24 ms·

Distributism

209 points by geowwy 8y ago

DonaldFisk 8y ago
There's apparently still a Distributist Club at Glasgow University that participated in the political debates held in Glasgow University Union: https://universityofglasgowlibrary.wordpress.com/2014/09/16/moderate-radicals-the-distributists-at-glasgow-university/ https://universityofglasgowlibrary.wordpress.com/2014/09/16/...
- geowwy 8y ago
  Tumblar House recently did a podcast on distributism too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMMpjApwfGA&t=748s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMMpjApwfGA&t=748s
- amelius 8y ago
  Just curious, are they in favor of Brexit, or against it?
  - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
    I would have assumed for it as the EU is clearly another form of centralised government and favours businesses that trade across borders so are larger. But when it comes to Brexit all bets are off.
    - matt4077 8y ago
      I run a 200,000€ revenue company that sells physical goods across the EU. Large companies have the resources to do the paperwork to sell across customs borders, I don’t. In this sense, the EU is more helpful to small companies than large ones. It effectively removes borders.
      - badpun 8y ago
        On the other hand, without the unified market, governments can engage in protectionism, and if they do, there's less of a chance that a small business will be crushed by a giant global competitor.
        bobthechef 8y ago
        That's too simplistic. There are large differences between countries in the East and the West. Western corporations have had a field day in the EU's Eastern members precisely because of the relative economic advantages they have built up over 50 years following WWII and the massive restructuring of the economies of the Eastern members following the fall of communism. Free trade really only works when countries have some kind of parity (something Friedrich List argues). However, to the East's advantage, their economies are much more dynamic and the West is increasingly stagnating.
    - vanderZwan 8y ago
      > favours businesses that trade across borders so are larger You are right about the first part of that sentence, but wrong about the second. In many contexts the EU makes the international market more accessible for small businesses - it greatly reduces overhead that large companies can afford and small companies cannot. For example, having one central safety or health standard for all countries is a lot cheaper than qualifying for each country on an individual basis. That benefits every business involved, but for smaller ones this fixed overhead is a much more significant hurdle than for big ones.
      - bewo001 8y ago
        While this is all true, there is a tendency that big markets create big players. Eg. in the 1950s/60s, many European countries had several independent car manufacturers. The cheap car in your country may have been worse than a cheap car of your neighboring country, but it cost less for the lack of tariffs. The local manufacturer had your business. When the borders came down, the smaller companies could no longer compete.
        0815test 8y ago
        The general pattern is that big markets create big players, but also increase the amount of "effective" diversity and competition at the local level. The smaller automakers of the 1950s and 1960s were essentially monopolies in their own countries; whereas with the borders coming down, manufacturers are incented to both compete and diversify in a meaningful way, so that some fraction of them can hold on to their share of the bigger, unified market.
        heavenlyblue 8y ago
        >> Eg. in the 1950s/60s, many European countries had several independent car manufacturers. The chance is that your point has nothing to do with the borders being open though.
        bewo001 8y ago
        Borders were certainly not the only factor. As car development became more expensive, only bigger players had the capital to do it. But different national regulations (eg in France head lights had to be yellow instead of white) and tariffs played a role.
    - talideon 8y ago
      OTOH, subsidiarity is explicitly a foundational principle of both the EU and Distributism.
  - notahacker 8y ago
    If it's Glasgow they're probably more focused on campaigning for Scottish independence!
gdwatson 8y ago
Maybe it's because I'm a Protestant who's not particularly invested in Roman Catholic social teaching and so I haven't learned the nuances, but it seems to me that when you apply distributism to an industrial or post-industrial society and work out the kinks you end up with either capitalism or socialism. It's straightforward to apply distributism to an agrarian society where land is the main source of wealth: split up the farmland among a bunch of smallholding farmers.¹ But once a meaningful part of your economy is in capital-intensive industries, you have a decision to make: do you allow private individuals to accumulate capital or not? If you do, you soon have a capitalist society. If you do not, or you allow them to accumulate capital but not to benefit from it, you end up with a socialist society. The examples in the Wikipedia article confirm this impression. Distributism looks to me like someone took the principle of subsidiarity and the role of the family, saw that they got more respect in the late middle ages, and pined for the economic system of that era. It would be interesting and productive to re-examine some of the underlying assumptions there. ¹ Whether land reform is just is a separate issue; at least it is possible.
- EGreg 8y ago
  You end up with OPEN SOURCE
- _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
  Interestingly, Protestantism is tied up with the history of capitalism. I think it's worthwhile to think about systems that don't reduce to either capitalism or socialism. (Though, in the spirit of reductionism, one can imagine capitalism as reducing to socialism in the long term: you can allow private individuals to accumulate capital, but ultimately it'll end up in the hands of a few individuals, who will be a de facto government.)
- jawns 8y ago
  It's not an either-or thing, where if you allow people to accumulate productive resources, you inevitably get capitalism, and if you don't, you inevitably get socialism. This is tremendously simplified, but I would say that if you allow people to accumulate productive resources and your economic policies prioritize market efficiency above all else, then you're likely to end up with laissez-faire capitalism. However, if you have economic policies in place that prioritize widespread ownership (for instance, by incentivizing small-business ownership or cooperatives), that might lead to some short-term market inefficiencies but may promote beneficial long-term effects. For instance, it might help them compete against larger corporations whose only advantage is economies of scale, but which wipe out otherwise healthy small businesses and then enjoy near-monopoly status.
mjfl 8y ago
Any real implementation of Distributism would require a strong state and police force to enforce it and in practice would look identical to socialism.
- nabla9 8y ago
  All robust implementations of capitalism require state and police force to enforce property rights. Property is monopoly to assets given by the government.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - baddox 8y ago
    You can certainly have property rights without a government, they just may not be “fair” according to some definitions (of course, specific implementations of government protection of property rights also may not be “fair” according to some definitions).
    - JetSpiegel 8y ago
      That's just might makes right, there's no property there since you can take what you want. Property implies you use the state (an external entity) to enforce your rights, providing checks on individual power, not that you enforce it yourself.
  - Proven 8y ago
    That is pure nonsense. Property existed before the government. It's a small detail but it does show how shallow most comments to this article are. Complete cluelessness! It is appalling to see that so many supposedly "smart" commenters support redistributionist ideologies (one comment even quoted Dengism as an example of a successful redistributionist system!).
