Distributivism: A Brief Introduction

[@Dude-yo5ec]

These sort of small youtube channels are what making KZbin a worthy platform. If it wasn’t because of you guys KZbin would be another worthless time wasting social media like most others.

[@manatoa1]

I'd really like to live in that sort of society, but I don't think more than a small minority of my fellow citizens would agree

[@dispatcher2243]

It existed in America up until the 70s. Because many christian communities namely the Catholic church bridged the gap and solved the issues of brutal capitalism while giving a free will way for things to be free. Nuns taught in schools, they took care of you in thier hospitals for free, and Americans were unburdened financially. As secularism has become more popular the habits of nuns are not in the numbers we need to go back to this, in addition to too micj government oversight.

[@thatguy913]

I think a lot of people would agree and like it. Particularly alot of leftist types would probably be willing to settle for it over capitalism. Then paleoconservatives would certainly like it too.

[@bartoszszczepaniak169]

​@@dispatcher2243The hell you talking about. It never existed in the US. It existed mainly in medieval Europe and in some cases up to the 19th century.😊

[@martinmartin1363]

Hilaire Belloc advocated ditributism , g k Chesterton was a great friends and adopted many of his ideas, they were so close they were referred to as chesterbelloc because they spoke as one person

[@michaelwoodhams7866]

Something I've thought which is vaguely similar: we should have a goal level of economic inequality - for example, that the 90th percentile has five times the wealth of the 10th percentile. Too little inequality removes incentives to work and innovate, too high inequality is unjust and rewards hoarding of wealth. Various government policies (primarily taxation) can influence the wealth inequality. So we monitor the measure of inequality, and adjust government policies in to shift the measure whichever way it needs to go to get closer to the goal. I don't know what the goal should be, but economists could look at many countries over many periods and see how desirable outcomes (overall wealth growth, social cohesiveness, low unemployment, social mobility) have varied with levels of economic inequality.

[@peterhoulihan9766]

I agree with the basic principle of distributivism about ensuring economic power is as widespread as possible, but inevitably they start making compromises and calling for centralisation in the form of guilds and regulators to control all the smallholders. Doing that effectively undoes any good gained by decentralising production. All of the smallholders and craftsmen end up just being a small cog in another massive corporation, just without the security of a contracted wage. Also, regarding solving problems as low down as possible. Without relying on ethical responsibility there's already an economic model for that: Fraternal societies. Fraternal societies used to be essentially local insurance and healthcare systems organised on a local level. If someone broke their leg and couldn't work, they'd be taken care of until they got back on their feet, that kind of thing. It was also very hard to cheat because instead of cheating some nameless taxpayer, you'd be cheating the guy next door. If people got the feeling you were malingering then it was possible for you to get kicked out. Fraternal societies also inter-insured on a regional and national level, so a disaster that affected an entire community or area could be handled. However, for the same reason that people avoided asking too much from the local society, communities also avoided asking for help from the regional societies. The weight of genuine need on one side and social disapproval/threat of help being withdrawn created a balance which punished fraudsters and overconsumers but provided for genuine cases of need. It was a pretty good system overall.

[@forenamesurname1183]

heres to Beef and Liberty

[@ATurnToTradition]

Formidable explanation. God bless.

[@nates2526]

Interesting concept. Thanks for the video!

[@ongridself-reliantfamily1751]

Love the video. And this idea, while I don't fully subscribe to it, is also near and dear to my (and my family's) heart.

[@BernardS4]

Is this idea found also in the economic theories of Tom Paine and Henry George?

[@thelostcreole]

I have been a fan of Chesterton for over 20 years. He inspired me to become a homesteader. However, I recently Heard from a Podcaster that Chesterton thought that Hereditary property was unfair and should be abolished under Distributism. Any truth to that?

[@GoodandBasic]

I don't know. Wouldn't surprise me though. JB

[@G4r0s]

There is some thought to put this in practice in a modern service economy. The basic idea is that every employee is also a shareholder of his company and is not only sold in wages but also equity. When he moves to another company, the capital moves with him. This becomes important when automation threatens to put a sizeable share of the working population out of work and to share the spoils of said automation more equitably among the population. So if a company improves its efficiency, it can either earn more for its employees or they can earn the same with lower working hours. This has multiple benefits: it makes automation not only a threat but also an opportunity, it is a great motivator for employees and it counters the tendency of capital to accumulate. Does anyone know of this model/theory and could point to more extensive resources?

[@bmo5082]

It sounds like a much better system than communism. Unfortunately it seems that it still requires someone to redistribute the land/wealth. Furthermore, not all property is homogeneous. Properties closer to town will garner more value, than those way out in the middle of no where. Personally I think the best solution to increasing the wealth of the middle class is to get rid of zoning laws. Zoning laws and Real property restrictions tend to hurt the little guy, while at the same time enriching governments and developers. I live in Utah, as I believe you do as well. Think of how much property is between Provo and st George, and between salt lake and Logan. Yet so little of it is available for purchase as individual lots because it’s Agricultural Land, or some other ultra low density zoning. So people are forced into townhomes, condos or some other high density housing.

