Popping up all over the country are chapters of the Catholic Land Movement, which is a distributist-inspired and Chesterton-inspired attempt to revive the economic vision of Pope Leo XIII. Grounded in conversion and conviction, such a movement is growing. Is it time—or already past time—to consider something that was once called distributism as an alternative [...]
History rarely announces its turning points. But sometimes it leaves unmistakable traces. It is premature to say that the era of unilateral Western financial and economic power is at end. That the West faces serious challenges and will likely never recover its previous authority is beyond dispute. Amid the debates (and the uncertainties) about tariffs [...]
In the last resort, according to Friedrich Hayek, the conservative position rests on the belief that in any society there are recognizably superior persons whose inherited standards and values and position ought to be protected, and who thus should have a greater influence on public affairs than others. The chief evil is unlimited government.... Nobody [...]
The “anonymous societies”—the corporations—can never deliver what they promise; they can never bring us limited government, free markets, or private property. But most especially, they cannot overcome the division between capital and labor; that can come only by sharing in ownership, and by identifying property with responsibility. The directors of such [joint stock] companies, however, [...]
One powerful way to begin to escape from the Cave is to strive to love others without seeking a reward; that is, to love others the way God loves us. The Cave In the Parable of the Cave, Socrates uses powerful images to depict the universal condition of humankind. All of us, ancient Athenians and [...]
In “The Wealth of Nations,” Adam Smith was absolutely right: The widespread division of labor would cause the interior life to die; an unsurprising result, for under capitalism, the human person became a commodity, a resource, a thing used to further profits. My parents, Romanian gypsies, born in a Transylvanian village and raised in thatched-roofed [...]
Theodore Roosevelt was the obvious victor in both of the “battles to transform American capitalism.” He refused to do the bidding of the coal operators and instead helped engineer a compromise. American capitalism was not so much transformed as tamed in the process. The Hour of Fate: Theodore Roosevelt, J.P. Morgan and the Battle to [...]
Because of the strong secular faith instilled in us by education, most of us trust that science and technology, democracy, and capitalism, the three legs of Modernity, can bring about only good ends and fail to see that these three triumphs of humankind can diminish the human person. With the publication of the book The [...]
“Capitalists” are often accused of wanting unfettered markets in which the only value is the almighty dollar and nobody cares about anything that is not related to making money. But others claim that capitalism is progressive by nature. Which is it? Is capitalism itself intrinsically “woke”? In “The Distributist” column in the latest issue of [...]
Not all food is fast food, but the acceleration of takeout does not bode well for a society in need of occasions to slow down, reflect, and communicate. Just when it seemed things were returning to normal, some habits changed for the worse. The instability of COVID times took countless people out of contact with [...]
True educational reform must re-establish the secondary school as a place for broad learning, vocational training as a highly respected route to respectable work, and college as a place for higher learning. The call for college to be made “free” to all who want it rests on a number of assumptions, most of them self-serving, [...]
As we start a new chapter of life after our move from Minnesota to Texas, I have a new goal for us. From now on, we are to switch our minimalism from Money to Things. No more acceptance of free things that will make our house less free. Henceforth and forevermore, we are no more [...]
When we strip away all the fancy arguments and strong opinions about capitalism, or industrialism if you like, we see a person in the workplace is a commodity, a thing to be used up and discarded. As a result, capitalism creates a thing-oriented society, where machines, profits, and properties are more important than people. I [...]
What made Aaron Feuerstein famous was not success but his attitude in the face of catastrophe. When a fire destroyed the textile mill he owned, he faced the decisions of whether to rebuild and whether to continue to pay his 1,400 workers, who were left destitute in the dead of winter. His decision became a [...]