[einhverfr]

Way back in the day, Cicero wrote Des Republica, which is really belongs with Aristotle's Politics on the bookshelf.

Cicero argues that being pro-property (and anti-theft) is simply necessary for people to live together in cities. People can't live together in cities if the means they use to make a living can be taken by their neighbors and they have no recourse. That's a pretty good point, and it means that non-urban societies might have other arrangements but cities require property rights. So no, I don't think it's religious superstition.

Secondly I think that there are several essential commodities. These are land (where to have your office, or for production of food, etc), capital, tools, and labor. The first three we can group together as "means of production."

The fundamental question that has been so much in dispute since the days of Karl Marx is how we want to address means of production. Capitalism has the means of production owned by the wealthy, who then hire labor. Laborers, deprived of their means of production, are dependent on jobs which, if they are lucky, the capitalists will give them, The concentration of the means of production in the hands of the wealthy capitalists disempowers workers.

Communism attempts to solve this problem by taking the means of production from the capitalists and placing them in the hands of the state which, in theory, represents the workers. In practice, however, this creates a more powerful state, and the workers are even more disempowered. In essence you can't solve the problem of big businesses having too much control over the economy by centralizing that control further in the state.

Distributism (think of this in terms of distributed computing) seems instead to distribute access to the means of production to the individual laborers. Worker owned and operated cooperatives, such as Mondragon, are economically distributist systems. Bossless corporations (WL Gore, Valve, GitHub) are distributist workplaces. Open Source is a distributist way of going about developing software. In this model the worker has a chance to own all the means of production needed to start a business sufficient to feed his or her family. If the worker chooses to work for someone else, that a viable choice, but it is more a choice than it is in liberal capitalism.

I mention this because despite the best efforts of lawmakers to regulate businesses into centralized control, I think our nation is moving more towards this latter solution. It may not be exactly what Belloc or Chesterton had in mind but it will be what serves us today.

So from a distributist perspective, social justice is an emergent property of the system in which we live (and to live is to work). We shouldn't need anti-discrimination law, for example, and to the extent we do, it's either to get a fresh start (as regards the problems that existed before the civil rights movement), or as a bandaid to keep a system from looking more broken than it is (regarding gender discrimination).

In the latter case, structural changes to our economy (a shift towards more bossless workplaces, flexible commitments, and ownership by the employees over the workplace) would go a long ways towards rendering these laws unnecessary. Aren't such structural fixes better especially if they add to our freedom rather than detract from it (as regulations do)?

[eli_gottlieb]

Structural fixes are indeed better, but Chestertonian distributism has a slight difference from what you've been talking about: it prefers to actually minimize the size of enterprises and assign ownership to families. It's very British, in that way.

It does, however, seem to actually work, which is far more than we can say for state-socialism.

[einhverfr]

Chestertonian distributism is something I like to push too.

But I don't think it is the only model and I think that as we get more distributive systems working side-by-side we will see interesting network effects come into play.

For example, Chestertonian distributism places a large emphasis on guilds. But there isn't a reason why for-profit corporations owned in significant part by their employees can't function like guilds. Again, a business like WL Gore strikes me as very distributist in how it works on the ground. For example WL Gore is largely owned these days by the employees and the employees have tremendous freedom to work where they feel they add value. The organization provides mentoring for employees etc.

[einhverfr]

Just one more point on re-reading both of these.

The end-result of Chestertonian distributism is an economy of tradesmen and small farmers. In other words, it is an economy of the self-employed. The US still has 20% of the work force that is self-employed and only 1/4 of those are doctors, lawyers, and others offering professional services. Anything which enables others to become self-employed moves us in that direction.

Any distributist approach cultivates the possibility and mentality of self-employment. Whatever form that takes is OK with me, even if that is the paradox of self-employment as a member of a larger firm.