Distributism: A Synopsis

I talked about why capitalism (and socialism) is bad, so what is the solution? It is a little-know idea, encouraged by many Popes as Catholic social justice and promoted by Hillaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton, called Distributism. Pope Leo XIII first expressed the idea in his encyclical Rerum Novarum. What he articulated was the connection between property and justice for the poor.

In Distributism, every family is a property owner. As Chesterton says, “three acres and a cow” is all a family needs. When families are self-sustaining or small business owners, they do not rely on the “Big Shops” for cheap prices and even cheaper labor. They can grow their own food, make their own clothes, and they do not worry about capital and wages.

As small business owners, they set reasonable prices on their goods instead of gouging the consumer in order to make a profit, and manufacture quality goods when the emphasis is taken off mass production.

What about goods and services that individuals cannot offer, such as automobiles? Then families assemble guilds where each person is self-employed and owns their own tools and machinery. As entrepreneurs, they are free to make their own decisions instead of being slave to the capitalist.

However, governments cannot force distributism on society. A change to the system must come from within the family. It is more like a change of heart, not a change of law. The good news is that you can start living like a distributist today. Here is a Twelve-Step Program to get you on your way.

The Regress of Parenting

Although I entitled this post “The Regress of Parenting”, I do not feel the title truly fits. Because you can only regress to a state you have been before and I believe this is entirely new ground – for all of us.

Many people today feel that anything new is best and anything old needs to go; hence, the negative reaction to all things “old-fashioned”. This country and others have put progress on a pedestal; they almost worship it. But has anyone ever wondered what we are progressing toward?

Always looking toward the future, while leaving past things behind, gets you nowhere fast. It is like trying to build a house while rejecting the idea of building on the groundwork you just laid. It is only when you continually build on a foundation that actual developments can be made. The only two institutions that have done this, according to Chesterton, are physical science and the Catholic Church.

One major area where our culture discards traditional ideas and worships new ones is with parenting. Even the word “parenting” is a new idea. It originated between 1955 and 1960 when parents started looking to psychologists for advice instead of their own relatives or just using common sense. People used to call it child rearing, but that was when they focused on the marriage instead of the child. (Ironic isn’t it?) On Amazon alone, there are over 61,000 results for “parenting books”. Have we really gotten to the point where we trust a professional over our own judgment? Or where we think that each child (because of his/her birth order or inabilities) needs a different “approach to parenting”?

One of the best (of few) parenting books I have read – Parenting by The Book by John Rosemond – offers four chapters on “The Great Deception” (as he puts it) which are about the lies touted by modern psychology. I have talked about this book before. I even had it among my top ten favorites. If you are a parent or ever will be, this is a must read.

A classic example of the modern psychology problem is psychoanalyzing the child’s actions, which ends up putting blame on someone or something else. Because of this (it is said), you cannot punish the child for his reaction to something beyond his control. I will give an exaggerated example to illustrate the point. As the parent demands to leave the park, the child reacts by hitting the parent. Instead of punishing the child for hitting, the parent apologizes for upsetting the child. By over-focusing on psychology, we have forgotten about sin. Children need to learn discipline. Their behavior should not be excused.

One of the things I really hate to see is parents laughing at disrespect, disobedience, or inappropriate behavior by their children. Children love to have an audience, and the minute they find something to make you laugh, they will repeat it (frequently). Therefore, these things must be disciplined immediately and consistently to teach the child proper behavior and manners. Not long ago parents would not have tolerated this behavior and certainly would not have found it funny. Parents today think tantrums are normal and should be tolerated for 5-year-olds and even beyond. It should not. Parents today are frustrated when their children argue with them … but they can only argue if the parent allows (by arguing back)!

Our state of affairs today is not normal. We need to get back to normal. Old-fashioned and traditional should not be considered “bad words”. They are normal. We need to resurrect the old ideas and meanwhile abandon the new. But many people will say, “Times have changed.” To that I will respond, times have always changed, yet child-rearing styles have only drastically changed in the past fifty years. All the advances in the world should not change something so basic as the raising of a family.