- nosuchthing 8y ago
  Are you implying regulation/anti-trust/anti-monopoly/anti-plutocracy is socialism? Do you understand the difference between state/corporate socialism, and regulations?
dluan 8y ago
Capital democratization is a topic I've been researching for a while now with regards to new tech startup corporate structure, especially things that fall into the public good category like FOSS. Co-op's and ESOPs are just one way, but it's about time that we start to experiment with new ownership and governance structures that don't just create more Facebook's and Amazon's. Louis Kelso is the one who notoriously invented and popularized worker-ownership plans in the US, taking inspiration from the US Homestead Act with spreading capital ownership across society. During the cold war, he also used to characterize 'capital democratization' as a third way, separate from capitalism and communism, but mainly just because then neoclassical economists like Samuelson derided his ideas at the time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUf51M9D6sw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUf51M9D6sw
- apatters 8y ago
  This is a really interesting thing to think about. If we pick on Facebook as an example, most people look at FB and see that it has 2.3 billion customers, then go on to assume it's an amazing and innovative company filled with great people who make the best product in the industry. An alternative point of view is that there are 2.3 billion customers out there for this type of product, and the financial systems and incentives present in our society resulted in Facebook owning all of those customers. FB actually is exemplary of the flaws present in the first mode of thinking. I don't doubt there are many brilliant people working there, but their product is crappy and even user hostile on many levels. Biggest absolutely doesn't translate to best all the time. More likely FB got to where it is because the rules of our society concentrate capital and control (which is exactly what we see going on when we look at data such as wealth disparity, shrinking # of new businesses etc. in the USA over time).
  - luckylion 8y ago
    > I don't doubt there are many brilliant people working there, but their product is crappy and even user hostile on many levels. The alternative interpretation is that there are brilliant people working on it and their product is great, the user just isn't the customer. Brilliance doesn't imply ethical behavior ;)
gottebp 8y ago
I love Distributism. As G.K. Chesterton said, "The problem with Capitalism is not that there are too many but too few" Distributism seeks the maximum number of families and individuals privately owning a small bit of capital. Imagine every family with a small business, and these businesses sometimes cooperating to do greater things. Distributism seeks to avoid massive capital in the hands of a few oligarchs. It also seeks to avoid the means of production belonging to the people in a vague and non-specific way -- such as communism with its abolition of private property (No one really owns anything in that vague abstraction -- the State owns all). When everyone (or at least most) has a modest business, they can support their community and keep it intact. Subsidiarity is localism through and through -- not just in food but everything else. I think we all want our work to make the places we live better. We all want the power to help our friends get jobs so they do not have to move far away (Have a small business and you can hire them).
- toasterlovin 8y ago
  The problem with this vision is that economies of scale exist. I have been involved in a manufacturing business for a while. Scale solves lots of problems. It spreads overhead over more units. It incentivizes spending resources to hyper optimize material and labor usage. Etc.
  - bloudermilk 8y ago
    That's what makes cooperation an important aspect of these types of ideologies. In Humanizing The Economy[0], the author describes successful cooperative movements from around the world that are based on localized democratic principles but leverage large-scale cooperation to organize at scale. [0]: https://www.newsociety.com/Books/H/Humanizing-the-Economy https://www.newsociety.com/Books/H/Humanizing-the-Economy
    - specialist 8y ago
      Thank you for this tip. I'm eager to read this book. While I'm a big fan of Richard D Wolff's efforts, he fails to examine the governance models of co-ops. What works, what doesn't. Models of incorporation. Case studies. Governance is key. -- Some years ago, I joined a non-profit OSS team, part of the Kuali Consortium, with the primary intent to see how it worked first hand. Sadly, it didn't. Even more sadly, I still have little clue what could work, what to advocate. I am inspired by Pieter Hintjens' Social Architecture as model for successful OSS: http://hintjens.com/books http://hintjens.com/books But have yet to practice it myself. -- Sorry, I always conflate ideas. My end goal is to figure out how to make useful, meaningful software while still paying my mortgage and feeding my family.
jefurii 8y ago
Richard D Wolff advocates a socialism that sounds something like this, centered around worker cooperatives rather than state control of everything.
- Mengkudulangsat 8y ago
  Any large examples of this? Only one I can think of is Mondragon Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
  - blowski 8y ago
    In the UK, John Lewis / Waitrose (a big supermarket and department store group) is owned by its employees.
    - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
      I suppose the mutual building societies in the UK aren't very far from this idea as well, although there aren't many left now. Also Vanguard.
jeffdavis 8y ago
I'm inclined to like this idea, but it seems to be framed in a way that centralizes a lot of governmental power. Why not look for ways to decentralize power and also decentralize resources? For instance, removing or limiting various privileges of large corporations that individuals don't have.
- larsiusprime 8y ago
  My understanding of distributism has been that it has among its aims to localize governmental power. I don't mind strengthening a government where my vote actually makes a difference. Especially in the incarnations of distributism that have a large overlap with Georgism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism) you see this sort of thing manifest in e.g. the land tax (strengthens local governments who are the assessors of said tax -- and if land tax is your society's primary tax, then power naturally devolves from the center to the local).
  - jeffdavis 8y ago
    Where do things like written rights come in to play? What is the difference between dostributism and federalism?
- tathougies 8y ago
  Distributism, being a Catholic belief, is ultimately based on the principal of subsidiarity, which is a Catholic social doctrine stating that all matters of government ought to be handled at the most local level competent and able enough to deal with the matter. Thus, while national defense may best lay with the national government, the trash pickup schedule is best decided by local processes.
  - lixtra 8y ago
    I don’t see why Catholism is emphasized so much in your answer. The concepts discussed exist independently of Catholism, have their roots before Catholism and looking at them from a religious angle confounds more than it clarifies.
bravura 8y ago
"Further, some distributists argue that socialism is the logical conclusion of capitalism, as capitalism's concentrated powers eventually capture the state, resulting in a form of socialism." This is pretty wild, could someone please explain this argument for me?
- tathougies 8y ago
