Distributism and Externalities

All economic activity is conducted in the presence of externalities. These externalities might be positive or negative; they might be avoidable or unavoidable. At root, though, they are all the same thing: they are effects of that economic activity on things which are not a part of that activity. In other words, it is the effects of a transaction on someone who did not agree to the costs or benefits of the transaction. The quintessential example of an externality is pollution. A coal plant produces electricity and sells it to people; the people involved are the coal plant, its employees and owners, and its customers. But everybody, whether those involved in the electricity sale and those not, is effected by the emissions of the coal plant, even those who aren’t buying the electricity or working at the plant. Those emissions are an externality.

Unavoidable externalities exist, of course; the emissions of carbon dioxide produced by breathing, working humans, for example. Others are avoidable, like the wood chips from a lumber mill, which can become an externality by being dumped into a nearby river, or which can be absorbed by the lumber mill by simply cleaning them up and using them in some other way. And some externalities are positive, as when a game-management company increases the population of deer on private hunting grounds and that spills over onto public ones. But some, of course, are negative, like our coal plant emissions or the overheating of river water by factories. All of these are externalities; some of them are desirable and some are not. But all of them are economic failures.

According to the principle of commutative justice, a transaction is supposed to ensure that both parties are enriched to the same objective degree. Clearly, externalities fly in the face of that, because it involves forcing some enrichment or (more likely) detriment on others who are not parties to the transaction. Capitalists, of course, deny the principle of commutative justice (in fact if not in principle), but they espouse a notion of pricing that is supposed to exclude externalities. The price in a transaction is supposed to describe the entire cost-benefit calculation of the parties. But the price does not describe externalities; indeed, capitalists often define externalities precisely as those costs or benefits not reflected in the price.[1] In both cases, though, the existence of externalities means that the system has failed in some way. For a distributist who believes in commutative justice, justice is being denied those who are forced to endure costs without any compensating enrichment; for a capitalist, the price is failing to reflect the true costs of the transaction, which leads to a market failure. Externalities are a problem for both systems.

This is where the government is supposed to step in. Government economic activity is designed to require the internalization of externalities; that is, to require parties to transactions with externalities to absorb the external costs of those transactions. (We’re concerned here primarily with negative externalities, but in principle positive externalities are also a problem.) Government agencies see an industry with some substantial externalities; say, the coal industry. They insist that the coal industry internalize its externalities; that is, pay to clean up or prevent its own pollution. The coal company will then reflect the costs of this cleanup in the price of its electricity, which means that the transaction, the sale of electricity, now truly contains the full costs, including the cost of ensuring that those not parties to the transaction will not be effected by it. So, at least, goes the theory.

There are two problems with this theory, however. The first is that government sometimes simply fails; but that is unavoidable not the subject of this essay. The second problem is industry capture, sometimes also called regulatory capture. Companies which produce externalities substantial enough to be noticed by the government are typically large and powerful; they are also typically the ones with the most knowledge of a given field. So the government recruits members of these companies to assist in the regulation of the industries. But these recruits are often still more loyal to their former companies than to the government, and ensure that the government doesn’t regulate the industry any more than necessary to conform to statute and placate public opinion, even when this regulation doesn’t fully compensate for negative externalities. Government regulators and industry executives also have a tendency to move back and forth between these fields; they work in the regulatory agency until they can obtain a better-paying job in the industry, and ensure that eventuality by using their regulatory positions to assist the industry where they can. The industries thus, in a real sense, control at least partly their own regulators. This phenomenon has gotten blatant enough that large corporations, far from internalizing their externalities, are openly externalizing their internalities, as well, an occurrence seen most spectacularly in the corporate bailouts. Profits are internalized, of course, but even normally internal costs are externalized by persuading the government, through capture of industry regulators and the more or less open purchase of votes via fundraising and lobbying, to absorb them and spread them across society.

Obviously, this is a problem, and a problem that we’ve seen extensively in numerous fields of endeavor, especially financial regulation and intellectual property. The government here is simply not doing its job; it’s allowing private interests to overcome its pursuit of the common good, the latter of which is, after all, the entire purpose of its existence.