The Regulation of Education

Comparison of compulsory education in America from its establishment to today:

	1852 ~ 1900	Today
Compulsory Education Laws	The first compulsory education law was adopted in Massachusetts in 1852. No other state followed for 15 years.	As of 1918, all 50 states now have laws requiring compulsory education.
"Reasons" Behind the Laws	To level disparity between poor and wealthy, to “Americanize” immigrants, to improve the situation for children following the outlaw of child labor.	“Education is far too important to be entrusted to the common man.”
Compulsory Age Laws (Minimum)	Most states did not require attendance until age 8, but Ohio and South Dakota did not require attendance until age 10. And only one state (New Hampshire) required attendance of 6 year olds.	Today, 28 states require attendance of 6-year-olds, and Arkansas, D.C., Delaware, Maryland, New Mexico Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Virginia require compulsory attendance of children as young as 5!
Compulsory Age Laws (Maximum)	In 1887, only Washington (state) required attendance of 18 year olds.	Today, 14 states require attendance of 18 year olds.
Length of the School Year	In 1887, the average school term was only 130 days.	The average school term is now 180 days.

Education is very important … to a point. When parents cannot even make decisions about what should and should not be taught to their children and what ages said children will be taught, the state has overexerted its power. As Chesterton says in his book The Well and the Shallows, “The State did not own men so entirely, even when it could send them to the stake, as it sometimes does now where it can send them to the elementary school.”

Emphasis needs to and should always be on subsidiarity. As Pope Pius XI says, in his encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, "Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do." Since the family can educate (as proven for millennia in human history and today through homeschoolers), then the government is “gravely wrong” for taking away that right from the families.

Almost every week I read an article about the shocking things the schools are now teaching, or allowing or disallowing. Just yesterday I was reading about the boys who were not allowed to go to their prom after taping a “… will you go to prom with me …” sign to the front doors of the school! A few months ago, I read multiple articles about how schools in Texas (without parental consent or vote) were now going to teach Islamic culture and religion. (But not Christianity which is True, believed by more citizens, older – as a form of history, and originates from the same region. See “Contempt for Christianity” for more.)

In his Illustrated London News column on September 7, 1929, Chesterton says, “The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.” If that doesn’t prompt you to change your ideas about public schools, consider what the Home School Legal Defense Association states in its September/October 2000 issue of Court Report,

“Is it merely a coincidence that the two countries [Germany and Japan] whose educational system we have most admired gave rise to totalitarian states in the 20th century, bent on world domination? Looking into the dying embers of two world wars should remind us that the utopian impulse that lures men to entrust control of the individual—including compulsory attendance and state control of education—to the wisdom of the state, sets the stage for corrupt and domineering governments. And, as experience should have taught us, this can lead to horrible results. Although today’s proponents of compulsory attendance will argue that their purpose is benign, when the power to control education is concentrated in the hands of a few, it can easily be turned toward objectives which are not all benign.”

Even homeschoolers are not completely free of the government’s hand. Eighty percent of states have laws requiring homeschoolers to at least notify officials of their intention to homeschool. Many states have laws stating exactly what subjects you must teach your children. (You should see the list of required subjects for North Dakota!) Looking at the table below, it is easy to see how much control has been taken away from the families. Twenty-seven of fifty-one states (includes the District of Columbia) require parents to submit either test scores or a professional evaluation of the student.