  Yes... Communism means the communal ownership of goods. In practice, some process needs to be in place to decide how the goods are used. Usually, this is some kind of democratic institution -- a government or small committee that nominally looks after the interests of the people. Historically, the issue with communism is the inability for this small group to truly benefit all the workers. Corporate capitalism is the same system under another name. Instead of governments controlling the capital in the name of the workers, employers own the capital in the name of the workers. Workers themselves in both systems do not often own their own means of production (although capitalism at least allows for this). For example, a distributist model of furniture manufacture involves thousands of local woodworkers each making furniture, selling them, profiting in a small way -- at least enough to raise their family. A corporate capitalist model is one large company which owns all the tools and wood that the individual employee-workers utilize to make a good that is sold to profit the corporation. A communist model is the 'people' own the tools and the wood that some citizens make into furniture for the benefit of all the community. Because the worker gets everything they need anyway, their income isn't actually a function of their labor. In both the case of corporate capitalism and communism, the worker does not own the means of production and the profit and value they create via the utilization of the tools and raw materials owned by some other more remote group is mostly alienated from their behavior. Only in the distributist model are people actually paid exactly for what value their labor provided. In other words, monopolistic publicly owned corporations are basically communism, but with the board of directors (on behalf of the 'people' -- the shareholders, basically the public for large corporations) substituting for the communist government. All economic decisions are made centrally, and any competition between these large firms in an oligopoly is more akin to the competition between communist governments than the competition envisioned by capitalists
  - 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
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bjourne 8y ago
I believe Distributist ideas such as Syndicalist worker cooperatives have been thrown by the way-side by the modern Left. Tackling the looming ecological disasters require centralized control. For example, the Paris Agreement is a Centralist policy, as is the world-wide Carbon tax.
- majewsky 8y ago
  The leftist media (at least the parts that I know) frequently applaud small cooperatives and other grassroots-level economic activity. But I don't see anyone who translates these local efforts into policy.
  - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
    Both sides of the media do, as to the politicians they seem to favour either big business or unions.
ComodoHacker 8y ago
What about large-scale projects which aren't possible without concentration of productive assets and capital? Does this doctrine addresses that? Can we have sustained energy production or trans-Atlantic internet cables or satellites or Teslas with it?
- mwilcox 8y ago
  It's about distributed _ownership_ not necessarily physical distribution
- geowwy 8y ago
  From the article: > Distributism puts great emphasis on the principle of subsidiarity. This > principle holds that no larger unit (whether social, economic, or political) > should perform a function which can be performed by a smaller unit. The point is that you should try and keep things as small as feasible. When it's not feasible you use bigger institutions.
  - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
    It does raise an interesting question though. If the system kept a lid on the size of the computer companies in the nineties how would a business like Apple accumulate enough capital to fund the development of a product like the iPhone. We might all still be playing Snake on our dumb phones.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      So, no FB, Twitter, walled gardens, BS apps, rat race to replace, and 3 hours per day staring at a mobile screen? Sounds like a deal! Where can I get this Snake thing (Google Maps aside)?
      - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
        Music, maps and route finding, weather forecasts, password management, calculator, email on the go, library loans, camera, calendar, chats with my friends and family, all on the first page of my phone. I wouldn't want to give it up now.
known 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dengism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dengism proved to be successful
harryf 8y ago
Based on personal impressions, I think Switzerland is a good example of distributism. Much attention is given to the Swiss banks and the "gold" but in reality, IMO, the strength of the Swiss economy lies in the small & medium business sector. There are over 300K businesses classes as SMBs in Switzerland, many of them family owned. For a country of 8 million people that means one SMB per 26 people. There are few "high street chains" aside from the supermarkets - unlike the UK for example where the high street of most towns and cities looks the same. According to this article - https://www.thelocal.ch/20171114/report-swiss-are-richer-than-ever-but-wealth-inequality-persists https://www.thelocal.ch/20171114/report-swiss-are-richer-tha... - 63 percent of Swiss adults have financial assets above $100,000 which means, although there is a small percent of extremely wealthy people, there's a good distribution of wealth. That in turn means if you want to start a business here, there are plenty of potential customers with disposable income they might be willing to risk on your product or service.
- luiscleto 8y ago
  > "Distributism favors the dissolution of the current private bank system, or more specifically its profit-making basis in charging interest" Does not sound very Swiss to me.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    It could be totally Swiss, as long as the banks are used to cater to a global clientele first and foremost, rather than lord over Swiss people themselves.
    - notahacker 8y ago
      The distributist writers held deep religiously-driven moral concerns about equitable property distribution, so I'm not sure the notion of "yes, we will build our economy around a banking system which helps people from other countries hide their sometimes dubiously-obtained immense wealth and charge them handsomely for the privilege" is really compatible with it.
- 8y ago
luiscleto 8y ago
> "Further, some distributists argue that socialism is the logical conclusion of capitalism, as capitalism's concentrated powers eventually capture the state, resulting in a form of socialism" This greatly resembles Karl Marx's criticism of capitalism, which has failed to hold up to reality so far. Frankly, this sounds a lot like repackaged socialism using labor unions and guilds rather than a central government. Might not be as bad a state socialism (i.e. they might actually be able to manage the businesses better), but I sincerely doubt it would solve any of the major problems we see today. While you do have inequality in capitalist systems the "elites" tend to rotate, with empires falling apart and new ones taking their place. Wealthy families maintaining their wealth and power are the exception and not the norm. Introducing guilds or more unions will likely make it much harder for competition and innovation to thrive, introducing a huge barrier of bureaucracy interested only in maintaining the status quo for their own benefit.
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  The capture the state part seems to be spot on. You just need to take a look at how much lobbying goes on and our inability to deal with issues like climate change thanks to the big oil companies.
  - luiscleto 8y ago
    They can apply large pressure on the state, true. But so can labour unions (and probably so would guilds). It is still not true state ownership as competition does thrive (even if they still have obstacles). Edit: There are probably even better examples of lobbying than climate change as that has a ton of confounding factors that make it hard to deal with besides just oil companies. But I see no reason to assume distributism would make the issue better. Taxi drivers protesting against Uber comes to mind.
- reallydude 8y ago