Distributists often feel as though their opinions are never heard and that they have no chance for affecting positive change in society. However, this area is one in which the public is already very sympathetic to our cause. The depravities of Goldman Sachs and the revolving-door of regulatory agencies to high-paying industry jobs are still very much fresh on the public’s mind, and the scourge of government by lobbyists is already widely hated by everyone the lobbyists aren’t already paying. Here, therefore, is one area in which distributism must make its voice be heard, standing up for a right economic order in our times.

Distributists should push for legislation which will help prevent this sort of blatant abuse of regulatory power against its proper end. Laws prohibiting regulators from taking jobs within or payments from their regulated industries for a period of time after their employment, say five years or so, would be an excellent start. Insulating government regulators from industry vote-buying, perhaps by raising the standard by which elected officials can hire and fire them, might be another. The ingenuity of the distributist mind should not be limited here; we must pursue all just means of ending this pernicious practice.

The distributist platform includes, of course, a sensible conception of the state and its role in society, a topic too broad to embark upon here but which has been treated extensively in the Review before. But the internalization of externalities is the rhythm to which we all must beat our drums. Corporations must not be permitted to force the public to absorb their costs; they must not be permitted to own their own regulatory agencies; and they must not be permitted to purchase legislation favorable to their own interests at the cost of the common good.

1. This is an inadequate definition because transactions can still have an effect on others even when the price reflects the possibility of those effects and the necessity of dealing with them. Such pricing reflects external effects of the transaction, but it does not eliminate them and it does not necessarily accurately reflect the cost of dealing with them. In such cases, the nature of an externality still exists even when the price is supposed to cover it.

Signs of the Times

I’ve just become acquainted with the Beloit College Mindset List, which is apparently a yearly ritual going on since 1998. It simply details what the mindsets of incoming freshmen are in a few details; this year, of course, they are detailing the mindsets of the class of 2014 at this Wisconsin liberal arts college. I had a few thoughts when reading it.

First off, as the opening blurb notes, this generation of children were “[b]orn when Ross Perot was warning about a giant sucking sound and Bill Clinton was apologizing for pain in his marriage.” I read this with some degree of surprise and skepticism. Quick, I thought: subtract, carry the one…eighteen-year-olds were born in 1992? Really? Born after the Berlin wall came down, after the end of the entire Cold War, after the first war in Iraq was started, fought, and finished, and yet they’re old enough to vote and drive automobiles? Shocking, but true.

I’m sure older generations share the same thoughts about me, of course. “What?” they’d say. “You were born after the Vietnam war, and yet you can vote and drive cars?” And it’s a valid point; younger generations by nature remember different things than older. But this generation (as the subsequent parts of the report make clear) is both myopic and amnesiac, so its lack of memory of such minor world events as the forty-year nuclear standoff between America and Russia, as just one example, is particularly important.

Furthermore, these older generations and I were, mostly, born in the same era of history. My parents and I, for example, were both born during the Cold War. There were two Germanies and two Berlins, the latter of which were separated by a big wall, and people fairly regularly got shot trying to get across it. Having nuclear missiles pointed at us was a fact of life that we all took for granted. We were both aware of where the fallout shelters were located, though we rarely thought about it; we do, in fact, know what the fallout shelter sign looks like, and it was odd to neither of us. We both wrote papers for school in longhand (my first, anyway, though admittedly I was very young), we grew up familiar with the clack-clack-clack of typewriters, we didn’t get to use calculators in school (at least, not until pre-calculus), and we all knew how to draw graphs by hand. We’ve had to wait six to eight weeks for something we sent off for to arrive. We grew up listening to the radio (you know, radio that comes over the air, for free) and know what magnetic tape is. We both experienced the wonder that was cable television and the VCR when they became common (though again, I was young, I do clearly remember both). We both knew about film, both strips of film for playing movies and regular film for photographs. We’ve had to walk up to the television in order to change the channel, and we were both familiar with that giant metal mess on every roof in the neighborhood that picked up television signals. And so on.

