As I've said before I want a Solidarity that is divorced from Christian Democracy. The first time I heard the word was when Organized Labor wad fighting the Communists in Poland. I knew the Unions were the good guys. I have come largely back to that position. I want a movement that reaches the underserved and the marginalized. In many ways I think those are not powerful Christian groups. Christian hegemony is a problem to be solved by Solidarity.
I also have never seen an explanation of Distributism that seems both realistic and desirable. I give money to the ASP because the system runs on American Dollars and not some weird academic economic theory.
Regarding Christian Democracy, see my previous comments...it is a pluralistic movement (as you can see in nations with large pluralistic Christian Democratic parties, such as the German CDU), although I agree the name is somewhat misleading. I would rather Christian Democracy rename itself in a way that accurately reflects what it actually stands for, but for now we're stuck with the historic name....
We'll talk about distributism more in a later post...I guess I'm just curious about what you understand to be distributism. There's no inherent contradiction between using US Dollars and distributism, since distributism is not about monetary policy, but rather about economic structure. You can use US Dollars and have a distributist society at the same time...or perhaps I misunderstood your point?
The most accurate form of large scale historical distributism is "Forty acres and a mule." I have not seen an argument that retains a complex economy and the specialization of labor. Bringing back guilds seems like a horrible idea to me for instance. I just don't see how someone who isn't a Ludite can honestly advocate for distributism. And I've seen a lot of party members who would be perfectly fine gutting the modern economy to get more employee owned co-ops.
I see...perhaps I'll be able to address some of your concerns when the article comes out. For now I'll just say that while I think that G.K. Chesterton's version of distributism was definitely more on the agrarian side, I think distributism as originally defined by Hillaire Belloc definitely is a broader principle. Of course, regardless of how you understand distributism, it's not something that could be achieved overnight by raw government power, and I think even fairly hardline distributists would be ok with private/government ownership of some means of production if that would be better for the economy. But that's a topic for another day...
As I've said before I want a Solidarity that is divorced from Christian Democracy. The first time I heard the word was when Organized Labor wad fighting the Communists in Poland. I knew the Unions were the good guys. I have come largely back to that position. I want a movement that reaches the underserved and the marginalized. In many ways I think those are not powerful Christian groups. Christian hegemony is a problem to be solved by Solidarity.
I also have never seen an explanation of Distributism that seems both realistic and desirable. I give money to the ASP because the system runs on American Dollars and not some weird academic economic theory.
Regarding Christian Democracy, see my previous comments...it is a pluralistic movement (as you can see in nations with large pluralistic Christian Democratic parties, such as the German CDU), although I agree the name is somewhat misleading. I would rather Christian Democracy rename itself in a way that accurately reflects what it actually stands for, but for now we're stuck with the historic name....
We'll talk about distributism more in a later post...I guess I'm just curious about what you understand to be distributism. There's no inherent contradiction between using US Dollars and distributism, since distributism is not about monetary policy, but rather about economic structure. You can use US Dollars and have a distributist society at the same time...or perhaps I misunderstood your point?
The most accurate form of large scale historical distributism is "Forty acres and a mule." I have not seen an argument that retains a complex economy and the specialization of labor. Bringing back guilds seems like a horrible idea to me for instance. I just don't see how someone who isn't a Ludite can honestly advocate for distributism. And I've seen a lot of party members who would be perfectly fine gutting the modern economy to get more employee owned co-ops.
I see...perhaps I'll be able to address some of your concerns when the article comes out. For now I'll just say that while I think that G.K. Chesterton's version of distributism was definitely more on the agrarian side, I think distributism as originally defined by Hillaire Belloc definitely is a broader principle. Of course, regardless of how you understand distributism, it's not something that could be achieved overnight by raw government power, and I think even fairly hardline distributists would be ok with private/government ownership of some means of production if that would be better for the economy. But that's a topic for another day...