Bad week for El Presidente

[Lambda Phage]

What's your thought on Australia James? I just saw some guy with an accent on Youtube say that Australia's retirement system is like Chile's, and a bunch of other good stuff and things. The accent makes me think he's smart.

He says there hasn't been an economic crisis in Australia in decades, low regulation, high gdp, abundant natural resources. Says it's an improved America he says.

[james03]

I don't know.  The bad things I have heard:

1.  Totally run by feminists.  Even more SJW than the USA.  Maybe not as bad as the USA, but it is evidently bad.
2.  Housing boom is coming to an end.  Expect a housing bust.
3.  Greens have rammed through a lot of legislation for the global warming scam.  Parts of Australia now have black outs due to power outages during low wind days.
4.  No guns allowed, for the most part. 

Don't know about their economy.  I suspect their success is due to them being reduced to a supply colony for China (coal/ore).  I don't know anything about their retirement program.  If it is like Chile, that is a huge plus.

[Lambda Phage]

No guns sucks. I think what would make life miserable for me is the inversion of seasons.

It should not be snowing in July. It should be snowing when Santa comes, damnit.

[Heinrich]

No guns sucks. I think what would make life miserable for me is the inversion of seasons.

It should not be snowing in July. It should be snowing when Santa comes, damnit.

Unless yer in Colorado, son. Been stacked in graupel and sleet in July these parts. True stories.

[Gardener]

He's got a website and podcast. If he sold merch I'd probably be in for a "The end is nigh, Faggots" coffee cup.

ETA: Also, a spill proof spitter with "God's Wrath Is Glorious" would definitely be on the shopping list too.

Maybe a beer coozie that says, "Subsidiarity: So easy even a self-absorbed promethean neo-Pelagian can do it"

For a brew coozie: "Distributism: You know you want it."

The only appropriate beer for a Distributism coozie would taste like mule piss and 40 unfarmed acres

Wrong. Bud Light and other Anheiser Busch products are a monolithic and globalist bully that crowds out the small, independent producer. Look to our own Belgium Brewing in CO. A clear and successful example of a Distributist model. James even unwittingly lauded another Distributive benefit in Chile's universal retirement plan. Why are you so against private property, no income tax, no socialized medicine, small family business, employee owned companies, living wages for workers, etc.? This is akin to socialism? The government owns nothing and expects nothing from a man's labor, but only taxes reasonably through consumption, i.e. sales taxes. It creates the economic environment through legislation creating the widest opportunity for ownership within cultural milieus. Look at the German system. It was so damn successful the mercantilists and usurers(incipient globalists and late stage capitalists) annihilated Fritz twice. Now he is slowly being shorn from the inside via sexual deprivation and a "refugee" phenomenon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelstand
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2010/aug/15/german-growth-business-culture

[yt][/yt]

Caveat per conventionem: I do not subscribe to Dr. Jones' belief that labor is the intrinsic mean to value. But his analysis here on two competing cultural systems via economics is an absolute gem of insight into what brought on the world wars and who would control the economic status quo in the world.

"Distributism cannot be done to people, it has to be done by people" - Dale Ahlquist @ 09:50: [yt]https://www.youpak.com/watch?v=OggeWbVE4hA[/yt]

Here's the problem:

Everything Mr. Ahlquist says in the video is all lovely. But it's really nothing more than artificially stunted Capitalism and at best a philosophy that wishes to LARP as an economic system.

It's saying to business at large, "Be successful, but not too successful." It is, as I've long said, glass ceiling Capitalism. Moreover, it is necessarily a government enforced process of financial and economic planning. Why? Because who else is going to enforce property and business acquisition obstacles and success barriers? And if one doesn't advocate for those, then we are living in the Distributist end-state anyway.

If I desire to invest in a business, I'm going to look for a successful businessman. So let's say he is just much better at industry X than everyone else in his town. He's king of the castle. So I invest with him. His competitors simply can no longer compete (would this be government enforced to stop that? I'd think so, if we are being consistent) and he now owns X swath of territory. So let's say he then attracts more investment and expands. And he starts doing it even better than other competitors, offering similar products at a lower price through creative material sourcing. He's a tour de force. Is this problematic?

Should he be forced to wear a business hypoxia mask because he outruns the competition?

Where where the backstop be applied? Would the standard be in flux or hardline? If it's in flux, how do we know that someone in charge of applying that standard in government isn't being bought off by the growing business' competitors? If it's hardline, what's too successful?

There is private property and small family business, employee owned business and living wages (can we get a definition on that?) for workers; no income tax or  socialized medicine in so-called Capitalism too, if the government keeps its nose out of it.