  > which has failed to hold up to reality so far It's held up for most of history. The US can probably avoid full socialism for just under 400 years (hopefully), as the brief ~250 years so far, is not a proof in context. What any 2 people consider socialist may be very different.
luiscleto 8y ago
I originally thought this was going to be an April fool's satire on using Microservices as a religion.
- gitgud 8y ago
  I assumed it was a similar joke for classifying people who worship the block chain
ImaCake 8y ago
Sounds a bit like wildlife Conservancies found dotted across the developing world[0]. While the rules and some funding come from centralised authorities, the land that is put aside for wildlife conservation is done so by local peoples at their own discretion, and the management and work in each conservancy are conducted by the locals. I guess Conservancies in the developing world contrast with the organised national parks and state run conservation areas of countries like the USA and New Zealand. But both forms of organsation can work together. If you look at the map of Namibia in this reference [1], you can see how conservancies offer a buffer zone to that country's national parks. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_Wildlife_Conservancies_in_Namibia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_Wildlife_Conservancie... 1. http://www.met.gov.na/services/conservancies/193/ http://www.met.gov.na/services/conservancies/193/
simonh 8y ago
The problem with this is it can only work by imposing arbitrary restrictions on everyone. Under free market capitalism if you want to run a family business you can. If you want to run a multinational corporation you can. Nobody is rigging the system to force one outcome or the other and there are good economic reasons why both can be appropriate and successful in different circumstances. Distributism arbitrarily labels one of those wrong and the other right on ideological grounds, leading to an inflexible, inefficient and ultimately coercive economy because the 'right' answer has to be imposed somehow. I think what is often missed about capitalism is that essentially it is based on individual freedom. The freedom to own property, to own capital, to deploy that capital as one sees fit, to take responsibility and the benefits from the outcome, to act individually if you wish or in concert in groups or organisations of any size. In capitalist liberal democracies, if you want to create and run a workers cooperative, you certainly can and people have. You can run a family business, or a huge corporation. It doesn't really mandate a particular organisational structure, at least at that level. There are rules about how business entities are run to an extent, such as rules about boards of directors and financial reporting, but they don't actually stop you building an enterprise built on distributist or even Marxist principles. The problem is these arbitrary systems of organisation, while they can be effective in some limited situations, just aren't flexible and efficient enough to be extensible to a whole economy. In mandating a particular organisational structure, and in distributism even a preferred scale, they also obstruct innovation. The old distributionist mantra 'three acres and a cow' sums this up nicely, it's an essentially static view of society. Again Marxism suffers from the same disease, never really developing good answers to how enterprises are founded, innovate, evolve and wind down in a natural way. Instead it has always had to resort to state executive fiat because there is no organic process for innovation and these life-cycle transformations in Marxism. In contrast under Capitalism, people and organisations simply do these things through the exercise of their individual freedom and discretion.
- hacknat 8y ago
  > Nobody is rigging the system to force one outcome or the other and there are good economic reasons why both can be appropriate and successful in different circumstances. I would consider myself a capitalist, but you have to be pretty naive to think that corporations haven’t captured our governing class and rigged the system in their favor. This Wikipedia article makes this point very early as a critique of capitalism, which is fair.
motohagiography 8y ago
The nearest implementation of this I can think of is the Seigneurial System in early Canada (then, New France), that we used to learn about in history classes as kids. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/seigneurial-system https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/seigneuria... It is criticized and largely dismissed in the article and memory as feudal, but a Distributist interpretation of it might grasp its benefits with more nuance.
Brendinooo 8y ago
Distributism is great because it is a third way; some are afraid of too much corporate power, some are afraid of too much government power, but distributists are wary of anyone having too much power and are able to provide a solution for that. However, there has to be a shift in consumers' mindsets for distributism to be embraced. One of the great things that capitalism/economies of scale does is drive prices down. A $100 grocery bill at Walmart could be $120 or more at the local grocery store, and for a lot of people that $20 makes a real difference. People rail against big banks, but don't mind the cheaper mortgages. And so on. Distributism has a lot of benefits, but in most of the cases that matter, price, selection, and oftentimes convenience are not benefits, and that's what we seem to optimize for. It requires a different set of priorities.
- kelnos 8y ago
  The annoying bit is that people as a whole don't seem to account for all variables all that well. Sure, your weekly grocery bill may be $20 higher, but due to better wealth distribution, your salary might be $50/week higher. Most people just see "it costs more" without recognizing that they still benefit, if they could only make the deeper analysis.
luthien2 8y ago
Distributism kinda sounds like what we had when we were first building the Internet (and what we still have): we all owned the means of production (a computer) and everyone contributed their own ideas freely and as they saw fit (frameworks, coding languages, software etc) and we all loosely banded together to come up with our own "rules" to run things, which we now call protocols. Later on, yes..we monetized the brains by hiring them and creating FB, Google, etc, but in a way, it seems like a rough idea of "distributism" built the internet. I think those catholic popes were on to something.
nickpinkston 8y ago
I've been to Mondragon which is the biggest co-op federation in the world - at something like 74K people and $25B of revenue. They've been around since the 1950's and have their own banking, healthcare, university, etc. It seems to be working pretty well and the area seems to have little poverty or wealth - very equal. I believe they do run into the same issues other big co-ops (and any big orgs really) which is after 70 years, the culture (which is so key to good co-ops) didn't maintain, and people in effect took the easy way out which led to the bankruptcy of their biggest co-op: Fagor. Still though, apparently most of the laid-off employees found work in other Mondragon co-ops - pretty cool. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
- Proven 8y ago
  Uhm, that’s a voluntary association. Distributism argues that property “should” be owned by many and that it’s a fundamental right. So if you’re a Mondragon guy next door and I am not, then who’s to decide whether my property should be distributed to you and your buddies? Obviously it’s done by the State or some other coercive institution. Otherwise I can ignore you and continue owning my property. So ultimately distribuism either can’t work, or requires a totalitarian government. It’s amazing how people don’t get this simple logic. Did Mondragon redistribute other people’s property or earn it? Should another (poorer) community be able to expropriate the property of Mondragon community? Use your head people.
stevecoley 8y ago
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209 points by geowwy 8y ago