	Description	# of States
States with high regulation	Requires parents to send notification, achievement test scores and/or professional evaluation, plus other requirements (e.g. curriculum approval by the state, teacher qualification of parents, or home visits by state officials)	6
States with moderate regulation	Requires parents to send notification, test scores, and/or professional evaluation of student progress	21
States with low regulation	Requires parental notification only	14
States requiring no notice	No requirement for parents to initiate any contact	10

Contempt for Christianity

I think Stanford Nutting (a character from G.K. Chesterton: Apostle of Common Sense) says it best in his thoughts on Christmas: “We don’t use the “C” word in the Nutting household. Christmas we don’t say. It’s too judgmental. It’s too exclusive. We need to be inclusive. That’s why we need to exclude Christmas, and so we say, ‘Merry Kwanza-Rama-Hanukkah-dan.’” You should watch the whole thing. It is hilarious, and it gets the point across very clearly.

We are no longer “allowed” to say “Merry Christmas”, because it is too exclusive. But we can say “Happy Hanukkah” or “Happy Kwanza” or “Happy Ramadan”. The problem with this country is not its lack of tolerance of other religions, but its hypocrisy through persecution of Christianity. It is only the Christian religion that is not tolerated in America (and other countries around the world). And yet America claims to be an open-minded, welcoming, free society.

How much persecution have Christians and especially Catholics suffered in this past century alone? A show from EWTN penned it as the bloodiest century for Catholics. Here are some numbers to give you an idea:

* Approximately one million Catholics were martyred in the twentieth century.

* Millions of Catholics were killed in WWII. Many people hold the false idea that Catholics were not persecuted for their religion during the war, only Jews. This is a lie. In Poland alone, – a country specifically targeted by the Nazis – the same amount of Catholics (over three million) were killed in death camps as Jews (approximately three million).

* 108 Martyrs of WWII – The Nazis martyred 108 clergy, other religious and lay Catholics in Poland. Pope John Paul II recognized these people in 1999 for their sacrifice.

* Wikipedia has 46 articles about wars and other persecutions of Catholics in the 20th Century.

But the most important thing fact is that Catholic persecution has been going on since Jesus’ death. The fact that most people today feel (or even “learned”) that Catholics “started” the Crusades out of intolerance or that the Church is against science prove that the persecution is deeply ingrained in our culture. You cannot read an article or a book about the Crusades that does not blame the Church and throw pity on the Muslims. Or one about science that accuses the Church of suppressing discoveries.

The Crusades were not started by the Catholics in order to “wipe out” Islam. It was provoked by the Muslims and was an effort to take back the land that the Muslims already stole from them. For more information on this, you should watch The Catholic Church: Builder of Civilization on EWTN.

As far as the Catholic Church being against science, all I can do is laugh, and tell you that Catholic priests and monks have made thousands of significant scientific advances and discoveries over the last two thousand years. Copernicus was a priest and was the first one to come up with the heliocentric idea (and was not “punished”). Galileo was punished because he called the theory “a law of science” before it had been proven as such and continued to teach it in that manner. You can also find more information on this on the show The Catholic Church: Builder of Civilization on EWTN.

The only way we can change people’s minds and hearts is by example. Show them who Catholics really are and what they really believe. And by speaking out against atrocities when they happen.

Why Not Capitalism?

Chesterton wrote, “It may be incredible that one creed is the truth and the others are relatively false. At the same time, it is not only incredible, but intolerable, to believe that there is no truth in or out of the creeds, and all are equally false. For then nobody can ever set anything right, if everybody is equally wrong.”

Chesterton also said, “Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.” Neither capitalism nor socialism can ever create an ideal society, and actually, capitalism will eventually create socialism, because the government will need to put restraints on Big Business and will eventually feel that Big Government can do a better job itself. Think “national health care” which was just rammed down our throats without our consent. Dale Ahlquist, in his post “A Prophetic Look at National Health Care”, says, “When health care started becoming too expensive, the solution was supposed to be health insurance. But insurance quickly made health care even more expensive. On the one hand, the medical industry stopped worrying about being affordable; on the other, a new layer of private bureaucracy and overhead was added that also needed to be paid for.”

