We've Moved!

We have enjoyed being a Blogger site for many years, but we are now ready to move on to our own domain. Future articles will be posted at the new Practical Distributism site:

https://practicaldistributism.com

Addressing your Local Community: An interview with Chattanooga Civics

by David W. Cooney

One thing that distributists are often asked is how we can begin to move toward a more distributist society. What are things that we can do now, in our current political and economic environment, to at least nudge society in what we consider to be a better direction. A lot of our response has been about how to do this economically; like supporting local businesses and using a credit union rather than a bank. That is good as far as it goes, but we must also address these questions politically. What steps can we take to help society as a whole to become more localist, to encourage our local government to address local issues and hold them accountable for doing so, and to encourage people in our local community to be engaged in the local political government and its activities?

Capitalism Eating Itself

One of the criticisms that have been made about the distributist movement is that we make false characterizations about capitalism. We take selective examples of abusive behavior taking place within capitalism and use them to criticize capitalism as a whole. We use terms like calling average employees the proletariat and “wage slaves” to reflect how capitalists treat the working classes they claim to “lift up.” Our critics say that these are not the norm for capitalism; they are the exception and not the rule. However, what distributists actually say is that capitalism as a system is morally neutral because it is only about money and “what the market will bear.” Distributists respond that this is how capitalism really exists in the world, and that very fact is what ultimately makes it an unjust system. As I have mentioned many times, most capitalists will insist that everyone involved in business should act in a moral and ethical way, but many of them will also admit that capitalism as a system does not enforce that in any real way. The revelations of Steven Crowder and the Daily Wire over the last two days have shown how right we are.