There's apparently still a Distributist Club at Glasgow University that participated in the political debates held in Glasgow University Union: https://universityofglasgowlibrary.wordpress.com/2014/09/16/moderate-radicals-the-distributists-at-glasgow-university/ https://universityofglasgowlibrary.wordpress.com/2014/09/16/...

geowwy 8y ago
Tumblar House recently did a podcast on distributism too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMMpjApwfGA&t=748s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMMpjApwfGA&t=748s
amelius 8y ago
Just curious, are they in favor of Brexit, or against it?
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  I would have assumed for it as the EU is clearly another form of centralised government and favours businesses that trade across borders so are larger. But when it comes to Brexit all bets are off.
  - matt4077 8y ago
    I run a 200,000€ revenue company that sells physical goods across the EU. Large companies have the resources to do the paperwork to sell across customs borders, I don’t. In this sense, the EU is more helpful to small companies than large ones. It effectively removes borders.
    - badpun 8y ago
      On the other hand, without the unified market, governments can engage in protectionism, and if they do, there's less of a chance that a small business will be crushed by a giant global competitor.
      - bobthechef 8y ago
        That's too simplistic. There are large differences between countries in the East and the West. Western corporations have had a field day in the EU's Eastern members precisely because of the relative economic advantages they have built up over 50 years following WWII and the massive restructuring of the economies of the Eastern members following the fall of communism. Free trade really only works when countries have some kind of parity (something Friedrich List argues). However, to the East's advantage, their economies are much more dynamic and the West is increasingly stagnating.
  - vanderZwan 8y ago
    > favours businesses that trade across borders so are larger You are right about the first part of that sentence, but wrong about the second. In many contexts the EU makes the international market more accessible for small businesses - it greatly reduces overhead that large companies can afford and small companies cannot. For example, having one central safety or health standard for all countries is a lot cheaper than qualifying for each country on an individual basis. That benefits every business involved, but for smaller ones this fixed overhead is a much more significant hurdle than for big ones.
    - bewo001 8y ago
      While this is all true, there is a tendency that big markets create big players. Eg. in the 1950s/60s, many European countries had several independent car manufacturers. The cheap car in your country may have been worse than a cheap car of your neighboring country, but it cost less for the lack of tariffs. The local manufacturer had your business. When the borders came down, the smaller companies could no longer compete.
      - 0815test 8y ago
        The general pattern is that big markets create big players, but also increase the amount of "effective" diversity and competition at the local level. The smaller automakers of the 1950s and 1960s were essentially monopolies in their own countries; whereas with the borders coming down, manufacturers are incented to both compete and diversify in a meaningful way, so that some fraction of them can hold on to their share of the bigger, unified market.
      - heavenlyblue 8y ago
        >> Eg. in the 1950s/60s, many European countries had several independent car manufacturers. The chance is that your point has nothing to do with the borders being open though.
        bewo001 8y ago
        Borders were certainly not the only factor. As car development became more expensive, only bigger players had the capital to do it. But different national regulations (eg in France head lights had to be yellow instead of white) and tariffs played a role.
  - talideon 8y ago
    OTOH, subsidiarity is explicitly a foundational principle of both the EU and Distributism.
- notahacker 8y ago
  If it's Glasgow they're probably more focused on campaigning for Scottish independence!

gdwatson 8y ago

Maybe it's because I'm a Protestant who's not particularly invested in Roman Catholic social teaching and so I haven't learned the nuances, but it seems to me that when you apply distributism to an industrial or post-industrial society and work out the kinks you end up with either capitalism or socialism. It's straightforward to apply distributism to an agrarian society where land is the main source of wealth: split up the farmland among a bunch of smallholding farmers.¹ But once a meaningful part of your economy is in capital-intensive industries, you have a decision to make: do you allow private individuals to accumulate capital or not? If you do, you soon have a capitalist society. If you do not, or you allow them to accumulate capital but not to benefit from it, you end up with a socialist society. The examples in the Wikipedia article confirm this impression. Distributism looks to me like someone took the principle of subsidiarity and the role of the family, saw that they got more respect in the late middle ages, and pined for the economic system of that era. It would be interesting and productive to re-examine some of the underlying assumptions there. ¹ Whether land reform is just is a separate issue; at least it is possible.

EGreg 8y ago
You end up with OPEN SOURCE
_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
Interestingly, Protestantism is tied up with the history of capitalism. I think it's worthwhile to think about systems that don't reduce to either capitalism or socialism. (Though, in the spirit of reductionism, one can imagine capitalism as reducing to socialism in the long term: you can allow private individuals to accumulate capital, but ultimately it'll end up in the hands of a few individuals, who will be a de facto government.)
jawns 8y ago
It's not an either-or thing, where if you allow people to accumulate productive resources, you inevitably get capitalism, and if you don't, you inevitably get socialism. This is tremendously simplified, but I would say that if you allow people to accumulate productive resources and your economic policies prioritize market efficiency above all else, then you're likely to end up with laissez-faire capitalism. However, if you have economic policies in place that prioritize widespread ownership (for instance, by incentivizing small-business ownership or cooperatives), that might lead to some short-term market inefficiencies but may promote beneficial long-term effects. For instance, it might help them compete against larger corporations whose only advantage is economies of scale, but which wipe out otherwise healthy small businesses and then enjoy near-monopoly status.

mjfl 8y ago

Any real implementation of Distributism would require a strong state and police force to enforce it and in practice would look identical to socialism.

nabla9 8y ago
All robust implementations of capitalism require state and police force to enforce property rights. Property is monopoly to assets given by the government.
- deleted 8y ago
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- baddox 8y ago
  You can certainly have property rights without a government, they just may not be “fair” according to some definitions (of course, specific implementations of government protection of property rights also may not be “fair” according to some definitions).
  - JetSpiegel 8y ago
    That's just might makes right, there's no property there since you can take what you want. Property implies you use the state (an external entity) to enforce your rights, providing checks on individual power, not that you enforce it yourself.
- Proven 8y ago
  That is pure nonsense. Property existed before the government. It's a small detail but it does show how shallow most comments to this article are. Complete cluelessness! It is appalling to see that so many supposedly "smart" commenters support redistributionist ideologies (one comment even quoted Dengism as an example of a successful redistributionist system!).
nosuchthing 8y ago
Are you implying regulation/anti-trust/anti-monopoly/anti-plutocracy is socialism? Do you understand the difference between state/corporate socialism, and regulations?