Not so with this generation. They’ve never thought of Russia as an important world power; two Germanies is an alien thought to them, much less one Germany which is under an oppressive, dictatorial regime which shoots people for trying to get to the other one. If they know any physical recording medium, it’s CDs and CDs alone; most likely they’re more familiar with digital recording. They’ve never had to rewind magnetic tape onto reels; have never seen, much less used, film, either moving picture or regular picture; and have probably never seen a typewriter, certainly never actually used one. And so on.

This is a much more significant difference between my generation (I’m on the very tail end of mine, I think) and the next than there is between mine and my parents’. For this reason, I think it’s sometimes interesting and instructive to go through silly little surveys like this. I’ll go through it a piece at a time, skipping any bits I don’t think are interesting; hopefully I’ll get some comments.

Few in the class know how to write in cursive.

What a depressing characteristic. But it’s unquestionably true; indeed, only about half (at a guess) of my graduating class could write in cursive. I write in it exclusively; it’s just plain better than printing. Indeed, not long ago “writing” was cursive; printing was something different, something children did before they learned to write. But longhand is a vanishing art, it seems; a shame, since it’s an art that all can practice.

Email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail.

This is one of the many instances of the mindset survey that gives one the impression of a generation of hyperactive impatients, and in some ways that’s exactly what we’ve got. Mail is very quick; when I was a child, sending away for things always took “six to eight weeks” according to the catalogues, and it really did. Now it takes a couple of days at most. And email is too slow? Really? One wonders what this generation is willing to wait for, if they’re willing to dedicate so little time and energy to communication that even email takes too long for them.

“Caramel macchiato” and “venti half-caf vanilla latte” have always been street corner lingo.

Really? Among middle-upper class yuppies, maybe; the people I live with and work with couldn’t pronounce “macchiato,” much less know what it is. (I can pronounce it, but I’ve got neither an idea nor an inclination to acquire an idea of what it means.) Part of this is prejudice; my father taught me that coffee is coffee, and its purity should not be impugned by the additional of corruptive elements like cream, sugar, and other creative flavorings. (I’ve always, consequently, drunk it black.) But I question whether this is true. Our society (my generation and my parents’ not excepted) is becoming increasing coddled and corrupt, but I don’t think it’s so coddled and corrupt that we’re all willing to pay seven dollars for a hazelnut mocha latte, even if we do know what a “mocha” is.

Clint Eastwood is better known as a sensitive director than as Dirty Harry.

Gah! Sad, but true. “Do you feel lucky? Well, do you? Punk?” I’ve never been a big fan of his westerns, but occasionally he produces something really great, like Gran Turino. It’s funny that nobody remembers Dirty Harry anymore, but I’ll confess that I can’t remember the last time I thought of him, either.

Korean cars have always been a staple on American highways.

Yes, when did this happen? They just sort of snuck up on us, I suppose. These days, the superiority of foreign cars is sadly a given, rarely questioned, Korean cars not excepted. The fact that these foreign cars owe their market successes in large part of favorable trade policies in Japan and Korea that America kindly refuses to reciprocate is neither known nor cared about by most. That, of course, isn’t limited by generation, either.

They never twisted the coiled handset wire aimlessly around their wrists while chatting on the phone.

That’s right! And they don’t know what rotary phones are, either! It’s getting common not even to have a landline phone. Anyone else remember when the idea of a pocketbook phone was risible?

Unless they found one in their grandparents’ closet, they have never seen a carousel of Kodachrome slides.

More than that, they probably have never taken film in for development; instant gratification, all the way. But you used to not know what a picture would look like until days later, sometimes weeks. You’d take four or five pictures of everything to make sure at least one turned out right. And you only got thirty or so pictures on a roll; then you’d have to take that roll out and replace it. Don’t let the light shine on the film part, or you’ll lose it!

