It is widely agreed that plutocratic, often kleptocratic capitalism is a disaster, as we have seen in descriptions of many financial catastrophes, and will see again. But what can we do about it? Well, some look to Marxism, which has in practice been equally catastrophic. Social Democracy is the best result so far, but it is clearly not enough.
Our author today, G. K. Chesterton, is far better known for detective stories, literary studies, and Christian apologetics than as a serious political commentator, much less an economist. He was in no way an academic economist, but was a resolute opponent of both Capitalism and Marxism.
The practical tendency of all trade and business to-day is towards big commercial combinations, often more imperial, more impersonal, more international than many a communist commonwealth—things that are at least collective if not collectivist. It is all very well to repeat distractedly, “What are we coming to, with all this Bolshevism?” It is equally relevant to add, “What are we coming to, even with out Bolshevism?” The obvious answer is—Monopoly. It is certainly not private enterprise.
Now I am one of those who believe that the cure for centralization is decentralization. It has been described as a paradox. There is apparently something elvish and fantastic about saying that when capital has come to be too much in the hand of the few, the right thing is to restore it into the hands of the many. The [Marxist] Socialist would put it in the hands of even fewer people; but those people would be politicians, who (as we know) always administer it in the interests of the many.
Chesterton’s proposed solution has been called Distributism. Its central idea is spreading the wealth around (as candidate Barack Obama memorably said to Joe the Plumber in this century.)
When I say “Capitalism,” I commonly mean something that may be stated thus: “That 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.”
The truth is that what we call Capitalism ought to be called Proletarianism. The point of it is not that some people have capital, but that most people only have wages because they do not have capital.
Reaganomics in a nutshell, along with many other political ideologies that have set out to make the rich richer by impoverishing as many others as possible.
Socialism is a system which makes the corporate unity of society responsible for all its economic processes, or all those affecting life and essential living. If any thing important is sold, the Government has sold it; if anything important is given, the Government has given it; if anything important is even tolerated, the Government is responsible for tolerating it. This is the very reverse of anarchy; it is an extreme enthusiasm for authority.
IOW The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, in the persons of the Central Committee or the Maximum Leader.
“Conservatism”
The real peculiarity of England is that it is the only country on earth that has not got a conservative class. There are a large number, possibly a majority, of people who call them selves conservative. But the more they are examined, the less conservative they will appear.
Not any more. There are no conservatives left in the party of MAGA.
Undoing Monopoly Power
Practically about half of the recognized expedients by which a big business is now made have been marked down as a crime in some community of the past; and could be so marked in a community of the future.
Big pharma, fossil fuels, air travel, corporate price gouging, junk fees, corporate disinformation, union-busting, excessive mergers and acquisitions…
Monopoly is not omnipotent even now and here; and anybody could think, on the spur of the moment, of many ways in which its final triumph can be delayed and perhaps defeated.
I would maintain that on the removal of that particular plutocratic pressure, the appetite and appreciation of natural property would revive, like any other natural thing. Then, I say, it will be worth while to propound to people thus returning to sanity, however sporadically, a sane society that could balance property and control machinery. With the description of that ultimate society, with its laws and limitations, I would conclude.
A modern joke has it that
Capitalism is the oppression of man by man; Communism is precisely the reverse.
Now the idea of breaking up the power of monopolies and oligopolies has begun to take hold in our time. We even have a new name for it—Bidenomics. Of course the basic idea has deep roots and a long history in the US, going back to the Jeffersonians, who held to an ideal of yeoman farmers as against the big northern manufacturers and to some extent the southern slave power. This is a large part of Chesterton’s idea, although he calls them peasant proprietors. At the same time he recommends breaking up the big retailers and going back to locally owned shops.
I sympathize with this ideal, in the sense that I detest both of the extremes it tries to counter. But much of Chesterton’s argument, and his suggestions for carrying out this program, are romantic fantasies. Not for the reason alleged by some, that economic concentration is a Law of Nature, that it is impossible to break up big business, but because peasants and shopkeepers simply do not behave as he claims. The history of the Industrial Revolution is more complicated than that.
So let us put that aside, and instead look at some of Chesterton’s smaller-scale thoughts, and how they have fared since. We are coming out of Reaganomics. Friedmanite Market Fundamentalism has been thoroughly discredited except among ideologues and marketroids who don’t care about the facts of economics and politics, and think that this is only a problem of messaging, like
Compassionate Conservatism
Kinder, gentler rape
Starve the Beast and MAGAism in a Nutshell.
It is one of the grim and even grisly jokes of the situation that the very complaint they always make of us is specially and peculiarly true of them. They are always telling us that we think we can bring back the past, or the barbarous simplicity and superstition of the past; apparently under the impression that we want to bring back the ninth century. But they do really think they can bring back the nineteenth century.
Amazon and Walmart
I think the big shop is a bad shop. I think it bad not only in a moral but a mercantile sense; that is, I think shopping there is not only a bad action but a bad bargain. I think the monster emporium is not only vulgar and insolent, but incompetent and uncomfortable; and I deny that its large organization is efficient.
Law and Courts
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
Anatole France
Our Supreme Court has been systematically rigged, and it will take time to unrig it. So we have corporate personhood, unlimited corporate money in elections, no voting preclearance list, no Roe v Wade abortion right, and no way to apply the disqualification of an insurrectionist for the Presidency under the Fourteenth Amendment.
Local Food
it is not true that the quickest and cheapest thing, for a man who has just pulled an apple from an apple tree, is to send it in a consignment of apples on a train that goes like a thunderbolt to a market at the other end of England. The quickest and cheapest thing for a man who has pulled a fruit from a tree is to put it in his mouth.
Corporate agriculture cannot be cured by a peasantry. But it can in part be cured by vertical agriculture, so that produce can be grown in cities and delivered fresh to markets and restaurants. We also have to deal with CAFOs, GMO crops, pesticides, fertilizers, and monstrous overuse of antibiotics. But these are things that are happening, or I should say in the early stages of happening.
The Military-Industrial Complex
For the moment I will leave the progressive to laugh at my absurd notion of a limitation of machines, and go off to a meeting to demand the limitation of armaments.
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