dluan 8y ago

Capital democratization is a topic I've been researching for a while now with regards to new tech startup corporate structure, especially things that fall into the public good category like FOSS. Co-op's and ESOPs are just one way, but it's about time that we start to experiment with new ownership and governance structures that don't just create more Facebook's and Amazon's. Louis Kelso is the one who notoriously invented and popularized worker-ownership plans in the US, taking inspiration from the US Homestead Act with spreading capital ownership across society. During the cold war, he also used to characterize 'capital democratization' as a third way, separate from capitalism and communism, but mainly just because then neoclassical economists like Samuelson derided his ideas at the time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUf51M9D6sw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUf51M9D6sw

apatters 8y ago
This is a really interesting thing to think about. If we pick on Facebook as an example, most people look at FB and see that it has 2.3 billion customers, then go on to assume it's an amazing and innovative company filled with great people who make the best product in the industry. An alternative point of view is that there are 2.3 billion customers out there for this type of product, and the financial systems and incentives present in our society resulted in Facebook owning all of those customers. FB actually is exemplary of the flaws present in the first mode of thinking. I don't doubt there are many brilliant people working there, but their product is crappy and even user hostile on many levels. Biggest absolutely doesn't translate to best all the time. More likely FB got to where it is because the rules of our society concentrate capital and control (which is exactly what we see going on when we look at data such as wealth disparity, shrinking # of new businesses etc. in the USA over time).
- luckylion 8y ago
  > I don't doubt there are many brilliant people working there, but their product is crappy and even user hostile on many levels. The alternative interpretation is that there are brilliant people working on it and their product is great, the user just isn't the customer. Brilliance doesn't imply ethical behavior ;)

gottebp 8y ago

I love Distributism. As G.K. Chesterton said, "The problem with Capitalism is not that there are too many but too few" Distributism seeks the maximum number of families and individuals privately owning a small bit of capital. Imagine every family with a small business, and these businesses sometimes cooperating to do greater things. Distributism seeks to avoid massive capital in the hands of a few oligarchs. It also seeks to avoid the means of production belonging to the people in a vague and non-specific way -- such as communism with its abolition of private property (No one really owns anything in that vague abstraction -- the State owns all). When everyone (or at least most) has a modest business, they can support their community and keep it intact. Subsidiarity is localism through and through -- not just in food but everything else. I think we all want our work to make the places we live better. We all want the power to help our friends get jobs so they do not have to move far away (Have a small business and you can hire them).

toasterlovin 8y ago
The problem with this vision is that economies of scale exist. I have been involved in a manufacturing business for a while. Scale solves lots of problems. It spreads overhead over more units. It incentivizes spending resources to hyper optimize material and labor usage. Etc.
- bloudermilk 8y ago
  That's what makes cooperation an important aspect of these types of ideologies. In Humanizing The Economy[0], the author describes successful cooperative movements from around the world that are based on localized democratic principles but leverage large-scale cooperation to organize at scale. [0]: https://www.newsociety.com/Books/H/Humanizing-the-Economy https://www.newsociety.com/Books/H/Humanizing-the-Economy
  - specialist 8y ago
    Thank you for this tip. I'm eager to read this book. While I'm a big fan of Richard D Wolff's efforts, he fails to examine the governance models of co-ops. What works, what doesn't. Models of incorporation. Case studies. Governance is key. -- Some years ago, I joined a non-profit OSS team, part of the Kuali Consortium, with the primary intent to see how it worked first hand. Sadly, it didn't. Even more sadly, I still have little clue what could work, what to advocate. I am inspired by Pieter Hintjens' Social Architecture as model for successful OSS: http://hintjens.com/books http://hintjens.com/books But have yet to practice it myself. -- Sorry, I always conflate ideas. My end goal is to figure out how to make useful, meaningful software while still paying my mortgage and feeding my family.

jefurii 8y ago

Richard D Wolff advocates a socialism that sounds something like this, centered around worker cooperatives rather than state control of everything.

Mengkudulangsat 8y ago
Any large examples of this? Only one I can think of is Mondragon Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
- blowski 8y ago
  In the UK, John Lewis / Waitrose (a big supermarket and department store group) is owned by its employees.
  - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
    I suppose the mutual building societies in the UK aren't very far from this idea as well, although there aren't many left now. Also Vanguard.

jeffdavis 8y ago

I'm inclined to like this idea, but it seems to be framed in a way that centralizes a lot of governmental power. Why not look for ways to decentralize power and also decentralize resources? For instance, removing or limiting various privileges of large corporations that individuals don't have.

larsiusprime 8y ago
My understanding of distributism has been that it has among its aims to localize governmental power. I don't mind strengthening a government where my vote actually makes a difference. Especially in the incarnations of distributism that have a large overlap with Georgism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism) you see this sort of thing manifest in e.g. the land tax (strengthens local governments who are the assessors of said tax -- and if land tax is your society's primary tax, then power naturally devolves from the center to the local).
- jeffdavis 8y ago
  Where do things like written rights come in to play? What is the difference between dostributism and federalism?
tathougies 8y ago
Distributism, being a Catholic belief, is ultimately based on the principal of subsidiarity, which is a Catholic social doctrine stating that all matters of government ought to be handled at the most local level competent and able enough to deal with the matter. Thus, while national defense may best lay with the national government, the trash pickup schedule is best decided by local processes.
- lixtra 8y ago
  I don’t see why Catholism is emphasized so much in your answer. The concepts discussed exist independently of Catholism, have their roots before Catholism and looking at them from a religious angle confounds more than it clarifies.

bravura 8y ago

"Further, some distributists argue that socialism is the logical conclusion of capitalism, as capitalism's concentrated powers eventually capture the state, resulting in a form of socialism." This is pretty wild, could someone please explain this argument for me?

