11 ms·

Letter from a Young Distributist: Georgism and Distributism

hprotagonist 4y ago
This circumstance constitutes in itself the most eloquent "Gospel of work", showing that the basis for determining the value of human work is not primarily the kind of work being done but the fact that the one who is doing it is a person. The sources of the dignity of work are to be sought primarily in the subjective dimension, not in the objective one. Such a concept practically does away with the very basis of the ancient differentiation of people into classes according to the kind of work done. This does not mean that, from the objective point of view, human work cannot and must not be rated and qualified in any way. It only means that the primary basis of tbe value of work is man himself, who is its subject. This leads immediately to a very important conclusion of an ethical nature: however true it may be that man is destined for work and called to it, in the first place work is "for man" and not man "for work". Through this conclusion one rightly comes to recognize the pre-eminence of the subjective meaning of work over the objective one. Given this way of understanding things, and presupposing that different sorts of work that people do can have greater or lesser objective value, let us try nevertheless to show that each sort is judged above all by the measure of the dignity of the subject of work, that is to say the person, the individual who carries it out. Laborem Execrens, 1981
- lukifer 4y ago
  Thanks for sharing, TIL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laborem_exercens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laborem_exercens
Apocryphon 4y ago
Nice to hear examples of some economic ideologies that didn’t catch on, but speaks to material concerns that still exist today.
- geocon 4y ago
  Georgism was extremely influential in its time, Progress and Poverty was the second best-selling book after the Bible and 200,000 people attended Henry George's funeral. Only it's been kind of written out of the history books since it doesn't fit easily in the socialist-communist-capitalist narrative people have in mind for the 19th and 20th centuries
  - bombcar 4y ago
    The biggest marketing trick of the 19th/20th has been convincing everyone that you have to pick one of those three, or some combination thereof.
- llamaimperative 4y ago
  Go pick up a copy of Progress & Poverty, and you too can forward the cause (basically by annoying the living daylights out of all of your friends, like I do)
F0llowsChrist 4y ago
Distributism is Based tbh
TimPC 4y ago
Georgism and Distributism is interesting but short of a plan to actually transition the tax infrastructure in that direction this article reduces to an unactionable history lesson. Still worth reading, but not powerful enough for those who want economic change. I'd argue that transitioning is an extremely hard problem. The Georgist system taxes property at extreme rates. In particular, the taxes on property ownership are supposed to capture the entire value of renting the property. This means that people owning property with a mortgage would suddenly be forced to sell their property at the near zero prices that Georgism is designed to foster. This is likely to lead to many unhappy homeowners as well as significant loss of capital for all the entities banks sell mortgages to. I think this problem is severe enough that in order to transition to a Georgist society a government might need to absorb every mortgage in the country. Mortgage debt in the US is currently estimated at 17.6 trillion dollars, slightly more than half of the 30.5 trillion US national debt. Such an expense would be vaguely possible, but extremely sizeable.
- brightly-salty 4y ago
  I think you might misunderstand Georgism, or maybe I did a poor job explaining it. Georgism does not propose taxing improvements (buildings etc), only the actual land. So many peoples tax burden would be decreased, and if the bank owns the land as in a mortgage, they are the ones paying the tax, not the people taking out the mortgages.
  - TimPC 4y ago
    I get that Georgism doesn't tax the improvements. I think we have a fundamental disagreements about how mortgages work. A mortgage doesn't make the bank the owner of the land. Even if we strangely ruled that it did, that would lead to strange situations where as long as people were paying a mortgage they could live tax free on their land. But the minute that mortgage disappeared they'd be on the hook for the tax value. I don't see a good way to get to Georgism without government absorbing the mortgages as the fallout to the economy of all that debt suddenly having little in the way of assets underlying it is a huge problem. I do agree I exaggerated with my claims of $0 since the improvements on the property would have some non-zero value, but land represents the majority value of most houses and the land value would be effectively reduced to zero by the change in value from the taxation. That would be enough to put most mortgages underwater and the asset would no longer sell for the cost of the mortgage. I don't see government doing this and just saying "too bad, investors absorb the loss".
