The Planned Dependent Community

"Walmart didn’t kill the once-vibrant cluster of shops next to a railroad and a creek in the faded old coal town of Kimball, W. Va. — the disappearance of the mines had pretty well taken care of that already. But now that Walmart’s leaving, too, as one of 154 U.S. stores the company closed in January, the town might be snuffed out for good."

This quote is from a Washington Post article on the circumstances some small towns were facing when Walmart recently decided to close 269 stores and lay off more than 16,000 employees. This prompted one reader of ours to ask how we can reach these types of communities. How can we present the idea of distributism to the people living in these situations as solution to their economic problems?

Distributism and the Local Organic Farm Community

The following is an article by Douglas R. Fox, director of the Center for Sustainability and Global Change at Unity College. This article is reprinted from the Fall 2013 edition of Maine Organic Farmer and Gardener. We thank Professor Fox and the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association for their permission to reprint this for our readers.

The Art of Distributism

We would like to welcome The Art of Distributism to the conversation on the blogosphere. This site started in January.

Owners vs. Workers: An Eternal Law of Nature?

Thomas Storck

A few years ago (November 2, 2013) The Economist magazine, that reliable organ of neo-liberalism that makes few bones about its idolization of material growth as the summum bonum of human existence and its consequent dismissal of anything, such as family life or cultural traditions, that might get in the way of such material growth, ran some articles about labor's diminishing share of national income.

Over the past 30 years, the workers' take from the [economic] pie has shrunk across the globe. In America, their wages used to make up almost 70% of GDP; now the figure is 64%, according to the OECD. Some of the biggest declines have been egalitarian societies such as Norway (where labour's share has fallen from 64% in 1980 to 55% now) and Sweden (down from 74% in 1980 to 65% now). A drop has also occurred in many emerging markets, particularly in Asia.

Even these figures of 70% to 65% for the U.S. are misleading, for as the magazine notes in another article in the same issue, "among wage-earners the rich have done vastly better than the rest; the share of income earned by the top 1% of workers has increased since the 1990s even as the overall labour share has fallen." So that, "the share of national income going to the bottom 99% of workers has fallen from 60% before the 1980s to 50%." That is to say, the workers whose job title is CEO are gobbling up not just more money but a greater percentage of it.

Catholic Social Teaching and Conventional Economics

by Thomas Storck

Anyone who has spent much time trying to promote Catholic social teaching has probably met with a response something like this. "What you say is very fine and certainly evidence of good will.  But, you see, most of what you are asking for is simply impossible. Society would break down.  For there are economic laws which it is as foolish to try to circumvent as those of gravity.  We certainly ought to try to eliminate poverty and all that.  But this can only be done if we obey the laws of economics.  If you study economics a bit, you'll soon see why you're barking up the wrong tree."

The bogus, self-serving notion that poverty is simple

In a recent article for The Week, Jeff Spross makes a fair claim against the standard "conservative" rhetoric that the real solution to the problem of poverty is for those in poverty to start working. He also addresses the position of some conservatives who say that we can never truly address the issue of poverty because it is such a complicated human problem. Mr. Spross points out fatal flaws with this claim, but fails to see the fatal flaw in what he presents as the solution.