[@Ariverfish]

Land reform and increasing land tax by the square mile basically fixes that in a couple of generations. It took decades to build up to the mess we have now, and it will take decades if not centuries to fix it back to the way it was intended. I personally lean more agrarian, so buying actual farmland and building a small farmhouse is not a problem for me. This is why generational inheritance of land is important and keeping family tradition. Distributism is not just the ability to own land, but to use that land to do your business in. Three acres and do not forget the cow. Cities and towns will naturally form and dissolve by themselves. High density housing and zoning laws are inevitable as that is how human society is built, and there will always be a "Prague" or "Vienna". The important thing is that matters in Vienna should stay in Vienna. The goal is to eventually get the people back to the countryside and spread out as much as possible, after all.

[@beautifulsmall]

The chesterton novel from 1908 , joseph conrad secret agent in 1907. maybe an influence . Three achers and a cow. I like that idea. an achre is a one cow per day field to plough. blockchain is a distributed system . at what level of technology do we sit, or will technology soon enable . HG wells the time machine has a wonderful vision from 1895 of a physically split society. tending a garden and working at TSMC , why not . no food shops, you have to grow your own. Great video,

[@johnfisher3380]

I like distributivism, but I’m solidly in the camp that if we need violence, state coercion/regulations, and state theft/taxes to get there, then it’s an immoral system and unconscionable on ethical grounds. Thankfully, history shows the opposite to be the case. In every facet of life and society, wherever the state becomes involved more, that area becomes much more centralized. For example, telephone used to be a monopoly when the state treated it like a utility and closed the market. Giants like Microsoft came about through use of IP laws (government-granted monopolies on ideas/“recipes”). Farming became much more centralized after the state got involved in the 20th century. I believe that a libertarian, true free market society leaves the most room for distributivism to thrive. Manatoa1 also makes a great point. Even if most people elect in a libertarian society to live in a distributivist manner, some people would rather specialize more and live in a city. They should be free to do so, naturally, and, following history, both they and the distributivists will be better off in the long run.

[@frze5645]

How does a national rail system fit into distributivism?

[@notcrazy6288]

I think that the idea is that higher echelons of society don't deal with local problems unless absolutely necessary, but that if a problem requires a national response, like the need for a national rail system, it would be dealt with at a national level. If the problem was a city needing a local rail system, distributism would advocate for that city's people, businesses, and municipal government to solve it and for the state and federal government to stay out of it. It seems to me that distributism would take a dim view of federal grant money being pushed to the states, for example.

[@chakra4735]

You can say Pope Leo XIII and "Rerum Novarum" and we'll be OK. If he was reasoning from first principles he likely ended up where honest modern thinkers would. Keep the meadowlark singing.

[@ashleyhamman]

I'm not quite sure if I agree with how you percieve communism, in that I think "state communism" is hardly communism at all, but rather a command economy, where global communism is more a left-leaning anarchism-like civilization. As for distributivism, it does make sense in a rural society where resources can be evenly spread, an economics version of the physics saying of "assuming a perfectly spherical cow". Dismissing cities, and indeed the fundamentally lumpy distribution of things on Earth, I think a democratic system more or less like we have in the US is about as close as we can get, megacorporations aside. Indeed, the idea of "widespread property ownership" sounds like another way to describe people paying taxes on things that they voted for. A city's metro system is a sense owned by every taxpayer, for example. To a certain degree, I do agree with the idea that local authorities should best be the ones to take care of issues, but I think even now that that is taken too far, as places seek to compete instead of cooperate, and resulting in wasted spending and poor planning.

[@DarkPrject]

Being an anarcho communist myself, I don't want any state whatsoever. My ideal society consists of loose federations of communes and syndicates each running on consensus decision making.

[@Ariverfish]

Democracy is a rubbish system that should be abolished at the national level. Choose between corrupt politicians trying to one-up themselves to the detriment of the nation, or a specifically trained person raised from their childhood to adulthood, regulated by the ecclesiastical polity, to inherit and make lasting decisions for generations. Embrace monarchy and true feudalism, and distributism is the closest we can get. Communism is a filthy ideology tainted by the plague of materialism brought on by the dogged French liberals, the very same way how capitalism is now. "Communism" and "Capitalism" are useless monikers for people to rally behind because people have lost their ethics, morals and humanity, succumbed to the material. People have stopped thinking for the past and future of humanity, and started to only think about the present of humanity.

[@HahaDamn]

That isn't what communism is.

[@kevinfromsales9445]

Catholic Socialism?

[@HahaDamn]

Just the fact he’s confused that the state will dissolve by means of a state, he literally hasn’t read Karl. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat is not the same as the bourgeois state, the dictatorship of capital, which Marx and Engels described as being special bodies or armed men (to enforce bourgeois property rights and force labour the work when striking etc). The idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat is a government run by workers whose political objective is to end bourgeois property, and to instead engage in a collective democratic and consciously run society and economy, thus eliminating the need for the state itself (without bourgeois property, the special bodies of armed men become unnecessary and the “state” withers away)

[@crusader2112]

No because there's private property Distributism. One of the key factors in Communism is the abolition of private property.

[@zynark777]

Imagine if you stopped buying Marvel toys (and Avocado Lattes), maybe you could afford a house some day? /Le Happy Boomer

[@martinmartin1363]

That would be ideal but house prices and mortgages keep going up and up making it harder for the common man to afford a house