Tuesday evening, the middle of the week almost here. Welcome.
We've been musing over libertarians' and distributists' economic differences and have patched together some notes and thoughts on the subject. We've decided to post them here, even though the people interested in this topic are probably few, the prose is rather dry, and our thoughts are nothing terribly profound. Check back again tomorrow morning for livelier fare.
The Kiosk is doing well. It's had 28 posts during its 20 or so days in existence. Some of the posts are pretty funny and/or interesting. You'd probably enjoy browsing through it. We're surprised more people aren't using it for free advertising, but that's fine with us. As Eric Scheske's grand pappy used to say, “It don't make me no never mind”
Traffic to TDE is also doing well. We're averaging over 300 visitors a day, seven days a week. The traffic on the weekends has particularly picked up (though Saturdays and Sundays still trail weekdays by a large margin). It's probably because many blogs shut down or slow to a trickle on the weekends. We try to keep the posting near weekday levels.
Thanks for coming. As always: We request that you forward the URL to friends and family.
Stoic's Porch
“There is nothing the wise man does reluctantly.” Seneca
Ebony and Ivory? Or Some Sort of Mulatto?
The political structure of a nation is profoundly affected by the elimination of a host of small and medium-sized firms the owner managers of which, together with their dependents, henchmen and connections, count quantitatively at the polls and have a hold on what we may term the foreman class that no management of a large unit can ever have; the very foundation of private property and free contracting wears away in a nation in which its most vital, most concrete, most meaningful types disappear from the moral horizon of the people.
Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (quoted in Steven E. Rhoads, The Economist's View of the World (1999), p. 193).
The folks at Lew Rockwell approve of Schumpeter (Murray Rothbard referred to him as a “great economist,” link), but not of distributism (link). Distributists, of course, also have concerns about big corporations (see, for instance, these posts at The Distributist Review: link and link). Today's libertarians approve of the cottage industries (e.g., eBay entrepreneurs) that are surfing in the wake of the Internet revolution. Link. So do today's distributists, though the camps differ on ways to encourage them. Distributists often favor tax breaks for the cottage industries and want to penalize the big corporations. Libertarians oppose this (at least the penalization part), being more inclined to foster non-economic attitudes and dispositions that encourage the cottage industries. They strongly believe (for good reason) that economic laws are laws that cannot be tinkered with any more than we can tinker with the law of gravity. That doesn't mean libertarians believe economic laws are the only or even most important areas worthy of study (in the first chapter of Man, Economy, and State, Rothbard identified “psychology,” “philosophy of ethics and aesthetics,” “technology,” and “history” as important disciplines).
It's also worth pointing out that distributists, like libertarians, disdain big government (both love Belloc's The Servile State). Libertarians say that the distributists' proposal of spreading individual ownership of business enterprises entails a big central government, but we don't see today's distributists advocating such a thing.
For all these reasons, we suspect there's more common ground between the two camps than it might appear.
Unfortunately, we don't consider ourselves qualified (either by way of background training or available time) to explore all the common premises and agreements between these camps, but we wish someone would. We suspect such an exploration would yield an economic framework that all right-thinking Christians could accept.
Strays
“[D]ifferences of religion are at the root of differences in culture.” Hilaire Belloc
My task is difficult because “error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence.” C.S. Lewis
“Bad taste comes easy, good taste requires discipline and training.” Eric Voegelin
“The prophets, philosophers, and saints who can translate the order of the spirit into the practice of conduct without institutional support and pressure are rare.” Eric Voegelin
Last Word
Volpone: a cunning schemer. “Rumors that Eric Scheske is a volpone who plans to use TDE to take over the world are exaggerated.”
