We recently got into a
FaceBook group devoted to discussing “Catholic Stuff.” Most of the questions and discussion items
were a little bit out of our area of expertise, but we did get into an
interesting one about “distributism,” the rather loosely defined social
philosophy advocated by G.K. Chesterton and his cohort, Hilaire Belloc.
The main topic under
discussion and which most of the comments were related to was, “What is
distributism, and is it a Catholic economic system?” Our response (somewhat edited for clarity) was
as follows:
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| Fr. Heinrich Pesch, S.J. |
As a number of people have
commented over the decades (notably Dr. Franz Mueller, the noted student of Fr.
Heinrich Pesch, S.J., founder of Thomist solidarism) there can be no such thing
as a Catholic economic system, social system, political system, etc. All you can have is a system that
conforms materially to Catholic teaching, which in social and political matters
means the natural law “written in the hearts of all men.”
That being said, Chesterton
and Belloc promoted distributism as something not Catholic, but compatible with
Catholic teaching . . . and thereby caused two major problems that have lasted
to the present day:
1. Chesterton was very
careful to describe distributism in general terms, which drove George Bernard
Shaw absolutely bonkers. Shaw demanded specifics that he could ridicule, as he
did in the early debates with Chesterton until Chesterton caught on and learned
how to handle him. Belloc tried to discuss some specifics, but he made
technical errors that so-called experts were able to discredit easily and
ignored the sound principles behind the flawed applications.
2. Others also tried to fill
in the details of distributism and ended up equating it with various forms of
socialism, e.g., guild socialism,
social credit, syndicalism, democratic socialism, etc., etc., ad infinitum, which was not only
incorrect, but supremely ironic, as Chesteron’s principal goal was to offer an
alternative to socialism and capitalism. Thus, today many people on both sides
of the debate see no difference between distributism and socialism.
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| G.K. Chesterton |
What is distributism? A
policy of widely distributed ownership, with a preference for family owned
farms and businesses.
That’s it. Chesterton never
said anything more about what distributism is,
although he said a great deal about what it is not.
At that point in the
discussion, someone else contributed the comment that Rerum Novarum was derived from distributist principles, to which
someone else replied that the statement was not true, but not so crudely as
that.
Since we think that —
chronologically — distributism (cir.
1910) came after Rerum Novarum
(1891), we said that it was true after a fashion, but not entirely accurate.
Chesterton and others came up with the somewhat vague notion of distributism in
an effort to apply the principles described in Rerum Novarum, as well as Mirari
Vos and a number of other encyclicals.
The problem was that
Chesterton quickly found that he could be ripped to shreds by both capitalists
and socialists because he did not have the technical expertise to point out the
flaws in their arguments. He then presented distributism as a goal to strive
for, but one that he had no specific plan to implement
The unfortunate result was
that others have been able to “capture” the term distributism and apply it to
what is effectively socialism in all but name (and now in name by some). The
essence of distributism, stripped of all the verbiage and add-ons by people
with agendas, is very simple: a policy of widely distributed ownership with a
preference for family owned farms and businesses. That is not only the essence
of distributism, it’s as far as you can go with it and still claim that
Chesterton supported it.
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| Hilaire Belloc |
Then someone
asked about specific practical applications of distributist principles, i.e., “Is the Mondragon
corporation or Taiwan distributism on full display? Ive been told employee
owned businesses and co-ops are examples of distributism. Is that true?”
We answered that, in the broad sense, yes. We
don’t know about Taiwan (our contact there has never mentioned it), but the
Mondragon system, while exemplary as far as it goes, also has some serious
flaws. The major ones are:
1. Ownership is limited to
workers. (What Leo XIII and GKC called for was as many people as possible
owning capital; limiting it to workers slips into the Marxist labor theory of
value and the idea that only labor creates property . . . which abolishes gift
and inheritance, among other things.)
2. Financing is limited to
existing savings; “modern” finance (actually millennia old) is not used, all
financing comes out of restricting consumption, which has a lot of problems,
given that the sole purpose of production is not saving, but consumption.
3. The bulk of production is
not for the local economy, but for export. (An economy that does not first take
care of domestic needs can get into deep trouble if the export market dries up,
cf. Japan.)
4. Foreign workers do not
participate in ownership. This has caused resentment, as they feel they are
treated as second class workers.
Yes, worker-owned businesses,
as with ESOPs and coops CAN be examples of distributism IF the purported owners
have the rights of ownership, which many do not. In the U.S. the ESOP is often
used as an expensive employee benefit that can be very useful, but few
participants have the full spectrum of natural rights of private property.
Coops are better in some respects, but do not have the tax advantages of 100%
worker owned S-Corp ESOPs.
The key element is power and
human dignity. Do people have their natural rights of life, liberty, and
private property secured, or are they just paid lip service?
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