[eco-misery] the search for a sustainable solution

You silly moo

[Chesterton, in the] 1910 What's Wrong with the World ... advocated a view called "Distributism" that is best summed up by his expression that every man ought to be allowed to own "three acres and a cow."

The economic pillar of this distributist idea entailed:

Private property

Under such a system, most people would be able to earn a living without having to rely on the use of the property of others to do so. Examples of people earning a living in this way would be farmers who own their own land and related machinery ... [and] the "co-operative" approach ... recognise[ing] that such property and equipment may be "co-owned" by local communities larger than a family, e.g. partners in a business.

Guild system

The kind of economic order envisioned by the early distributist thinkers would involve the return to some sort of guild system. The ... existence of labor unions promotes class interests, whereas Guilds are employers and employees cooperating for mutual benefit.

Banks

Distributism ... eliminates ... the current private bank system, or in any case, its profit-making basis. This does not necessarily entail nationalization.

The fine detail, unfortunately, still involves government or social coercion in a plethora of legislation but at least it appreciates the great social dilemma - given the ideal that a free market needs to be also a fair market, that private property should be recognized for all members of society and that the system favours people of enterprise, nevertheless the system will always tends towards monopolization and cartels.



Would you not agree that a healthy society is one in which a man and/or woman can labour to produce direct betterment of their condition, in a climate where this is not swamped by prices driven up by price fixing?

Eliminate the banks and the cost of a house would sooner or later become "affordable" for the average family and would require no borrowing. It is the borrowing which is the problem. To borrow to improve your condition is one thing - it involves usury - and yet to legislate against usury is again state coercion.

At base level though, with no borrowing whatsoever, the cost of a basic house should still be affordable on the mean wage and this needs to be somehow enshrined in society.

So it's a pretty problem.

It also fails to take into account two other things - the mushrooming population, with its consequent strain on natural resources plus greed and evil in high places [Ephesians 6:12].

I keep quoting that verse and argue that it very much must be taken into consideration in developing any sustainable economic theory and yet most economists, by nature, would reject the notion. Therein lies the potential failure of any social order - from capitalism to communism - if you won't accept the existence of some sort of malicious cynicism up top.

The system must, therefore, necessarily fail because it does not recognize "malice" as a factor, as a motive. Not just "incompetence", not just "selfishness", not just "greed" but actual malice in high places.

Well all right, let's call it instead "deep cynicism".

It knows that certain policies such as sub-prime lending and the inevitable effect of credit availability for the masses, leading to skyrocketing costs, must inevitably also lead to crunches, crashes and war, which devastate the masses and in fact criminalizes the ordinary citizen. However, for a certain class - it turns an obscene profit.

It's this profiting from human misery, under the banner "business is business", which is the most troublesome in my mind, a mind which, in principle, embraces the Coolidge maxim that the business of the state is business.

Small government, therefore, needs to run four things:

1. defence; 2. social security for the truly needy; 3. facilitation of enterprise within its borders; 4. anti-cartel, anti-monopoly legislation and anti-price fixing.

But who will do Point 4? The people who rise to the top of government, by definition, meet the old money and are seduced by the elite ideals. I was on my way to this at one time in the distant past. Which is worse - state slavery or business cartel slavery?

Choose your flavour.

How can we devise a system which will actually work and yet does not involve government in any but those four areas?

The problem or the solution?