skybrian 4y ago
It seems like the US already has widespread ownership of property? Home ownership isn't exactly rare. NIMBYism is a consequence of widespread ownership; it's small land owners exercising political power. In the cities, converting apartment buildings to condos is another form of this. Of course, many people believe this is inadequate and we need to go further, with low-income housing and the like. But it's been a long time since redistributing agricultural land made sense. Do you really want a hobby farm? You might say that an apartment isn't productive property, but with increased working from home it seems like it's blurred a bit? You can run an Internet business out of your home. Meanwhile we have widespread ownership of public companies via the stock market. Again, not widespread enough. But another issue is that being a stockholder doesn't feel like ownership. It's just an investment; you don't get meaningful control. It's not all that clear what meaningful control looks like, for large firms. Maybe this is an argument for smaller firms? Company breakups might be the modern equivalent of land redistribution.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  > But another issue is that being a stockholder doesn't feel like ownership. It's just an investment; you don't get meaningful control. Perhaps more employee co-ops would further that goal. Mondragón in Spain is often cited as an example of Distributism in action. https://distributistreview.com/archive/mondragon-revisited https://distributistreview.com/archive/mondragon-revisited
- brightly-salty 4y ago
  I agree that land has to some extent been widely redistributed in the United States because of the frontier, which continued to exist and distribute land ownership up until the 1880s. However, since the frontier died, land ownership distribution has stayed more or less the same. Compare the coasts to England, where land mobility is even more limited because the frontier died even longer ago. What Georgism and a Land Value Tax would do is to re-create the frontier at the margin of production, where land is free and there is no tax to be paid, but the land itself is still workable without profit. Recreating the frontier would re-introduce land mobility and make land more liquid, while also countering NIMBY desires to keep their land and neighborhoods the way they were fifty or a hundred years ago. Companies are arguably not very widely distributed. The stock market is ownership of companies by those who do not work for it, so the distance between the worker and the owner is still greater than in small businesses, family businesses, worker cooperatives, or even traditional corporations with Employee Stock Ownership Plans. Trust-busting is one way to decrease that distance, although true anti-monopoly policies like a land-value tax or a tax on intellectual property enforcement would truly remove the privileges these big companies have and allow smaller ones to truly compete.
ogogmad 4y ago
Does this have anything to do with the land reforms of Pyotr Stolypin?
- brightly-salty 4y ago
  I wasn’t aware of the reforms before I just looked it up, but from what I see, it looks like he had distributist goals. He was almost definitely not aware of the concurrent academic movement in England, but many thinkers individually came up with similar ideas.
Proven 4y ago
m0llusk 4y ago
It might be interesting to generate simulation data that attempts to project how these systems and transitions to them might actually play out. It is great to play around with systems thinking and alternatives, but big changes need to have serious analysis up front and robust metrics for judging progress and success.
- geocon 4y ago
  If you're looking for data, Lars Doucet has written a pretty exhaustive 4-part series going over claims and evidence: https://gameofrent.com/content/progress-and-poverty-review https://gameofrent.com/content/progress-and-poverty-review. Obviously there's more to be found out but it looks promising.
kkfx 4y ago
IMVHO this is more a fictional story to justify issues in actual westerns society... Few purposed vague elements, that if detailed reveal their incoherence: - subsidiarity :: how a large community/entity can help but not interfere? Let's take a simple example: in India there are various cohort of population, let's focus on Indus and Muslims. Indus consider cows sacred animals, they can be milked but not confined nor slaughtered fro their meat. Muslims eat cows, so slaughter them for that purpose BUT do not eat pigs, a religious crime for them, while Indus have no issues in eating pigs. Suppose you are the bigger entity: how can you help them without interfere? - family policy :: a family designed by mother, father and children miss a part: the two parents have also their parents, who happen to get elderly, for instance. Their children at a certain point in time will leave family. Making a family an atom who form molecules, means the society can't exists. Original family ideas came from a more practical élites needs: people to live need to be a bit together and reproduce, they need to be balanced in sex terms