Not to mention stringing long strips of film into a film projector, so that you could watch a film with the sound obscured by the clattering of the motors as the film made its way from one reel to the other, and “rewinding” meant literally rewinding it back onto its original reel. Ah, those were the days!

Nirvana is on the classic oldies station.

Ha! Really? I was just a bit too young for the glam rock of the 80s (heard the older kids listening to it, of course), and in those heady days of my wasted youth I cut my teeth on Nirvana. I’m much too young for the popular music of my youth to be on an oldies station. Aren’t I?

Fortunately, I’ve found better music since.

Rock bands have always played at presidential inaugural parties.

What a miserable commentary on our society. We come from a great civilization, which has been producing great music for centuries; yet the repertoire of our people consists of the last fifty years of popular piffle produced by huge record companies solely in consideration of maximization of profit by taking advantage of a suddenly large and powerful youth demographic. And not only that, but even our highest political events are accompanied by this cacophonous wailing. Can’t we do better than this?

I must say that the generation following mine is actually better than mine in this matter; while their taste in music is little improved, if at all, they at least direct fashion in music rather than receiving it all passively, as my generation and my parents’ did. Nothing, after all, is all bad.

They have never worried about a Russian missile strike on the U.S.

This is the most earth-shattering of all the differences; Russia is really just another country to the next generation, like Poland or Japan. Nothing interesting. I remember when Russia invaded Georgia recently, some younger people urging an immediate American military response to that invasion, scoffing at the possibility of war with Russia as no big deal. I was thunderstruck.

What? War with Russia is no big deal? That’s the nightmare scenario that’s been giving people the sweating terrors for decades! That’s end-of-the-world quality scary! We’re talking about worldwide desert, Mad-Max destruction here! Of course, they don’t know who Mad Max is, either.

But they have no recollection of such fears; even my generation has only a slight one, though it’s enough in general to make as at least aware that Russia remains a powerful country. (Sadly, some people want us to fight her anyway, despite knowing better; but that’s another question.)

Anyway, just some interesting tidbits. I’m aware that I’m probably not entirely typical for my generation; I remember clearly things that most people my age don’t, for example. But these are my thoughts. And note that I’m not doing a “these young whippersnappers” curmudgeonry here; I’m young enough that I can’t credibly do an imitation of a crotchety old man. I like computers and email; digital photography has many advantages over old-school film; I’m not a fan of rotary phones (remember how you used to hate calling people with lots of nines and zeroes in their numbers?); and so on. The next generation isn’t all bad, and overall isn’t any worse than my own or my parents’ (both of which are pretty bad, in a lot of ways). These are just off-the-cuff thoughts on a few issues raised by this little survey. Anyone else have any?

Praise be to Christ the King!

The Primacy of Agriculture

Of course, distributists pride themselves on being opposed to the consumptive economy and focusing on production. Indeed, the distributive state is defined, by Belloc, as that state in which productive property (not property simply) is so well distributed throughout society that the society as a whole takes on the character of one of owners, rather than of one of proletarian workers. Everybody, rich and poor, needs to consume, and consumption will therefore always be an important part of an economy. But we cannot consume what has not first been made; and as such, the producers, and those who control production, are the most important part of an economy.

But why, the capitalist will object. Why would anyone produce if no one can consume? Why would I, a maker of widgets, go through all the trouble of producing those widgets if no one wants to buy them? But a still better question is, what is the man who needs widgets to do if I haven’t gone through all the trouble of producing them? The consumer is dependent upon the producer. If the producer cannot sell to this consumer, he can sell to another, or he can produce something else; the non-producer, however, simply has to wait until somebody else makes what he needs. That is why production is prior to consumption in an economy.

This primacy of production is even more pronounced in necessaries, particularly the most basic, like food and clothing. The producer of food will always need food; he is motivated to produce enough at least to ensure that he may eat. The consumer of food, on the other hand, is entirely dependent upon the producers of it. If the producers do not produce enough, or produce in too low a quality, the consumer dies. The same is true for a society as a whole: if that society fails to produce sufficient food, it must either import that food, compensating for that importation by some other valuable production, or simply go without, which clearly is not a viable option. Either way, it must produce rather than merely consume, and production is again seen to be primary; for without production, no consumption can occur.

