A perennial temptation for good and decent people who want everyone to have a good and decent life is to think they can find a "third way" between socialism and a market economy. Among Catholics there's a strong attraction to "distributism," as discussed by ChesterBelloc.
I've never thought there was much substance to distributism. Like "crunchyconism," it's more an emotional or aesthetic response to huge impersonal corporations than a set of policies or an economic system. The problem is, at least today, most of the folks talking about distributism unwittingly call for policies that have created precisely the things they hate and will worsen them -- because what they hate is not actually the free market and competition, but the huge corporations, trammeling on the little guy and the family, and corruption that result from crony capitalism -- the collusion of government with businesses trying to monopolize the free market.
Here's a good short piece about that.
Subscribe to:
Comment Feed (RSS)
