Archive for Category: "History"
The Austrian Version of the English Enclosures III
The State abolition of the guild system, State authorization of usury, and the concentration of economic power in the hands of a few all worked together for the oppression of the working man. The Industrial Revolution was subjecting masses of hapless human beings to forms of exploitation and degradation inconceivable in Catholic social order.
The Austrian Version of the English Enclosures Part II
Increased poverty? An outraged sense of dispossession among the village poor? But according to Thomas Woods, citing Mingay’s book six times in two pages, enclosure had nothing to do with poverty or dispossession.
The Austrian Version of the English Enclosures
Why are the past fifty years of scholarship on the enclosures more reliable than the past two centuries of scholarship? We are talking about the dispossession of non-owners from the commons by both large and small “owners,” whose purported titles ultimately derived from the massive Henrican theft of Church lands that paved the way for English capitalism.
Corporation Christendom: The True School of Salamanca
If Aquinas was a capitalistic Pre-Liberal, von Mises certainly did not see it; in fact, he uses St. Thomas’s teachings as the embodiment of the very mentality and outlook, which he is rejecting.
The Growth and Decline of the Roman Economy
The loss of its supply of food is the very thing that brought the western empire to the end of its resources. The Eastern Empire by contrast, had become populated with farming communities which could now support the agricultural needs, something that did not take place in the Western Empire. This enabled it to last for nearly another thousand years.
Distributism: Economics as if People Mattered
According to Belloc, it was King Henry’s confiscation of the monastery lands in England, and his action of parceling them out among his wealthy supporters, which marked the beginning of the transformation of England from a nation in which property, the land, and the means of production were widely distributed, to one in which a small number of families control increasingly greater shares of the land.
A Real Catholic Monarchy
A thing without proper limits becomes its own opposite, and benevolence quickly becomes a tyranny which threatens both civil and religious order.
Locke and InsideCatholic
For Leo, men don’t form the state because they want to protect their property; they form the state because his “natural instinct moves him to live in civil society, for he cannot, if dwelling apart, provide himself with the necessary requirements of life, nor procure the means of developing his mental and moral faculties.”
‘The Distributive Alternative’
Russell Sparkes addresses the theoretical background and intellectual origins of Distributism in order to counter some of the ill-informed criticisms made against it by contemporaries and recently revived by critics worried by the renewed interest in it.