for that and for social stability BUT "we" (élite) need also something for them. Let's define them a family, saying any family have to give something to the élite: food, young sane people for war etc. Locking peoples in such mindset it's easy to say: you parents need to reproduce, more than one child because he/she can die, some are needed to work to live, some are tribute for war etc do not care much about you, your duty is the family. You child you have a family, you need to represent it, so go to war and work hard, do not care much about your duty it the family. That's the simplest and easiest subdivision of humans to direct them as a flock. As single families they need someone who handle their disputes, they have a simple duty they believe etc. The rest of the society is designed with the same scenario: authorities/élites are "parents", families their children who need to obey. Autarchy is a dream, sci-fi movies prove it regularly design autonomous starship with a small set of humans traveling the galaxy, in the past that was Conestoga wagon, equally nomadic life and so one. All depict the dream but omit how anything is built. Who built the starship, for instance. That's left aside because it's the core of the gamble: we need something organized differently, often some people forced to live bad life to makes others happy etc. Taxes is equally used here in psychological terms instead of in economical terms: they are weaponized instead being clearly described as a way to avoid some earn too much respect of others. A social leveling mechanism. Again they aren't cited like that because if so we have to say that money is not a value no-one-really-know who control it but just a symbol we agree to use as a unit of measure for a substrate NOT as the substrate of anything like we do today. It's a classic way to use emotions for stopping people think and demand clarity, making them blindly trust something.
newaccount2021 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
F0llowsChrist 4y ago
Distributism is based tbh
Barrin92 4y ago
Central problem with these kinds of systems of thought is actually hinted at in the piece itself >"While Georgism does not have a philosophy of governance, it can easily be harmonized with distributist ideals. In many governments today, especially the United States, there is a substantial bureaucracy which creates red tape rather than solving problems" Georgism and similar economic ideas that favor localism have no theory of governance or of power. You can imagine a G.K. Chesterton style economy where we all live in a sort of Catholic Hobbingen of family owned businesses or Le Guin's Anarres, but there's a reason we're not living in it now. Without having a theory of administration, that is to say bureaucracy and governance and how to beat all those big companies and actors that ruin your distributist dreams into submission, you have a considerable problem. There is no such thing as 'naturally limited government'. That these systems do not magically sustain themselves is visible in Europe with the decline of Christian- and Social-Democracy respectively whose economic and cultural foundations (largely Catholic/neo-Calvinist social teaching) started to break apart.
pharke 4y ago
> This would serve as an effective frontier, like that which the United States used to have, giving families a failsafe in case of hardship. This implicit safety net for new or recovering families naturally favors a distributist small-owner model of business. This is probably the weakest part of the article. The frontier is not a safety net. You do not go to the frontier because you are in the poorhouse, you leave the frontier for the poorhouse after you have failed at a nearly insurmountable task. Even today this plays out again and again, people imagine that they can start their life over on a farm and earn a living with their hands, very few succeed. The biggest cost of starting a homestead is not the land but the sheer amount of labour and money that goes into improving that land to the point where it can provide for you. Even the basics of clean water, sanitation, power/heat and shelter would be beyond anyone in need of a failsafe. Add to this the insult of the available land being that which is so marginal that already established businesses cannot make it productive and you have a complete non-starter. If you think that the marginal periphery will consist of abandoned homes instead and that all one would have to do is move in then I'd invite you to visit a few of the existing abandoned homes in your area. Mind you, not unoccupied homes which generally still have an owner that does at least the basic upkeep necessary to avoid fines. Visit a truly abandoned home where the owner has simply walked away. Unless you're coming in hot on their heals, it's going to be a disaster. Cold weather alone will ruin an unheated structure built to modern standards not to mention the toll that wildlife, plants, and vandals can take. Modern, draft free buildings will also develop a significant mold problem if their power is disconnected since no heat and no air circulation mean that temperature changes will produce condensation.

