Serge over at A Conservative Blog for Peace tears into distributism in this post. Serge, unfortunately, misunderstands the practical value of distributist thought: it functions as a critique of the big business - big government - wage earner economic system. Distributism posits that a healthier form of economic life is oriented towards broadly distributed ownership, small business and localism. Distributism is not meant to function as an economic system, rather it is an approach to free market economics that stresses that small is beautiful. Overlook that, and distributism becomes unintelligible.
I would argue that libertarianism, if it is to be of any use, needs to be thought of in a similar way. The libertarian ideal is unworkable in human society. Nobody would really want to live in a libertarian world -- it would be like living in the Mad Max movies. No society has ever been a libertarian one, not even the American frontier. Every society restricts human behavior and every society seeks to enforce social and economic norms. Insofar as libertarian rejects this, it demonstrates its ideological and utopian essence as part of the anarchistic wing of liberalism.
But if one puts aside the delusion that libertarianism could ever function as a practical approach to human government, the libertarian perspective can be useful as a critique of the modern big government servile state. And in this respect libertarianism can function to devastating effect. Not in its ideological dogmatism and not in its hostility to the notion of positive government, but in its identification of the limitations of government power and in its defense of the principle of human freedom. While the libertarian critique needs to be balanced by other considerations, it has tremendous value as a perch from which to point out the negative consequences of government untethered from practical and prudential limits.
Thus, both distributism and libertarianism have value in the modern world -- and they have value in similar ways, as thought experiments that correctly identify overreaching policies that curtail human flourishing. If taken as actual blueprints for human civilization, distributism and libertarianism are unworkable. But that isn't really what they are. They are critiques of centralized and overwhelming power disconnected from the lives of actual people.
1 comment:
I've only rather recently come under the wings of distributism, as it were (which is a refrain I hear again and again in discussions of the issue), and I'd say my only holdout for distributism as against Austrian libertarianism, is that the former situates the agent in what I believe is not only the only authentic Catholic context but also (i.e. and therefore) in the only authentic human context, namely, in the context of the connubial and hearth goods. Distributism takes subsidiarity as far down as it will go to preserve "genuine human freedom", whereas libertarianism seems to take subsidiarity below a viable threshold. To paraphrase, human utility should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. alone Distributism seems to preserve this. Granted, being a middle, golden-mean 'way' is no automatic victory. There is still a good debate about whether neoclassical economics itself is viable. Cf. Keen's "naked emperor" assault on capitalism.
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