Practical Distributism

23 July, 2013

Consequences

This article was originally published by

on 23 July, 2013

Almost no one denies that there were serious problems with getting sufficient access to health care services when the president’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, frequently referred to as “Obamacare,” took over the political scene. The consequences of not addressing these problems were dire, we were told, and something needed to be done. There was much criticism from all sides about the solutions offered, and the willingness of one side to negotiate and compromise with the other. While the Democrats promised us that the results of this secret bill, the details of which we couldn’t see until it was passed, would be wonderful, Republicans, Libertarians, and the pundits who promote their ideas, spent most of their time criticizing Obamacare rather than explaining how their own proposed solutions would help the common American subject.

Practical Distributism and the Zombie Apocolypse

This article was originally published by

The Distributist Review

on 20 February, 2013

Steps and Stumbles

[In 2010], I wrote about a potentially exciting movement supported by the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, David Cameron. This was branded as the “Big Society,” and it promised that the central government was going to distribute political authority from itself to the local level. It consisted of several programs to assist local councils in taking on additional responsibilities that were currently being handled at the central level. The idea was that the common citizen, working with local government, would be capable of dealing with local issues and would no longer be dependent on the central government to deal with every problem. If it could be handled at a local level, the local level would be empowered to handle it. This was not a fully distributist plan, but it had the potential to be a step in that direction.

Utopia

“They say it is Utopian, and they are right. They say it is idealistic, and they are right. They say it is quixotic, and they are right. It deserves every name that will indicate how completely they have driven justice out of the world.”

– G. K. Chesterton