In traditional societies the birth rate of illegitimate children was around 3% or 4%. Today it is almost institutionalized. Your attack of my ideal of small property and decentralized production just because it is not contemporary is as logical as attacking conservative sexual values because illegitimacy is currently in vogue.

Just suggesting that the thousands of family owned slaughterhouses at the beginning of the 20th century were better than the few centralized slaughterhouses owned by only four companies makes me in your eyes a champion of polio, wife beating, racism, famine, anti-technology primitivism, and strangely neo-Marxism. I don’t understand it but I am going to let it go.

As far as egalitarianism, there are many definitions. In my opinion there is a kind of Christian egalitarianism that is implicit in the Scriptures: “Do not show partiality in judging; hear both small and great alike…” (Deut 1:17) “I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism…” (Acts 10:34) A form of egalitarianism is also at the core of American political thinking. Thomas Jefferson first used the phrase “All men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence. Martin Luther King, Jr. called these words the creed of the United States. The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 says, “All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property.” Yet the progressive movement in the United States has extrapolated from this traditional understanding to a new form of egalitarianism. “Equality of outcome” is a form of social justice rhetoric which seeks to reduce or eliminate incidental inequalities individuals in a society. “For example, granting a greater amount of income and/or total wealth to poorer individuals or households at the expense of relatively wealthy individuals or households.” This is the statist re-distribution of wealth that results in equalizing of poverty and destroys the work ethic. I simply acknowledge that an over bearing corporate capitalism can also crush a man’s work ethic through despair.

Lastly, wikipedia defines socialism as referring “to various theories of economic organization advocating state, worker or public ownership and administration of the means of production and allocation of resources, and a society characterized by equal access to resources for all individuals with an egalitarian method of compensation.” Capitalism refers “to an economic and social system in which the means of production are privately controlled; labor, goods and capital are traded in a market; profits are distributed to owners or invested in new technologies and industries; and wages are paid to labor.”

Distributism, as I understand it, is like decentralized small capitalism. It does not want state or public control of the means of production, allocation of resources, or anything at all. It wants the means of production and allocation of resources to be privately controlled by more private individuals, particularly families. Distributism does not refer to an egalitarian method of compensation but to coerced remuneration of labor and industry through capital traded in a free market. Profits are distributed to owners just as in capitalism, just that there are more owners. The state has nothing to do in “forcing” people to be owners except not inhibiting ownership or small property and protecting privet property. Wages are paid to labor, though I think a “family wage” rather than a “minimum wage” is most conducive to the sustained existence of the work force, as even Adam Smith admitted. A “minimum wage” is a state regulation that helps keep the work force from starving, and like all state regulations should be abolished.

I cannot say it clearer than that. I am sorry if I have been vague in the past.

I too see computers and the internet creating a more localized and distributed economy because it democratizes information. I also agree that tyrannical governments have always been threatened by the internet so that the Cyber-security Act of 2009 is another attack on liberty such as we have already seen in dictatorships around the world. In fact it is perhaps too obvious since every college philosophy and social science student understands this very principal. Thus it is perhaps the clearest evidence of the growing statist tyranny we see in America today.

So how is what I am saying anything like “socializing health care?” Did I say “the inequities of the present system are reason enough to turn the entire enterprise over to secular elites?” No I did not. I said, turn it over to mom and pop, give my neighbors a chance to get ahead by becoming entrepreneurs.

Since John Couretas said he was arguing for no such nonsense, referring to “monopoly capitalism” and we all agree that if there was a free market without state favoritism and more entrepreneurship then more people would be better off, then how do we even disagree?

The political principles that under gird the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution go back to the English philosopher John Locke. According to Locke and his spiritual heirs such as Thomas Jefferson, the function of government is to secure the liberty of individual citizens. Freed from the burdens of indentured servitude and the depravation of life, citizens mature and then enter into the kind of industry best suited to result in Prosperity and Virtue ending in abundance, hospitality, and generosity. This belief, that the purpose of government is to secure the liberty of its citizens, necessarily entails limited government. Limited government allows opportunities for more self-government, improved representation, and choice in the political process.

