Island Hopping to Distributism

In the Second World War, the United States employed a tactic known in our history books as "Island hopping” to defeat the Japanese. Instead of merely throwing all of our military might indiscriminately, we took key islands in order to create a path straight to the Japanese mainland.Whenever large tasks are undertaken correctly, they are taken in this manner, by prioritizing and making gains step by step, even if the gains added up do not equal the overall objective; they may in fact lead to it.Today however, the way men engage in accomplishing tasks suggests that they don't understand this philosophy. Likewise they look at step by step strategies as cumbersome rather than throwing weight at the problem. It would be as if they were to look down on General MacArthur and chide him for making his troops fight to the death with the Japanese over a mile wide strip of island.The greatest example of that today is in the political process here in the United States. When men try to take on the institutionalized 2-party juggernaut of “Republicrat” and “Democan”, they usually aim for the mainland without securing the island path by running presidential candidates who have no recognition and whose message is rarely heard.“Island hopping” a third-party into existence takes time and patience, perhaps as much as ten years to run candidates at a local level before acquiring state and later national recognition, by which one could compete with the big parties. At present, any 3rd party candidate running for president will be boxed out due to lack of support and recognition, like a military strike for the main target that goes astray, and is short of support and back up.This is also true when we consider Distributism. There can be no question of walking out with a referendum to establish a Distributist society, or of laws enacted to establish Distributism without the edifice of support first. Thus like MacArthur, we must identify a) The goal and b) the steps to get there.A. Distributive society is characterized by widespread, yet limited private productive property so that the availability of property will always be present.According to Belloc, not every man needs to own his own property, but only a sufficient number to mark the society with a character of ownership. As Chesterton said, if a man chooses not to own, that's his own business, but the opportunity that is not present today for the rest of society will be. Another way to put this is that we are going to create more “capitalists” than the elite over at Wall Street. Laws are in force to keep the large unit from destroying the small, or the small from becoming too large, and in this fashion protecting ownership by the many.B. The steps to get there are suggested best and most orderly in Hilaire Belloc's book An Essay on the Restoration of Property. Yet these are neither the only ways to do them nor are they a "be all and end all". Belloc proposed a process by which a restoration might take place in England in his day. He wrote specifically of England because “If it can be done in England, it could be done anywhere.” The beautiful thing about Distributism is that it is not limited to what the founders believed or thought, rather it is eminently adaptable. Thus it is not called Chesterbellocism, because, while their ideas serve as a strong foundation, they are not fixed and stagnated lists of proposals. Even within Distributism, there were disagreements. Arthur Penty believed in government price setting (for some of his life) while Chesterton and Belloc thought it was a rotten idea.The first step, without which Distributism could never flourish, is to create the desire in men for ownership. If men do not want to own there is little chance of re-establishing ownership. There are many ways in which this could be done, certainly apologetics and spreading more information about Distributism is a start. Before I read Chesterton and Belloc's works I scarcely would have aspired to owning my livelihood. However even self-ownership would be insufficient to sway most men who have now become accustomed to living as proletarians. The first step is in making ownership possible for man’s consideration is to remove the blatant bias in our laws and financial system for large entities. We do not have to favor small units necessarily; just make it so a small business could succeed. Here I mean in the way of government taxes, fees, and endless rounds of paperwork and tax forms, which are easily dealt with by large units with their legions of law firms, and their large bank book, but not by the small business that must pay the same fees with a smaller budget.If the government were to remove all inspection fees (but not the inspections!) on small businesses, which made less than $60,000 a year (after expenses such as salaries and taxes, accounting of losses, etc.); or minimizing the taxes on such businesses. My own father was self-employed for many years, and made somewhere near that amount, but then had to pay half of it to the government between state and federal taxes and fees, even absurd things like “use” taxes for his equipment. When one thinks of 50 cents of every dollar one makes going to Washington, is it little wonder people think twice about starting a business? For larger operations, not only does 15 cents of every