From Backyard RadTrad, a Traditionalist Catholic website, an mp3 interview on Distributist Economic thought with this sidebar:
Whatever the root cause of the current “economic crisis” may be, it is clear that what is at threat goes deeper than pension funds, jobs and livelihoods. Every aspect of Western society is being put into question, and rightly so. The great weakness of Capitalism and Socialism (from the point of view of the average man-in-the-street) is that both have ultimately been used to centralize power. Socialism is overtly centralist, advocating a single party political system, communal ownership of everything, but governed centrally, and so forth. Free market (laissez-faire) Capitalism is indirectly centralist in that it promotes monopolies, cartels, corporatism, and various other types of corruption which effectively result in centralized government. Socialism and Capitalism are both failed ideologies because each promotes the ultimate confiscation of wealth from the population, placing it into the hands of a few.
Is there another alternative? Dr Donald Goodman visits the Backyard to talk about Distributism; the “third way,” in opposition to both socialism and capitalism.
The interview lacks “high production values” but is easy enough to understand although conducted by phone. The interviewee’s knowledge is broader than it is deep, but the interviewer asks a lot of stimulating “how would this work (or that, or the other thing) in a Distributist economic system?” Well worth a listen if you’re fed up with our economic mess and are grownup enough to know that socialism is not antidote to our version of capitalism.
My personal take-away is that there’s enough unanswered, or unsatisfactorily answered, questions about how Distributism would work — even from a proponent talking to a friendly auditor (me) — that we’re extremely unlikely to more toward it before the economy finally collapses even more decisively. Then all kinds of things could happen, of which Distributism is only one.
But one thing we can count on: “baptizing” the Austrian School won’t work. It is incompatible with Christianity. We have Von Mises’ own word for that.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 