Today a massive centralized government has grown too big and too corrupt to allow for any meaningful representation or self-government. Furthermore, the government’s goal is to grasp as much political control for itself and for corporate concerns by promoting a culture of fear. By means of a crippling tax burden, obligatory bureaucratic regulations, and the systematic limitation of individual rights the government is slowly eroding the personal integrity, independence, and liberty of their people.

Since it is the nature of governments to seek greater power and control through tyranny, political philosophers have been very suspicious of politicians. Therefore the principles upon which this nation was founded sought to limit the power of government. That is why the United States Constitution did not prescribe a limited number of people’s rights. Instead it delineated clear boundaries and limits as to what government could and could not do leaving most of the power and rights in the hands of the people.

Clark Carlton, in his letter, writes, “The equation is quite simple: the bigger the government is, the more it tries to do, the less freedom is available to its citizens. The purpose of government within the American tradition, then, is neither to make its citizens righteous nor to take care of them from the cradle to the grave, but to protect their God-given liberty.” This is the political philosophy known as “political liberalism.”

And how about this grave warning from my article The Politics of Antichrist,

If the traditional society was envisioned as helping people live virtuous lives, now the purpose of society is to keep people from suffering. Where as the first goal aims at removing impediments to virtue it left open the possibility of suffering. In fact it thought of suffering as something that could sometimes build character. The end result is a nation of mature, productive, strongly independent, and liberally generous people. The second goal aims at removing opportunity for suffering by limiting individual rights and “protecting” people from themselves. The end result is a nation of immature, lazy, and strongly dependent people with an entitlement attitude “cared for” by a state that encompasses all of life within its total grasp.

‘When Mussolini first coined the word “totalitarianism”, it was not a pejorative slur, nor was it something connoting tyranny; rather, Mussolini used totalitarianism to refer to a humane society in which everyone was taken care of and looked after by a state which encompassed all of life within its total grasp. The oppressive totalitarian state always begins by being the compassionate totalitarian state.’

The classic British and American traditions have prized liberty just as highly as safety, as encapsulated in Benjamin Franklin’s dictum, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Richard Weaver warned of this tendency toward the totalitarian, ‘total care’ state in 1962 when he said, “The past shows unvaryingly that when a people’s freedom disappears, it goes not with a bang, but in silence amid the comfort of being cared for. That is the dire peril in the present trend toward statism. If freedom is not found accompanied by a willingness to resist, and to reject favors, rather than to give up what is intangible but precarious, it will not long be found at all.”

So how can you honestly accuse me of statist pretensions when I expose the dangers of statism in such a nuanced way for all the world to read?

By “socialism and capitalism are two sides of the same coin” I meant statist socialism and corporate monopoly capitalism. I said before that, Statist socialism [has] as it’s goal that 100% of people are employees of the state, 100% of people are dependents of the state, and 100% of a states GDP is from government spending. Monopoly capitalism also has as it’s goal that 100% of people become employees of corporations. I am advocating a system where as few people as possible are employees because they own their own business. A system where as few people as possible are dependent on government welfare because they are self-sufficient, and more than that, they have excess to be liberally generous.

Statist socialism and corporate monopoly capitalism can merge easily because by the first the worker is provided a minimum wage rather than a family wage and no opportunity to start a business of his own. By the second he is provided state welfare benefits.

a) I read and interacted with many articles that were suggested to me.

b) I do not advocate “The Third Way” which is a contemporary political movement I know very little about and may just be a form of centrist statism that I deplore.

c) Rather than being vague I have given details and policy positions that only amount to removing the privileges a certain class currently enjoy and removing impediments to entrepreneurial enterprise. I have also demonstrated that this is the way things used to be in early America.

d) I do not advocate any social welfare at all, such as when I said it would be ideal to promote a society where as few as possible, even 0% of citizens, would be state dependents, therefore countering the claim that “they never suggest how to solve grave financial problems of high level of government expenditures on their social welfare programs.” I am not one of “them” anyway.

e) My “economic prescriptions” are more free trade, protection of privet property, promotion of entrepreneurship, and severely limited government. I wish to limit federal government to the point that it operates on a tithe of a 10% state tax. I don’t see how we could possibly disagree on my “economic prescriptions” unless you think the federal government should not be cut back as far.

f) I even said that I repudiated single payer government health care in my previous post at the expense of being ridiculed in Canada!

g) And even I agree with farmer Blake Hurst that it is perhaps more humane to raise chickens and turkeys in sheds rather than outside where they can be decapitated by weasels or die in a rain storm. I read the article!