tathougies 8y ago
Yes... Communism means the communal ownership of goods. In practice, some process needs to be in place to decide how the goods are used. Usually, this is some kind of democratic institution -- a government or small committee that nominally looks after the interests of the people. Historically, the issue with communism is the inability for this small group to truly benefit all the workers. Corporate capitalism is the same system under another name. Instead of governments controlling the capital in the name of the workers, employers own the capital in the name of the workers. Workers themselves in both systems do not often own their own means of production (although capitalism at least allows for this). For example, a distributist model of furniture manufacture involves thousands of local woodworkers each making furniture, selling them, profiting in a small way -- at least enough to raise their family. A corporate capitalist model is one large company which owns all the tools and wood that the individual employee-workers utilize to make a good that is sold to profit the corporation. A communist model is the 'people' own the tools and the wood that some citizens make into furniture for the benefit of all the community. Because the worker gets everything they need anyway, their income isn't actually a function of their labor. In both the case of corporate capitalism and communism, the worker does not own the means of production and the profit and value they create via the utilization of the tools and raw materials owned by some other more remote group is mostly alienated from their behavior. Only in the distributist model are people actually paid exactly for what value their labor provided. In other words, monopolistic publicly owned corporations are basically communism, but with the board of directors (on behalf of the 'people' -- the shareholders, basically the public for large corporations) substituting for the communist government. All economic decisions are made centrally, and any competition between these large firms in an oligopoly is more akin to the competition between communist governments than the competition envisioned by capitalists
- 8y ago

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bjourne 8y ago

I believe Distributist ideas such as Syndicalist worker cooperatives have been thrown by the way-side by the modern Left. Tackling the looming ecological disasters require centralized control. For example, the Paris Agreement is a Centralist policy, as is the world-wide Carbon tax.

majewsky 8y ago
The leftist media (at least the parts that I know) frequently applaud small cooperatives and other grassroots-level economic activity. But I don't see anyone who translates these local efforts into policy.
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  Both sides of the media do, as to the politicians they seem to favour either big business or unions.

ComodoHacker 8y ago

What about large-scale projects which aren't possible without concentration of productive assets and capital? Does this doctrine addresses that? Can we have sustained energy production or trans-Atlantic internet cables or satellites or Teslas with it?

mwilcox 8y ago
It's about distributed _ownership_ not necessarily physical distribution
geowwy 8y ago
From the article: > Distributism puts great emphasis on the principle of subsidiarity. This > principle holds that no larger unit (whether social, economic, or political) > should perform a function which can be performed by a smaller unit. The point is that you should try and keep things as small as feasible. When it's not feasible you use bigger institutions.
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  It does raise an interesting question though. If the system kept a lid on the size of the computer companies in the nineties how would a business like Apple accumulate enough capital to fund the development of a product like the iPhone. We might all still be playing Snake on our dumb phones.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    So, no FB, Twitter, walled gardens, BS apps, rat race to replace, and 3 hours per day staring at a mobile screen? Sounds like a deal! Where can I get this Snake thing (Google Maps aside)?
    - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
      Music, maps and route finding, weather forecasts, password management, calculator, email on the go, library loans, camera, calendar, chats with my friends and family, all on the first page of my phone. I wouldn't want to give it up now.

known 8y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dengism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dengism proved to be successful

harryf 8y ago

Based on personal impressions, I think Switzerland is a good example of distributism. Much attention is given to the Swiss banks and the "gold" but in reality, IMO, the strength of the Swiss economy lies in the small & medium business sector. There are over 300K businesses classes as SMBs in Switzerland, many of them family owned. For a country of 8 million people that means one SMB per 26 people. There are few "high street chains" aside from the supermarkets - unlike the UK for example where the high street of most towns and cities looks the same. According to this article - https://www.thelocal.ch/20171114/report-swiss-are-richer-than-ever-but-wealth-inequality-persists https://www.thelocal.ch/20171114/report-swiss-are-richer-tha... - 63 percent of Swiss adults have financial assets above $100,000 which means, although there is a small percent of extremely wealthy people, there's a good distribution of wealth. That in turn means if you want to start a business here, there are plenty of potential customers with disposable income they might be willing to risk on your product or service.

luiscleto 8y ago
> "Distributism favors the dissolution of the current private bank system, or more specifically its profit-making basis in charging interest" Does not sound very Swiss to me.
- coldtea 8y ago
  It could be totally Swiss, as long as the banks are used to cater to a global clientele first and foremost, rather than lord over Swiss people themselves.
  - notahacker 8y ago
    The distributist writers held deep religiously-driven moral concerns about equitable property distribution, so I'm not sure the notion of "yes, we will build our economy around a banking system which helps people from other countries hide their sometimes dubiously-obtained immense wealth and charge them handsomely for the privilege" is really compatible with it.
8y ago

luiscleto 8y ago

> "Further, some distributists argue that socialism is the logical conclusion of capitalism, as capitalism's concentrated powers eventually capture the state, resulting in a form of socialism" This greatly resembles Karl Marx's criticism of capitalism, which has failed to hold up to reality so far. Frankly, this sounds a lot like repackaged socialism using labor unions and guilds rather than a central government. Might not be as bad a state socialism (i.e. they might actually be able to manage the businesses better), but I sincerely doubt it would solve any of the major problems we see today. While you do have inequality in capitalist systems the "elites" tend to rotate, with empires falling apart and new ones taking their place. Wealthy families maintaining their wealth and power are the exception and not the norm. Introducing guilds or more unions will likely make it much harder for competition and innovation to thrive, introducing a huge barrier of bureaucracy interested only in maintaining the status quo for their own benefit.

tonyedgecombe 8y ago
The capture the state part seems to be spot on. You just need to take a look at how much lobbying goes on and our inability to deal with issues like climate change thanks to the big oil companies.
- luiscleto 8y ago
  They can apply large pressure on the state, true. But so can labour unions (and probably so would guilds). It is still not true state ownership as competition does thrive (even if they still have obstacles). Edit: There are probably even better examples of lobbying than climate change as that has a ton of confounding factors that make it hard to deal with besides just oil companies. But I see no reason to assume distributism would make the issue better. Taxi drivers protesting against Uber comes to mind.
reallydude 8y ago
> which has failed to hold up to reality so far It's held up for most of history. The US can probably avoid full socialism for just under 400 years (hopefully), as the brief ~250 years so far, is not a proof in context. What any 2 people consider socialist may be very different.