The reason the big beer producers are successful is they produce a cheap product with enough alcohol for people to get a buzz or drunk without paying 15 dollars a 6pk. Most folks don't sit around taste testing beer and acting like they are drinking wine.

I still cannot find any coherent, cohesive argument for Distributism that actually addresses its segue into the norm and how that's done without property theft; how it's done with the necessary gumption, motivation, and success is inherently individualistic per its claims, but yet those same individuals could do those same things now. Ergo, I tend to see Distributism more as victim-mindset whining than a viable system. Nothing is stopping Distributism but the lack of distributed motivation to implement it on a small scale. The Amish do it in essence, but they have a community in which to do so. Catholics have no real community these days. The ones which were had in the past were basically ethnic enclaves and that helped.

[Lambda Phage]

Distributism does not and never has existed. It is ahistoric. The good things people point to and say "see there, distributism" are things brought to you by capitalism.

I advocate for the economic system which made western civilization superior to the rest of the world. The only system which achieved sustained economic growth, created wealth, and lifted more people out of poverty than anything else known to man. Whatever that was at one point in time, it naturally evolved over the course of history, without planning, without revolt, without referendum, into what can only be described as capitalism.

Bernie Sanders often said "We are the richest nation in the history of the world." Doesn't anyone care to know how we ended up that way? Many are they who seek to kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

It is capitalism, not distributism, that has its roots in the commercial revolution of the middle ages. It is capitalism, not distributism, whose early form can be seen working in the Italian city states of the high middle ages, the Dutch Republic in the late middle ages, and the British Empire of the early modern era, all the premier economic powerhouses of their respective eras.

Go back further, Rodney Stark has argued capitalism was born in the monasteries of the dark ages. And we can now even speak intelligibly of the Roman market economy.

Like it or not, capitalism is the economy of western civilization. The sooner Catholics come to terms with that the sooner all will realize that the left truly hates everything about western civilization. You will more fully appreciate the depths of their evil when you realize they are your enemy in all things and you do not have common ground with them even on economics.

There is no third way between dexter and sinister.

[Lambda Phage]

Distributism, on the other hand, was born in the minds of 20th century idealists. Remarkable Catholics, though not an insignificant number were former socialists.

"It is my experience that the sort of man who does really become a Distributist is exactly the sort of man who has been a Socialist ... Mr Belloc himself had been a Socialist; my brother had been a Socialist; I had been a Socialist." -G.K. Chesterton

[Carleendiane]

.

[Heinrich]

Lambda, capitalism is sustained by usury. The organic economic development you spoke of in the Middle Ages was Distributism, which Gardener alluded to at the end of his most previous post: Local, homogenous economies creating wealth with local labor, talent, skill, and competition. Did Italy, France, Austria, etc. create those wonderful villages(with Churches, Basilicas, Cathedrals) by outsourcing companies for cheap products used by immigrant labor at a cheaper cost?  The free market system is accomplished within a sensus Catholicus, which would modify behavior. Is it perfect? Of course not, but it is not going to foster the looting and avarice and rapaciousness we see now. Market competition does exist and natural market forces do come into play in a D. system, btw. Ultimately, Capitalism is a system that is unnatural and the flip side of communism. A jewish two-headed hydra whose ends garner souls for Hell. Yes, conceded, the capitalist champion goes to Hell fatter with more goods left behind for his kin, if he decided to have any.

[Lambda Phage]

There is still the problem of "How do you get there?"

Distributism as you describe it seems as though it is nothing more than people behaving a certain way within a capitalist framework. But how can you force people to behave a certain way? I don't mean moral behavior, but amoral things like corporate ownership, or even property ownership. Is it not true that distributism is defined by a more widely distributed means of production?

Not everybody is fit for ownership, not everybody even wants to be an owner. Many people prefer the simple 9-5 job where they don't have to plow their own fields or run their own business. If everybody is their own boss or their own owner, who is left to fill in for the unskilled laborer? Robots? Immigrants? There are already enough people who think an entry level job is beneath them, and so those jobs go to the poor foreigner who gratefully accepts because it's better than they could have done in their own country.

It seems a democratizing force which says "more men should be leaders and owners," or even, "all men should be leaders and owners." Whereas the natural order produces only a few leaders and truly competent men.

I disagree that Distributism was the economic system in place in the middle ages. I know Hillaire Belloc thought it was, but it was not so. Where was it found? Guilds? To which an extremely few number of people were able to belong? It certainly didn't exist for the more than 90% of the populace who worked the fields. They did not own the property on which they worked. They did not own much of anything. If the common man wanted a chance at making his own fortune, his best hope was to live in a city. But many both then and now were and are content to remain humble.