This circumstance constitutes in itself the most eloquent "Gospel of work", showing that the basis for determining the value of human work is not primarily the kind of work being done but the fact that the one who is doing it is a person. The sources of the dignity of work are to be sought primarily in the subjective dimension, not in the objective one. Such a concept practically does away with the very basis of the ancient differentiation of people into classes according to the kind of work done. This does not mean that, from the objective point of view, human work cannot and must not be rated and qualified in any way. It only means that the primary basis of tbe value of work is man himself, who is its subject. This leads immediately to a very important conclusion of an ethical nature: however true it may be that man is destined for work and called to it, in the first place work is "for man" and not man "for work". Through this conclusion one rightly comes to recognize the pre-eminence of the subjective meaning of work over the objective one. Given this way of understanding things, and presupposing that different sorts of work that people do can have greater or lesser objective value, let us try nevertheless to show that each sort is judged above all by the measure of the dignity of the subject of work, that is to say the person, the individual who carries it out. Laborem Execrens, 1981

lukifer 4y ago
Thanks for sharing, TIL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laborem_exercens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laborem_exercens

Apocryphon 4y ago

Nice to hear examples of some economic ideologies that didn’t catch on, but speaks to material concerns that still exist today.

geocon 4y ago
Georgism was extremely influential in its time, Progress and Poverty was the second best-selling book after the Bible and 200,000 people attended Henry George's funeral. Only it's been kind of written out of the history books since it doesn't fit easily in the socialist-communist-capitalist narrative people have in mind for the 19th and 20th centuries
- bombcar 4y ago
  The biggest marketing trick of the 19th/20th has been convincing everyone that you have to pick one of those three, or some combination thereof.
llamaimperative 4y ago
Go pick up a copy of Progress & Poverty, and you too can forward the cause (basically by annoying the living daylights out of all of your friends, like I do)

F0llowsChrist 4y ago

Distributism is Based tbh

TimPC 4y ago

Georgism and Distributism is interesting but short of a plan to actually transition the tax infrastructure in that direction this article reduces to an unactionable history lesson. Still worth reading, but not powerful enough for those who want economic change. I'd argue that transitioning is an extremely hard problem. The Georgist system taxes property at extreme rates. In particular, the taxes on property ownership are supposed to capture the entire value of renting the property. This means that people owning property with a mortgage would suddenly be forced to sell their property at the near zero prices that Georgism is designed to foster. This is likely to lead to many unhappy homeowners as well as significant loss of capital for all the entities banks sell mortgages to. I think this problem is severe enough that in order to transition to a Georgist society a government might need to absorb every mortgage in the country. Mortgage debt in the US is currently estimated at 17.6 trillion dollars, slightly more than half of the 30.5 trillion US national debt. Such an expense would be vaguely possible, but extremely sizeable.

brightly-salty 4y ago
I think you might misunderstand Georgism, or maybe I did a poor job explaining it. Georgism does not propose taxing improvements (buildings etc), only the actual land. So many peoples tax burden would be decreased, and if the bank owns the land as in a mortgage, they are the ones paying the tax, not the people taking out the mortgages.
- TimPC 4y ago
  I get that Georgism doesn't tax the improvements. I think we have a fundamental disagreements about how mortgages work. A mortgage doesn't make the bank the owner of the land. Even if we strangely ruled that it did, that would lead to strange situations where as long as people were paying a mortgage they could live tax free on their land. But the minute that mortgage disappeared they'd be on the hook for the tax value. I don't see a good way to get to Georgism without government absorbing the mortgages as the fallout to the economy of all that debt suddenly having little in the way of assets underlying it is a huge problem. I do agree I exaggerated with my claims of $0 since the improvements on the property would have some non-zero value, but land represents the majority value of most houses and the land value would be effectively reduced to zero by the change in value from the taxation. That would be enough to put most mortgages underwater and the asset would no longer sell for the cost of the mortgage. I don't see government doing this and just saying "too bad, investors absorb the loss".