You think I want to coerce the world with sweeping changes for the sake of moral outrage. I just long for the status-quo of America 100 years ago when more small businesses were owned by more people and there was less government interference. That’s not moral outrage, its nostalgia. Rather than demonstrate that there isn’t such contemporary government interference you resort to telling me I believe the exact opposite of what I say I do.

I don’t see how what I believe is socialism, statism, or egalitarianism. I am in complete agreement with Jefferson, Dabney, Wendell Berry, and Clark Carlton, veritable giants for traditional conservatives, whom none would dare call a progressive, whose very name makes progressives shudder. And I would go live on a farm if I wasn’t indentured into white-collar employment. Besides my farm could be confiscated by tyrannical state agencies because there is no such thing as privet property.

The primary flaw here is that of egalitarianism (as well as a healthy dose of the ‘noble savage’ myth). Egalitarianism is a perverse and prevalent philosphical idea that is profoundly non-Christian.

I agree that all other things being equal, relatively small-scale, local economies are more healthy but they are only sustainable when there is a relatively low level of demand for anything but basic goods and services.

Looking to a ‘golden age of agrarianism’ is not the way to foster vital localized economies however. Computers, IMO, offer the best chance of having a more localized, distributed economy. However as the Cyber-security Act of 2009 shows, our friends in Washington want to control that, especially the Secretary of Commerce. See report on http://www.eff.org

I think it is ironic that I have Canadian Orthodox people calling me an unenlightened God hatter for not agreeing that single payer government health care is an essential human right because I think it would kill millions of people and take away my health freedoms and I have American Orthodox people calling me a neo-Marxist for wondering if the world would be a better place if my neighbors could be entrepreneurs, if we could strengthen the family as the sovereign atom of political life, and if local communities could become self sufficient free markets! I am totally out of breath!

Better slow down then and take a breath.

Look, your presumed virtue, ostensibly affirmed by being criticized by both right and left (like that TV reporter I mentioned upstream — did you read it?), really has nothing to do with your economic prescriptions.

All I really see is statism. You offer a cascade of moral imperatives to advance what is essentially state control of the economy (just like the health care aficionados). Employing the language of morality instead of the economic language of Marx, or the increasingly shop-worn language of “fairness” of the progressives, you want us to believe that somehow that a state directed agrarian nirvana constitutes a “Third Way” that (surprise!) nobody has ever thought of before.

You gave it away with your comment upstream that “socialism and capitalism” are two sides of the same coin; more accurately that state controlled economies and free markets are one and the same. Marx knew this is not true. So do most progressives (why do you think they wont allow a “public option” in socialized health care?). Scratch a socialist they say, and you always find a totalitarian impulse lurking underneath.

If you really believed this, you would move off to a subsistence farm and live happily ever after. Instead, you expend a flurry of words trying to convince us that the state can create a utopia somewhere if we can just find the right reasons.

But Ryan posits more, much more in fact. His “Third Way,” while ostensibly a moral call, is in fact a kind of “compassionate socialism,” — nice on the outside but treacherous on the inside, a lot like socialist health care that promises us a generation of happy-faced children while deep-sixing Grandma and Grandpa in the back room (see: London Telegraph, Sentenced to death on the NHS).

John Couretas brought up Vaclav Klaus in response to Ryan’s promotion of a “Third Way.” Ryan apparently does not know that when you receive a reference like this, you should take the time to read it. Klaus makes a point anyone reading this discussion would do well to ponder:

Tony Blair made recently a very apt statement: “The third way is a new alliance between progress and justice” (The Washington Post, September 27, 1998). I know that it is difficult or almost impossible for us to take it seriously but it should have been done. It was a mistake that such a formula was not immediately analyzed and attacked – we either did not care or were not able to easily discuss such fuzzy words like alliance, progress and justice and especially their unspecified combination. We can laugh at it but we must be aware of the fact that such loose phrases have been more or less accepted as a new basic dogma, as a currently dominant anti-liberal ideology.

