Gotham Diary:
Que Faire?
25 September 2013

In the event of a sequester, or “government shutdown,” or other Tea-Party-induced shock, it will be very interesting to see what, if any, impact the crisis has on the wealth of the Washington metropolitan area. According to Richard Florida (writing in The Atlantic), the nation’s capital and its environs comprise the fourth-richest metropolitan region in the United States, it includes six of the ten most affluent counties in the country. Florida claims that “its economy is not entirely or even predominantly parasitic,” but he does not enlarge on this point. I wonder. To the extent that it is parasitic, how vulnerable will it prove to be to federal cutbacks? The underlying question is simple: what stake do the people in and around Washington have in the nation’s health?

Considering this question, along with the obscene inequality in income-distribution, I worry that American élites believe that they’re protected from adversity by wealth and privilege. This is what the aristocrats (especially the recently-ennobled ones with money) thought before 1789. I worry that any serious attempt to fix what ails the United States will bring forth not so much a process of reform as a maelstrom that nobody can control.

What is to be done?

Here’s something interesting that I had never heard about: Distributism. Garry Wills mentions it in passing in a review of the work of J F Powers in the current issue of the NYRB.

In England, neo-medievalism took the form of Distributism—G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc opposing both socialism (abolishing private property) and capitalism (concentrating private property), to promote the widest distribution of private property. One way to distribute property more widely, and to withdraw from modern industrialism, was to cultivate one’s own small farm. Distributists called people back to the land not only in England but even more effectively in America, where it showed up in the Rural Life Movement, and even in the Southern Agrarians. The repudiation of the machine age made one British Distributist, the Dominican Vincent McNabb, refuse to use any machine, even a typewriter. It was a compromise with modernity for him to write with a fountain pen instead of a quill.

I quote the entire paragraph just to get it out of the way: Distributism, as envisioned by Chesterton and Belloc, was little more than a disguised antiquarianism. We might just as well try to go back to Sturbridge Village. (And restore the Vatican hegemony of Innocent III while we’re at it.) But! The idea of a coherent economic program between socialism and capitalism is an enticing prospect indeed. It would necessarily feature an economic arrangement that discouraged (excessive, capitalistic) concentrations of wealth. It would also impose limits on rentes — unearned incomes.

At the risk of annoying everyone, I’ll repeat two convictions that I reached long ago.

  • Corporations must be stripped of their “natural personhood,” and rendered incapable of owning intellectual property of any kind. To put it another way, intellectual property ought to be licenseable but inalienable.
  • Densely-settled real property ought to be owned and developed by not-for-profit corporations. Established utilities and other mature businesses (even commercial banking) ought to operate as not-for-profit organizations. Entrepreneurship, with its risks and rewards, ought to be reserved for industrial innovation, not financialization.

Neither of these things is going to happen tomorrow. But each of them could be introduced on a small-scale, local basis. Without the need for tax engineering, they would all conduce to distribute wealth more evenly. I also believe that they would nurture a growth in the number of jobs overall and of satisfying jobs in particular.

Pie in the sky? All my program needs is a supermax enhancement of the human capacity for taking the long view. Simple!