| Wednesday,
October 22, 2008
Distributism vs. Redistributism
Obama and the Democrats propose a redistribution of incomes through the
"earned income tax credit". This is often confused with the distributist
views of Belloc and Chesterton, The differences are profound.
Belloc and Chesterton were both conservative capitalists, and very much
opposed to Socialism (which is the best single-word description of Obama
and the left wing Democrats). They did not believe the State would or
could be fair in implementing its policies. They did believe that using
the State to distribute incomes would inevitably lead to corruption.
They also saw truth in Marx's observation that unrestrained capitalism
led to capitalists devouring each other, with more and more of the wealth
and means of production concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. Marx saw
that as leading to revolution, with the elimination of social classes
entirely. Government would shrink to nothing, and a man might be a worker
in the morning and an artist in the afternoon. Management would not be for
maximum profit, but merely for maintenance. The resulting stability --
some would call it stasis -- would be the end of history.
Fascism accepted Marx's principal observation that history was the
history of class warfare, but solved the problem of class warfare by
erecting a State superior to all the social classes and institutions that
would force everyone to work together, not for the benefit of any
particular class or institution, but for the good of all. Mussolini began
as a Socialist and said he remained a Socialist to the day he died; his
Socialism was intended to be progressive. He built airports and not only
made the trains run on time but built many of the railroads.
Socialism is sometimes described as Marxism with a human face. Hilaire
Belloc presciently said that the result would be "The Servile State" in
which subjects begged state bureaucrats for favors, and nothing was
allowed without a permit. A man might not erect a chicken coop in his back
yard without permission -- indeed, it wasn't his back yard. It belonged to
the state which graciously allowed him to live there. One may judge the
success of this approach by the fate of Pruit-Igoe in St. Louis, or any
Chicago or New York public housing project. Proponents of public
collective projects have various fixes which they say will take care of
the problems if applied. The fixes do not usually include giving actual
ownership to anyone but the state.
The distributist approach would be to give actual title to the property
to the occupants. Chesterton argued for peasant ownership of the land even
as he understood that English yeomen would not care to be called peasants.
At the time he was writing, about 90% of the land in England belonged to a
few hundred families who rented out farmland to those who worked it. At
that time agriculture was a significant part of the British economy, and
factory management, though more complex than Marx believed, was still
considerably simpler that it is today. From the distributist view, if
peasant ownership of farms was a proper solution in agriculture,
worker-owned factories would likely be the proper solution to industry.
Both Chesterton and Belloc were concerned by the trend of increasing
consolidation of industry into large conglomerates and trusts, in theory
responsible to stockholders but in practice responsible to no one but the
managers. James Burnham, formerly an anti-Stalinist Communist and at one
time a leader in Trotsky's Socialist Workers Party, took up this argument
in The Managerial Revolution (1941) and Suicide of the West.
He later broke with the left and became one of the founding editors of
National Review; he was a major influence on the late Samuel Francis, the
populist paleo-conservative.
Most of these socio-economic views have one major concern: the
increasing concentration of control over society into the hands of fewer
and fewer people. This is not quite the same as increased concentration of
wealth: wealth itself is no great threat to the social order although it
can be used for that purpose. Socialism would tax wealth in order to set
up bureaucracies that would fairly redistribute the wealth. At one time
Socialism demanded the nationalization of the means of production, but
experience showed this didn't work very well, either in the Soviet Union,
or in the Scandinavian welfare states, or in England. Bureaucratic
management "for the public good" is neither efficient in production nor
particularly effective at pleasing its public clients (who are usually
very much treated as clients; see the Roman origin of the word).
Distributists claim to be a third alternative to ruthless capitalism
and bureaucratic socialism. The distributist view can be summarized fairly
in Chesterton's statement "Too much capitalism does not mean too many
capitalists, but too few capitalists." They believed in transparency and
subsidiarity -- local control of most resources coupled with maximum
freedom. (Note that the late
Jane Jacobs
thought those principles the only way to avoid a coming Dark Age.) One
means of distributism would be through death taxes : the money would not
go to the state, but be instantly and irrevocably divided.
Distribution of ownership of the means of production might lead to
Jeffersonian Democracy in a largely agricultural country, but it's much
more difficult in industrial states. Worker owned companies are sometimes
both efficient and successful, but they often succumb to ruthless
competition from manager-controlled companies and cartels.
There are plenty of Socialists who seek to redistribute the wealth
through government action (which always means creating a bureaucracy). The
neo-conservatives generally favor unregulated capitalism, which generally
leads to concentration of wealth. There are few distributists in the
modern political picture. Yet many of us can agree that "Too much
capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists."
I suppose that the free lance programmer who owns his own computers is
the best modern example of what Chesterton and Belloc sought. I would also
suppose that more vigorous enforcement of the anti-trust laws, even if
that led to some inefficiencies, would meet their approval. To the charge
that this would destroy local industries through ruthless international
competition, they would probably answer by raising tariffs.
Incidentally, the Regulatory State seems determined to restrict America
to two kinds of companies: those with fewer than 50 employees, and giant
corporations with thousands of employees. No one in his right mind would
expand a company -- particularly in California but Federal Law is making
this universal -- from 49 to 51 employees. The instant one gets to 50 (or
51 depending on the state) a huge panoply of regulations kick in, so many
that even if one can afford to comply with them all, one will also need a
compliance staff of several employees to make sure one is in compliance.
This means that up to 10% of one's work force does nothing productive
except keep the owners out of jail. This makes the company singularly
uncompetitive when faced with companies that don't have to devote so many
resources to complying with regulations. This is probably not what
distributists had in mind.
Continued below
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I very much recommend my Imperial Stars trilogy, which is part of
The Pournelle Continuum. There are some good
stories in there, and some of my best essays.
=================
Tomorrow I won't be posting before about dinner time.
Next week is the Microsoft Professi9onal Developers Conference at the LA
Convention Center, and I'll be there, so most activity on this page will be
in the evenings. Unless I get bored...
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