skybrian 4y ago

It seems like the US already has widespread ownership of property? Home ownership isn't exactly rare. NIMBYism is a consequence of widespread ownership; it's small land owners exercising political power. In the cities, converting apartment buildings to condos is another form of this. Of course, many people believe this is inadequate and we need to go further, with low-income housing and the like. But it's been a long time since redistributing agricultural land made sense. Do you really want a hobby farm? You might say that an apartment isn't productive property, but with increased working from home it seems like it's blurred a bit? You can run an Internet business out of your home. Meanwhile we have widespread ownership of public companies via the stock market. Again, not widespread enough. But another issue is that being a stockholder doesn't feel like ownership. It's just an investment; you don't get meaningful control. It's not all that clear what meaningful control looks like, for large firms. Maybe this is an argument for smaller firms? Company breakups might be the modern equivalent of land redistribution.

Apocryphon 4y ago
> But another issue is that being a stockholder doesn't feel like ownership. It's just an investment; you don't get meaningful control. Perhaps more employee co-ops would further that goal. Mondragón in Spain is often cited as an example of Distributism in action. https://distributistreview.com/archive/mondragon-revisited https://distributistreview.com/archive/mondragon-revisited
brightly-salty 4y ago
I agree that land has to some extent been widely redistributed in the United States because of the frontier, which continued to exist and distribute land ownership up until the 1880s. However, since the frontier died, land ownership distribution has stayed more or less the same. Compare the coasts to England, where land mobility is even more limited because the frontier died even longer ago. What Georgism and a Land Value Tax would do is to re-create the frontier at the margin of production, where land is free and there is no tax to be paid, but the land itself is still workable without profit. Recreating the frontier would re-introduce land mobility and make land more liquid, while also countering NIMBY desires to keep their land and neighborhoods the way they were fifty or a hundred years ago. Companies are arguably not very widely distributed. The stock market is ownership of companies by those who do not work for it, so the distance between the worker and the owner is still greater than in small businesses, family businesses, worker cooperatives, or even traditional corporations with Employee Stock Ownership Plans. Trust-busting is one way to decrease that distance, although true anti-monopoly policies like a land-value tax or a tax on intellectual property enforcement would truly remove the privileges these big companies have and allow smaller ones to truly compete.

ogogmad 4y ago

Does this have anything to do with the land reforms of Pyotr Stolypin?

brightly-salty 4y ago
I wasn’t aware of the reforms before I just looked it up, but from what I see, it looks like he had distributist goals. He was almost definitely not aware of the concurrent academic movement in England, but many thinkers individually came up with similar ideas.

Proven 4y ago

m0llusk 4y ago

It might be interesting to generate simulation data that attempts to project how these systems and transitions to them might actually play out. It is great to play around with systems thinking and alternatives, but big changes need to have serious analysis up front and robust metrics for judging progress and success.

geocon 4y ago
If you're looking for data, Lars Doucet has written a pretty exhaustive 4-part series going over claims and evidence: https://gameofrent.com/content/progress-and-poverty-review https://gameofrent.com/content/progress-and-poverty-review. Obviously there's more to be found out but it looks promising.

