Archive for Category: "Vintage Distributism"
The Restoration of Property
The change in philosophy is our root difficulty, but the second is that it has produced a certain state of society. It is a state in which by far the greater part of men are attuned to being wage slaves, that is, a state of society in which a man is more afraid of losing his job than of anything else.
Two Difficulties
Injustices must be removed, bad systems changed, human values made effective once more in their right order. But these things cannot be done so long as the men and women of the nation are ignorant, apathetic, even antagonistic to what they ought to cherish.
The Guild System
Every kind of good would flow from the re-establishment of the Guild, and without the re-establishment of the Guild the effort to maintain well-distributed property, even if we had already achieved that good distribution, would be vain.
Communism Has Failed
There are four main proposals offered for setting things right again. The first three are false remedies, the fourth is the true remedy, which is the restoration of property, the building up of economic freedom for the mass of men, and the re-creating that independence of the family which industrial capitalism has destroyed.
There Was a Socialist
It is not Socialism for the State to endow hospitals, any more than for the State to support reformatories. Socialism is not a condition in which the government can help hard cases or protect and patch up economic evils; it has that power in every healthy Distributist community.
Distributism as a Way of Life
Since Distributism is not a system for hermits, it is by nature communal and communitarian. While we may have to get things started by our own initiative, any plan that is not strongly rooted in a community is bound to fail. Distributism, like Christianity, assumes community.
G.K. Chesterton’s Distributism
The home is the place where the important things happen. The economy is the place where the most unimportant things happen. The backwardness of the situation is something constantly pointed out by Chesterton: “There is nothing queerer today than the importance of unimportant things. Except, of course, the unimportance of important things.”
The Differential Tax
The principle of the Differential Tax is that a different proportion of taxation, as well as a different amount, may be applied to men in different circumstances. It has a chief function to perform in the disintegrating of large accumulations and the consequent fostering of small accumulations.
What We Are Getting At
We propose the gradual re-creation of English agriculture, of English crafts, of English country life. We suggest that as England becomes more and more self-supporting the need for foreign markets and food imports will diminish.