luiscleto 8y ago

I originally thought this was going to be an April fool's satire on using Microservices as a religion.

gitgud 8y ago
I assumed it was a similar joke for classifying people who worship the block chain

ImaCake 8y ago

Sounds a bit like wildlife Conservancies found dotted across the developing world[0]. While the rules and some funding come from centralised authorities, the land that is put aside for wildlife conservation is done so by local peoples at their own discretion, and the management and work in each conservancy are conducted by the locals. I guess Conservancies in the developing world contrast with the organised national parks and state run conservation areas of countries like the USA and New Zealand. But both forms of organsation can work together. If you look at the map of Namibia in this reference [1], you can see how conservancies offer a buffer zone to that country's national parks. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_Wildlife_Conservancies_in_Namibia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_Wildlife_Conservancie... 1. http://www.met.gov.na/services/conservancies/193/ http://www.met.gov.na/services/conservancies/193/

simonh 8y ago

The problem with this is it can only work by imposing arbitrary restrictions on everyone. Under free market capitalism if you want to run a family business you can. If you want to run a multinational corporation you can. Nobody is rigging the system to force one outcome or the other and there are good economic reasons why both can be appropriate and successful in different circumstances. Distributism arbitrarily labels one of those wrong and the other right on ideological grounds, leading to an inflexible, inefficient and ultimately coercive economy because the 'right' answer has to be imposed somehow. I think what is often missed about capitalism is that essentially it is based on individual freedom. The freedom to own property, to own capital, to deploy that capital as one sees fit, to take responsibility and the benefits from the outcome, to act individually if you wish or in concert in groups or organisations of any size. In capitalist liberal democracies, if you want to create and run a workers cooperative, you certainly can and people have. You can run a family business, or a huge corporation. It doesn't really mandate a particular organisational structure, at least at that level. There are rules about how business entities are run to an extent, such as rules about boards of directors and financial reporting, but they don't actually stop you building an enterprise built on distributist or even Marxist principles. The problem is these arbitrary systems of organisation, while they can be effective in some limited situations, just aren't flexible and efficient enough to be extensible to a whole economy. In mandating a particular organisational structure, and in distributism even a preferred scale, they also obstruct innovation. The old distributionist mantra 'three acres and a cow' sums this up nicely, it's an essentially static view of society. Again Marxism suffers from the same disease, never really developing good answers to how enterprises are founded, innovate, evolve and wind down in a natural way. Instead it has always had to resort to state executive fiat because there is no organic process for innovation and these life-cycle transformations in Marxism. In contrast under Capitalism, people and organisations simply do these things through the exercise of their individual freedom and discretion.

hacknat 8y ago
> Nobody is rigging the system to force one outcome or the other and there are good economic reasons why both can be appropriate and successful in different circumstances. I would consider myself a capitalist, but you have to be pretty naive to think that corporations haven’t captured our governing class and rigged the system in their favor. This Wikipedia article makes this point very early as a critique of capitalism, which is fair.

motohagiography 8y ago

The nearest implementation of this I can think of is the Seigneurial System in early Canada (then, New France), that we used to learn about in history classes as kids. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/seigneurial-system https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/seigneuria... It is criticized and largely dismissed in the article and memory as feudal, but a Distributist interpretation of it might grasp its benefits with more nuance.

Brendinooo 8y ago

Distributism is great because it is a third way; some are afraid of too much corporate power, some are afraid of too much government power, but distributists are wary of anyone having too much power and are able to provide a solution for that. However, there has to be a shift in consumers' mindsets for distributism to be embraced. One of the great things that capitalism/economies of scale does is drive prices down. A $100 grocery bill at Walmart could be $120 or more at the local grocery store, and for a lot of people that $20 makes a real difference. People rail against big banks, but don't mind the cheaper mortgages. And so on. Distributism has a lot of benefits, but in most of the cases that matter, price, selection, and oftentimes convenience are not benefits, and that's what we seem to optimize for. It requires a different set of priorities.

kelnos 8y ago
The annoying bit is that people as a whole don't seem to account for all variables all that well. Sure, your weekly grocery bill may be $20 higher, but due to better wealth distribution, your salary might be $50/week higher. Most people just see "it costs more" without recognizing that they still benefit, if they could only make the deeper analysis.

luthien2 8y ago

Distributism kinda sounds like what we had when we were first building the Internet (and what we still have): we all owned the means of production (a computer) and everyone contributed their own ideas freely and as they saw fit (frameworks, coding languages, software etc) and we all loosely banded together to come up with our own "rules" to run things, which we now call protocols. Later on, yes..we monetized the brains by hiring them and creating FB, Google, etc, but in a way, it seems like a rough idea of "distributism" built the internet. I think those catholic popes were on to something.

nickpinkston 8y ago

I've been to Mondragon which is the biggest co-op federation in the world - at something like 74K people and $25B of revenue. They've been around since the 1950's and have their own banking, healthcare, university, etc. It seems to be working pretty well and the area seems to have little poverty or wealth - very equal. I believe they do run into the same issues other big co-ops (and any big orgs really) which is after 70 years, the culture (which is so key to good co-ops) didn't maintain, and people in effect took the easy way out which led to the bankruptcy of their biggest co-op: Fagor. Still though, apparently most of the laid-off employees found work in other Mondragon co-ops - pretty cool. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

Proven 8y ago
Uhm, that’s a voluntary association. Distributism argues that property “should” be owned by many and that it’s a fundamental right. So if you’re a Mondragon guy next door and I am not, then who’s to decide whether my property should be distributed to you and your buddies? Obviously it’s done by the State or some other coercive institution. Otherwise I can ignore you and continue owning my property. So ultimately distribuism either can’t work, or requires a totalitarian government. It’s amazing how people don’t get this simple logic. Did Mondragon redistribute other people’s property or earn it? Should another (poorer) community be able to expropriate the property of Mondragon community? Use your head people.

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