---------------------------------------- Distributism March 27th, 2018 ---------------------------------------- I've been thinking about politics too much lately, so I thought I'd liven things up by jumping into economics! I'll keep this one short, I promise. I'm no fan of capitalism, especially "free" market economics. It is tantamount to slavery both in its literal abuse of the third world or the consolidation of wealth into the corporate leading to wage-slavery in the first world. The appeal of endless growth is clear, but it's so obviously unsustainable that I can't keep up the lie to myself. Eventually you will run out of peoples to exploit and the workers will have no money to spend. It will consume itself or transform from economic oligarchy into political oligarchy. No, the modern fascination with democracy is mirrored by the lust for wealth that capitalism promises. In reality, the regulation that free-market champions condemn are the very things that have kept us from the brink thus far. The world economy teeters on the edge of absolute ruin and it will be the greedy, get-rich-quick, that take us all there. There are alternatives, and they don't all involve us devolving into an agrestic commune. Distributism [0] is my economic structure of choice. Here's the extremely brief key points: - personal property is a right of the individual - don't assign to higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do - small production and local culture is favored over central systems and mass production AKA, keep it small and owned by the workers. The best examples I can give in today's culture are credit unions and farming co-ops. Of course there's a lot more to it, and no system in place today functions in its pure form. We have some elements of distributism in the United States in the form of anti-trust laws. Still, I'd prefer more. Capitalism has no soul, no morality. Distributism shares the morality of the community its attached to. I like that. (TXT) [0] Distributism on Gopherpedia