[…]

The Third Way remains to be a very vague concept which has no operational definition, which has not been properly defined. It blocks its serious discussion but it does not block its use and its irresponsible dissemination, and it does not devalue the promises it contains.

Finally, Klaus touches on my complaint with Ryan’s three-post-five-paragraph responses (none of which engage the questions he is asked):

The present-day exponents of third way thinking have been relatively successful in pretending that they endorse conservative economic policies which is, of course, not true. We should not be misled by their rhetoric. They never discuss details, they never reveal what they have in mind when they talk about regulation and they never suggest how to solve grave financial problems of high level of government expenditures on their social welfare programs.

Like all progressives, Ryan catalogs a multitude of sins and then expects us to accept his economic prescriptions because of the moral repugnance they generate. Again, it’s a lot like socializing health care. The inequities of the present system are reason enough to turn the entire enterprise over to secular elites (can you imagine having your health care decided by a committee appointed by Barbara Boxer or Barney Frank?) — Grandma and Grandpa notwithstanding.

When I praise what was right about American life 100 years ago it doesn’t mean I am elevating even what was wrong. Maybe that is what is being missunderstood, as if everyone thinks I love slavery and famine because I admire the diversity and great number of small entrepreneurs of the pre-war pre-FDR American economy.

I think it is ironic that I have Canadian Orthodox people calling me an unenlightened God hatter for not agreeing that single payer government health care is an essential human right because I think it would kill millions of people and take away my health freedoms and I have American Orthodox people calling me a neo-Marxist for wondering if the world would be a better place if my neighbors could be entrepreneurs, if we could strengthen the family as the sovereign atom of political life, and if local communities could become self sufficient free markets! I am totally out of breath!

I am sorry father, I don’t watch tv, not that I am better than anyone because of it, I am just too busy, so I don’t follow your argument. Yet, I bear equal blame for not being as clear. And I never claimed to be impartial. I have an interest in entering the market and providing for my family.

In his article, suggested by the intriguing John Couretas, Thomas E. Woods Jr. says,

In a true market system, no one may employ state coercion to gain an advantage at his neighbor’s expense.

This is what I mean by “More Entrepreneurship.” I do not believe that America or any nation on earth has a pure free market system and that is the problem. Large corporate interests influence government to create regulations and taxes thus employing state coercion to gain an advantage at their neighbor’s expense. Since John Couretas agreed that he did not believe “monopoly capitalism” was the ideal then we all agree, a decentralized popular capitalism, as in more people being able to enter and participate in the free market, would be the ideal.

Additionally, I believe that big corporations have been responsible for environmental destruction, at least in the past, though I admit not everyone will agree and that it was American lifestyle that drives that destruction. So we are all at fault, not that I think it is government’s place to coerce anyone to do anything about it. Thomas E. Woods Jr. goes on,

The market economy is the remarkable engine of civilization that people are all too often taught to hate. All other economic systems make fantastic promises that turn out in practice to be cruel and empty delusions. Theory and experience alike testify that the market alone can deliver an economy that is just, humane, and prosperous.

This is an uncritical and absolutizing perspective. “All other economic systems make fantastic promises that turn out in practice to be cruel and empty delusions.” Wow! But I am the romantic one? Even though I couldn’t agree more emphatically with the first sentence!

I don’t hate the market! That’s where I buy eggs and tomatoes and edumame. It’s the most pure form of capitalism where men and women sell the produce of their hard work in a free market where no one coerces them by telling them what to sell and how much to sell it for.

I was the one mocked and ridiculed and had my privacy violated, and I continued to be congenial and polite. It reminds me of when my wife was publicly scorned on the internet for writing a letter to the editor about raw milk. Looking up someone’s internet service provider doesn’t make a rational proof of anything. It is a rhetorical tactic attempting to show that I am contradictory and therefore my argument is invalid. It assumed that I dislike modern technology and hate the market, none of which is true, and could not have reasonably been implied by my previous posts. It was just mean.

I am sorry father, I don’t watch tv, not that I am better than anyone because of it, I am just too busy, so I don’t follow your argument. Yet, I bear equal blame for not being as clear. And I never claimed to be impartial. I have an interest in entering the market and providing for my family.