Hillaire Belloc once said that capitalism is a “Servile State” which is “a state of society in which certain fully free citizens can compel, by positive law, the other inhabitants of that society to produce wealth for them.” And Chesterton (in The Outline of Sanity) says capitalism is “the economic condition in which there is a class of capitalists roughly recognizable and relatively small, in whose possession so much of the capital is concentrated as to necessitate a very large majority of the citizens serving those capitalists for a wage.” He also states that what we call Capitalism ought to be called Proletarianism – the practice of workers, especially industrial wage earners, not possessing capital or property and selling their labor to survive. With capitalism, we are all just wage slaves. Businesses become so big that they control the market (e.g. Walmart), and we must work for them because they have swallowed up all the competition.

I will leave you with this Chesterton thought, “the point is not that some people have capital, but that most people only have wages because they do not have capital.”

Woman at Home

Chesterton wrote in his book What’s Wrong with the World, “Now it is the great mark of our modernity that people are always proposing substitutes for these old things; and these substitutes always answer one purpose where the old thing answered ten.”

When a woman leaves the home to “focus on her career”, she leaves a laundry list of responsibilities, and a household hung out to dry. Who will watch the children? Who will cook the meals? Who will wash the clothes? Who will teach the children? And who will clean the house? The woman’s importance in the home is infinitely more valuable than any modern feminist could conceive.

Within the past century, services such as: daycares, preschools, “one-box meals”, frozen dinners, laundry services, dry cleaners, and maid services were made accessible to the lower and middle classes, because women decided they needed emancipation from domesticity. The need for these many “conveniences” only proves that married women with a career cannot “have it all”. They cannot be the “perfect wife and mother” if they are also an employee.

A person must decide their vocation at the brink of adulthood, and he or she has three choices: priesthood/religious life, marriage, or celibate single life. Within these vocations, people can choose occupations as well, but the vocation always supersedes the occupation. Aa a priest, a man cannot be a good shepherd to two thousand, or even to twenty, when he must raise up five at home. It follows that a woman who chooses marriage (and therefore motherhood) cannot work outside the home and still properly maintain the house and raise the children.

The selfish, individualistic ideas of our culture have caused many (if not all) of the current problems: irresponsibility, divorce, smaller families, an increase of women and children living in poverty, a dependence on the government for necessities, and disregard for human life. We need to get back to a family-centered culture instead of an individual-centered one.

What is "A Bird on Her Nest"?

My new blog title is from Chesterton’s debate with George Bernard Shaw. Shaw claimed that women needed freedom from the home, like being birds in a cage. Chesterton rebutted that woman is already free when she is in the home – like a bird on a nest. When she goes out in the world, she becomes a slave. As Chesterton once said, “Twenty million young women rose to their feet with the cry, ‘We will not be dictated to’: and proceeded to become stenographers.”

As for my subtitle, “defending the joyous drudgery of a housewife’s life”, I will let Chesterton’s words speak for themselves. In his book, What’s Wrong with the World, Chesterton writes:

“When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small import to the soul, then as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean. To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets, cakes and books; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.”

How Do You Know Truth is True?

I came across this “test” on the “G.K. Chesterton: The Apostle of Common Sense” TV show with Dale Ahlquist.

1. Truth is consistent – Lies, false philosophies, and errors will eventually show holes. The Truth is reliable and dependable.

2. Truth does not change – Truth does not depend on the year or even the century. Truth is valid at all times. Truth survives fads and fashions.

3. Truth is distinctive – Truth emphasizes what is important, not what is unimportant. Chesterton said, “Art, like morality consists of drawing the line somewhere.”

4. Truth is complete – Anything less than the Truth is a heresy. A heresy is a half-truth, a lie, which is only interested in itself instead of the whole Truth.

5. Truth is good – A lie does no one any good, and is mostly self-destructive. The Truth is always good, even if you cannot see it right away.

So, now you know. There may be other ways to tell if Truth is true, but these will start you out with a basic “test”.

