G.K. Chesterton

Today is Blog Action Day 2008, and the topic is a most serious one – poverty. With dark economic clouds descending, this topic, unfortunately, couldn’t be more apt.

Haves and Have-Nots

The cartoon above is one I created around the words of G.K. Chesterton. Chesterton was an Englishman of the early 20th century, a brilliant journalist, essayist, novelist, and poet. He held very definite views on wealth, poverty, and the horrors that befall a society when the gap between the two is great.

While the divide between rich and poor in the U.S. is not nearly so extreme as what Chesterton experienced in England in the immediate aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, if you look at the situation worldwide, it is worse.

A Cure for Poverty – Distributism

Chesterton developed and tried to popularize a socio-economic theory called Distributism, which he and others believed would right the wrongs inflicted on the masses by an extreme imbalance between rich and poor. Distributism holds that -

  1. All people should own property and the means of production
  2. Property (wealth) should be divided as evenly as possible

Distributism is a “third way” between socialism and capitalism. With socialism, the goal is an even distribution of wealth, but with government ownership. In capitalism, the goal is every man for himself, but with wealth being in the hands of the people. In Chesterton’s time, both socialism and capitalism were producing horrific human suffering without seeming to provide basic economic necessities to the majority of citizens within their respective realms.

Have things changed very much?

Distributism never gained much traction in its day. For one thing, the theory was thought to be unprogressive – a return to the medieval guild system Chesterton loved so much. Its roots in the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church may not have helped, either – anti-Catholic sentiment lingered in England and many other industrialized nations.

Yet I believe distributism deserves another look. The environmental movement, which does have traction, encourages local production of human necessities, very much in line with distributist thinking. Entrepreneurship and small business perhaps have more political clout today than ever, partly because they work, and party because the excesses of big business and big government have been exposed. (We can thank the Internet for that.) A fair amount of economic development in the Third World has come from courageous entrepreneurs who have stepped into the breach. Kiva and the micro-loan phenomenon demonstrate how effective this response to poverty can be.

There are no magic bullets for poverty, or any other problem for that matter. But economically speaking, our framework is broken. Clearly. Is distributism the answer? It may be at least part of the answer, and while its mechanics may need adjusting, its heart is definitely in the right place.

Further Reading

What’s Wrong with the World, by G.K. Chesterton

The Servile State, by Hilaire Belloc

Rerum Novarum, Encyclical by Pope Leo XIII on Capital and Labor

The Distributist Review

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