kkfx 4y ago

IMVHO this is more a fictional story to justify issues in actual westerns society... Few purposed vague elements, that if detailed reveal their incoherence: - subsidiarity :: how a large community/entity can help but not interfere? Let's take a simple example: in India there are various cohort of population, let's focus on Indus and Muslims. Indus consider cows sacred animals, they can be milked but not confined nor slaughtered fro their meat. Muslims eat cows, so slaughter them for that purpose BUT do not eat pigs, a religious crime for them, while Indus have no issues in eating pigs. Suppose you are the bigger entity: how can you help them without interfere? - family policy :: a family designed by mother, father and children miss a part: the two parents have also their parents, who happen to get elderly, for instance. Their children at a certain point in time will leave family. Making a family an atom who form molecules, means the society can't exists. Original family ideas came from a more practical élites needs: people to live need to be a bit together and reproduce, they need to be balanced in sex terms for that and for social stability BUT "we" (élite) need also something for them. Let's define them a family, saying any family have to give something to the élite: food, young sane people for war etc. Locking peoples in such mindset it's easy to say: you parents need to reproduce, more than one child because he/she can die, some are needed to work to live, some are tribute for war etc do not care much about you, your duty is the family. You child you have a family, you need to represent it, so go to war and work hard, do not care much about your duty it the family. That's the simplest and easiest subdivision of humans to direct them as a flock. As single families they need someone who handle their disputes, they have a simple duty they believe etc. The rest of the society is designed with the same scenario: authorities/élites are "parents", families their children who need to obey. Autarchy is a dream, sci-fi movies prove it regularly design autonomous starship with a small set of humans traveling the galaxy, in the past that was Conestoga wagon, equally nomadic life and so one. All depict the dream but omit how anything is built. Who built the starship, for instance. That's left aside because it's the core of the gamble: we need something organized differently, often some people forced to live bad life to makes others happy etc. Taxes is equally used here in psychological terms instead of in economical terms: they are weaponized instead being clearly described as a way to avoid some earn too much respect of others. A social leveling mechanism. Again they aren't cited like that because if so we have to say that money is not a value no-one-really-know who control it but just a symbol we agree to use as a unit of measure for a substrate NOT as the substrate of anything like we do today. It's a classic way to use emotions for stopping people think and demand clarity, making them blindly trust something.

newaccount2021 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

F0llowsChrist 4y ago

Distributism is based tbh

Barrin92 4y ago

Central problem with these kinds of systems of thought is actually hinted at in the piece itself >"While Georgism does not have a philosophy of governance, it can easily be harmonized with distributist ideals. In many governments today, especially the United States, there is a substantial bureaucracy which creates red tape rather than solving problems" Georgism and similar economic ideas that favor localism have no theory of governance or of power. You can imagine a G.K. Chesterton style economy where we all live in a sort of Catholic Hobbingen of family owned businesses or Le Guin's Anarres, but there's a reason we're not living in it now. Without having a theory of administration, that is to say bureaucracy and governance and how to beat all those big companies and actors that ruin your distributist dreams into submission, you have a considerable problem. There is no such thing as 'naturally limited government'. That these systems do not magically sustain themselves is visible in Europe with the decline of Christian- and Social-Democracy respectively whose economic and cultural foundations (largely Catholic/neo-Calvinist social teaching) started to break apart.

pharke 4y ago

> This would serve as an effective frontier, like that which the United States used to have, giving families a failsafe in case of hardship. This implicit safety net for new or recovering families naturally favors a distributist small-owner model of business. This is probably the weakest part of the article. The frontier is not a safety net. You do not go to the frontier because you are in the poorhouse, you leave the frontier for the poorhouse after you have failed at a nearly insurmountable task. Even today this plays out again and again, people imagine that they can start their life over on a farm and earn a living with their hands, very few succeed. The biggest cost of starting a homestead is not the land but the sheer amount of labour and money that goes into improving that land to the point where it can provide for you. Even the basics of clean water, sanitation, power/heat and shelter would be beyond anyone in need of a failsafe. Add to this the insult of the available land being that which is so marginal that already established businesses cannot make it productive and you have a complete non-starter. If you think that the marginal periphery will consist of abandoned homes instead and that all one would have to do is move in then I'd invite you to visit a few of the existing abandoned homes in your area. Mind you, not unoccupied homes which generally still have an owner that does at least the basic upkeep necessary to avoid fines. Visit a truly abandoned home where the owner has simply walked away. Unless you're coming in hot on their heals, it's going to be a disaster. Cold weather alone will ruin an unheated structure built to modern standards not to mention the toll that wildlife, plants, and vandals can take. Modern, draft free buildings will also develop a significant mold problem if their power is disconnected since no heat and no air circulation mean that temperature changes will produce condensation.