In his article, suggested by the intriguing John Couretas, Thomas E. Woods Jr. says,

In a true market system, no one may employ state coercion to gain an advantage at his neighbor’s expense.

This is what I mean by “More Entrepreneurship.” I do not believe that America or any nation on earth has a pure free market system and that is the problem. Large corporate interests influence government to create regulations and taxes thus employing state coercion to gain an advantage at their neighbor’s expense. Since John Couretas agreed that he did not believe “monopoly capitalism” was the ideal then we all agree, a decentralized popular capitalism, as in more people being able to enter and participate in the free market, would be the ideal.

Additionally, I believe that big corporations have been responsible for environmental destruction, at least in the past, though I admit not everyone will agree and that it was American lifestyle that drives that destruction. So we are all at fault, not that I think it is government’s place to coerce anyone to do anything about it. Thomas E. Woods Jr. goes on,

The market economy is the remarkable engine of civilization that people are all too often taught to hate. All other economic systems make fantastic promises that turn out in practice to be cruel and empty delusions. Theory and experience alike testify that the market alone can deliver an economy that is just, humane, and prosperous.

This is an uncritical and absolutizing perspective. “All other economic systems make fantastic promises that turn out in practice to be cruel and empty delusions.” Wow! But I am the romantic one? Even though I couldn’t agree more emphatically with the first sentence!

I don’t hate the market! That’s where I buy eggs and tomatoes and edumame. It’s the most pure form of capitalism where men and women sell the produce of their hard work in a free market where no one coerces them by telling them what to sell and how much to sell it for.

I was the one mocked and ridiculed and had my privacy violated, and I continued to be congenial and polite. It reminds me of when my wife was publicly scorned on the internet for writing a letter to the editor about raw milk. Looking up someone’s internet service provider doesn’t make a rational proof of anything. It is a rhetorical tactic attempting to show that I am contradictory and therefore my argument is invalid. It assumed that I dislike modern technology and hate the market, none of which is true, and could not have reasonably been implied by my previous posts. It was just mean.

Distributism, or more accurately, More Entrepreneurship, has got a bad wrap. First it is attacked for being vague and without definition or romantic. When it is defined it is attacked as being too Marxist for conservatives and as to Free Market for progressives. It advocates more people being entrepreneurs so those in favor of centralized employment hate it. It advocated independence from state welfare so statists hate it. I have presented many arguments. I hope not many were unfriendly, ad hominim attacks, or begging the question, for I feel this is mostly what I got in response. I was asked questions which I answered succinctly. I was called names. I asked questions and none were ever answered.

This sounds like the television reporter who trots out a critical letter from the left, follows it with more criticism from the right, and then expects us to believe he is objective (as if such a thing exists in journalism).

Look, you are all over the map here. Lots of moral outrage (some of it justified), but precious little in specifics. Everytime you are asked a question, the answer is three more five paragraph posts. It gets tiresome.

I don’t disagree with Archbishop Demetrios’ Encyclical at all. I think most of the negative comments about it had more to do with the seemingly non-stop enviro-babble we have been hearing for years. There is certainly more pressing needs for the Orthodox Church to address such as secularization (unfaithfulness to Parodisis), abortion, and dis-unity. For me, living consistent with a sacramental worldview does include living more in harmony with the land, though I believe that Christian ascesis comes before environmental activism. Living in a more agrarian way seems to me a more consistent and sacramental way of being conscious, thankful, and responsible for the life I receive from God. This goes hand in hand with promoting healthy families, local communities, and discouraging any profit from the misfortune of others. These are all virtues that wage ceaseless war against the American lifestyle. And these are virtues that seem to have gotten me in trouble for defending.

Distributism, or more accurately, More Entrepreneurship, has got a bad wrap. First it is attacked for being vague and without definition or romantic. When it is defined it is attacked as being too Marxist for conservatives and as to Free Market for progressives. It advocates more people being entrepreneurs so those in favor of centralized employment hate it. It advocated independence from state welfare so statists hate it. I have presented many arguments. I hope not many were unfriendly, ad hominim attacks, or begging the question, for I feel this is mostly what I got in response. I was asked questions which I answered succinctly. I was called names. I asked questions and none were ever answered.