True Freedom

Freedom is fully realized by choosing properly between good and evil.” (Theology of the Body for Beginners, Christopher West, p. 23) Freedom is not doing whatever you feel like without regard for others or even yourself. That is licentiousness. Action can only be called truly free if it remains within moral and logical bounds. Two examples will explain this better: I am free to draw a circle, but I am not free to call it a square. “We are free to do whatever we want with our bodies but we are not free to determine whether or not what we do is good or evil.” (ToB for Beginners, p. 23)

Many people today feel they can do whatever they want. They think because God gave them free will, they are free to live their lives however they choose; there is no right or wrong way to do something. Well, if that were true, then according to Chesterton, Christianity must be false because: “You cannot evade the issue of God … defending [Christianity means] talking about anything or everything. … Nothing can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is true.” (For the whole quote, see my Intro to Chesterton post.)

Since God gave us free will we have a responsibility, as Christians, to live our lives as examples and to show others what it means to be truly free. When you choose “properly between good and evil”, you are happy. And others will notice that. Hopefully, by your example you will encourage others to live like you.

An Introduction to Chesterton



Artwork courtesy of the
American Chesterton Society

I thought, since I told you my ideas were inspired by the man, it would be important to give some background on Gilbert Keith Chesterton before I proceed.

He was alive from 1874 to 1936 and lived in England. As Dale Ahlquist, president of the American Chesterton Society puts it, “He said something about everything and he said it better than everybody else.”

He wrote one hundred books, contributed to two hundred more, hundreds of poems, five plays, five novels, and around two hundred short stories, including the popular detective stories about Father Brown. Though, as Chesterton proclaims, he was not a writer. He was a journalist. He wrote over 4000 newspaper essays, including thirty years worth of weekly columns for the Illustrated London News and thirteen years of weekly columns for the Daily News. He also edited his own newspaper, G.K.’s Weekly.

Chesterton has been called the “Apostle of Common Sense”, because he wrote about, he defended the common man and common sense. He wrote about the Truth. He has also been called a complete thinker, because he didn’t defend half-truths. He defended the whole Truth. Because he wrote about everything, Ahlquist says reading Chesterton is a “complete education” in itself.

Even though he did not actually convert until 1922, Chesterton defended the Catholic Church, Her beliefs, and the Truth throughout his whole life and in everything he wrote. One of the most important things he said was in an article he wrote for the Daily News on December 12, 1903:

You cannot evade the issue of God, whether you talk about pigs or the binomial theory, you are still talking about Him. Now if Christianity be. . . a fragment of metaphysical nonsense invented by a few people, then, of course, defending it will simply mean talking that metaphysical nonsense over and over. But if Christianity should happen to be true - then defending it may mean talking about anything or everything. Things can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is false, but nothing can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is true.

In other words, Truth is not relative. You cannot tolerate another’s position on the basis of “everybody has their own views/opinions”. Since Christianity is true, there is only one Truth and it encompasses the whole world. This Truth is not just bound to “religion” and “religious things”. It covers every aspect of life: how you live, how you take care of your home, how you educate your children, how you care for your family, how you provide for your family, and everything else you can think of!

An Update (Not) Worth Reading

I know it's been a long time since I've written anything. Let me assure you, I have not been too busy. I was putting it off because I wanted to save all of my previous blog posts to my computer before I started writing anymore so that I could have a "backup" without adding more posts to back up! Now that I have that finished, I am actually going to try to write again. I have some topics floating around in my head:

• Women in the Home
• Divorce
• Education
• Eugenics
• Food & Health (eating naturally... not "nutritiously")
• Truth

All of them inspired by Chesterton. We'll see how many of them make it onto "paper". If you have never read Chesterton, you should. Robert randomly picked up a book by him up at the library one day in Quincy and we will both forever be grateful for that working of God. He is a wonderful 20th-century philosopher, theologian, and prophet who literally wrote about everything. Hope you look forward to reading these truth-inspired ideas as much as I look forward to sharing them with you!