dollar go for Social Security, but 7 1/2 cents of every dollar paid to employees must go to the government, while they cover the other 7 1/2 cents.Perhaps the biggest corruption and scandal of the 20th century is government “Social Security” which became a big blank check that increasingly demands more and pays less, and now can scarcely meet its obligations. A reform of this obscenity, under the guise of retirement care, which allowed for small businesses to keep those 15 cents for every dollar, would be a huge boon for ownership. This is even before we have considered the points of Belloc's essay.Once the desire for ownership has been nurtured, the next step is to make ownership palpable by actively penalizing the purchase of small institutions by larger ones, restricting mergers, and levying a tiny fee, if any, for small entities acquiring property from larger ones. The large institution can always shoulder the cost, but the small one cannot, thus you remove that penalty. If a man wants to own a mechanic shop, (and following the earlier suggested, the $60,000 which he must make before he can begin to make $1 of profit to pay for groceries and bills has dwindled to something more reasonable at this time, like $10,000) and a large national chain such as Jiffy Lube (known for its poor service) comes in and buys his shop, their tax should be 60% or 70% of the sale. If a man on the other hand wanted to buy a failing Jiffy Lube (again known for its shoddy service) and make it into a small mechanic business, he has no tax on the sale, or perhaps 5%, and receives fees proportionally smaller for inspection. This process can be applied to the small grocer, the self-employed contractor, co-owned or employee owned stores, and especially small agriculture.Instead of subsidizing farmers, which hurts them in the long run and hurts farmers around the world at present, we should remove taxes and fees on agricultural output and raise the amount on agribusiness.The next step dealt with must be usury, which the Catholic Church has always and everywhere condemned. Hilaire Belloc provides an excellent description of usury: it is money charged for money, rather than money charged for productive lending. If a bank loans money, and demands a payment of “x” extraof the loan—regardless of its use and production—from that money, this is what the Church has always condemned. Yet, if money should be given, even by a bank, and a percentage of the profits earned (plus the money back) are demanded, then the Church has nothing to say because one is entitled to the profits his money earned, just as the one who borrows the money is entitled to the profits he earned with the money. Yet usury is the source of the power of modern banking institutions, and it is the agent that maintains capital in the hands of but a few. It allows capital to be hoarded by a bunch of investment firms in New York and Geneva, while the community starves for the substance to make ends meet. The substantial credit card debt of the majority of our nation should be sufficient to attest to that and the, frankly, criminal FICO system which is used as a pretext of denying jobs to men who have made even slight mistakes with their credit. In some places you cannot even rent an apartment if you have a subpar credit score.Credit power should be positively broken in order for ownership to be achieved. The best way is to outlaw usury and limit amounts demanded on loans to the positive profit obtained from it. Whether or not this can even be done in our modern plutocracies which we misname “democracies” is something that remains to be seen. The chief power in our system is in the hands of banks.A bank is something that is not evil in itself, and that can, in fact, serve a positive role in society when it deposits capital into society and does not take it out of society. Before one even begins discussing bailouts, it is obvious that the purpose of the bank today is to take capital out of society, and leave in just enough to keep people earning in order to pay interest alone. Yet in a Distributist framework, banks are institutions protecting people’s money against theft, loss, etc.Throughout history, banks found that depositors normally only needed 10-15% of their deposited funds at a time. Thus the banks had the ability to lend out money and still cover their depositors’ needs. If usury were outlawed, the only outlet for such lending would be “productive loans,” which, rather than take money out of society, put money into it. If a mining operation, or a business, or some other thing were to borrow money to get off the ground, the bank could claim the money plus some percentage of the profits. This is only fair, since the money is functioning as capital, labor is applied, and wealth is produced. Without the bank’s money no profit could be made; likewise without the labor. The depositors’ money allowed the bank to lend in the first place, and thus will also get a percentage of the profits, which is far more than what they see today. This reduction of bank activity, in favor of productive lending, has yet a final consequence. It will require banks to be smaller and local.With the potential for national catastrophe reduced, as the institution would be smaller so as to avoid a meltdown of the entire financial system, “banker” would no longer be a dirty word.