[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.