain hastily and haphazardly decorated boxes, drearily impersonal.
We are not forced to participate in this system, as such, at least not in any way that we normally associate with the word "force". If we were being forced in that way, we would not stand for it. We would have taken up pitchforks and torches a long time ago. But we are softly coerced. From grade school, we are taught to see the world this way, to entertain only this narrow sphere of possibility, and by the time we are out of our formal schooling we find we are on the hamster wheel and are more or less at a loss as to how to get off the damned thing.
I have worn out the following Chesterton quote, but it sums up the shortcomings of our current money-obsessed Capitalism and the need for a Distributist revolution as well as any you could hope to find;
"Our society is so abnormal that the normal man never dreams of having
the normal occupation of looking after his own property. When
he chooses
a trade, he chooses one of the ten thousand trades that
involve looking
after other people's property." - Commonwealth, 1932
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