Which brings me to my present topic: the primacy of agriculture. By “agriculture” here I mean, very loosely, the production of food; it includes farming, gardening, animal husbandry, hunting, fishing, and anything else that results in some food product at the end. It’s clear from the foregoing that agriculture is the most necessary of all productive industries. Agriculture is the oldest and the greatest profession. Without a healthy agricultural base, all economies are doomed, for workers cannot work if they cannot eat. Before we worry about whether we’ve got enough motor vehicles, good enough highways, fast enough computers, and big enough office parks, we need to worry about whether we’ve got enough food. We take it entirely for granted these days, but we shouldn’t. It’s the bedrock of all human endeavor, the root of all human production. Without it, we can do nothing.

Yet despite this, the farm and the farmer are treated with scorn. Farmers are stupid, uneducated yokels. They speak strangely and do weird things; frequently, even their relations with their livestock are called into question. Their children are either drunken jocks resigned to the inevitably of their descent into agricultural drudgery, or motivated geniuses studying their hardest so as not to have to endure a life of working in the fields. One thing is certain: nobody wants to be a farmer. Farmers are the ones who are stuck with it, especially illegal aliens, who do the work that Americans—you know, people who have gone to school and know better—don’t want to do.

This attitude comes with our increasing distance from production, our transformation into consumptive sheep incapable of producing anything on our own. Think long and hard; how many people do you know who are engaged in a productive endeavor for a living? How many people do you know who actually make things, instead of being one of the many links in the long chain passing them along the line? Even when most people think about starting a business, it’s rarely about starting a productive business; rather, it’s about starting a real estate firm, a law firm, a restaurant. It’s usually about providing services which utilize the valuable goods produced by others, rarely about producing valuable goods themselves.

Even our legislation tends to reflect this bias against agricultural production. When was the last time we in America had a real, popular debate about farming legislation? The Great Depression. The plutocrats so thoroughly control the Department of Agriculture and other farming-related wings of our government that such issues rarely see the light of day. Yet we live in a vast country, with some of the most fertile land on the planet. We unquestionably have far more land than we need to feed ourselves; even most of our individual states could easily themselves without importing much food from other areas. But are we importing only luxury foods, like pineapples and chocolate and other things that are not necessary and simply cannot grow in our own climate? No; we’re importing far more of our food than we need to import, and it’s exposing us to food insecurity and public health risks.

The USDA estimates that America imported $71.9 billion worth of food in 2009. Our farms and herds only produced about $282.1 billion of food. About a fifth of the food that we produce is, therefore, imported. A nation with nearly a billion acres of farmland imports a fifth of its food supply. Both our plutocratic parties claim to be concerned about our dependence on foreign oil (though in typically plutocratic fashion they never do anything about it); why do they never express concern about our growing dependence on foreign food, a much more fundamental and necessary good?

The state which cannot produce its own food is the state which is forever dependent upon others. It is time that our society restored agriculture to its proper primacy, and its practitioners to their honored place in our states.

Praise be to Christ the King!

Treason and our Recent Russian Spies

Ah, Russian spies; talk about a blast from the past. It’s just like an 80s party, but for the Cold War. Next we should have Vladimir Putin go to the UN and bang his shoe on the table, and then start a proxy war in a Third World country, and it’ll be just like old times. It’s like waking up in 1982; or 1952, as the case may be, though no matter how successful and deep this spy ring was, the Rosenbergs they were not.

The flashback quality of breaking this Russian spy ring has been noticed by many others besides me, who was only a child when the Soviet Union collapsed, though I was old enough to clearly remember the trouble and fear associated with it. (Not Khrushchev banging his shoe, though; I only know that through history.) But it made me reflect on patriotism—loyalty to country, a species of piety—and treason, the betrayal of that country. And treason made me angry.

I’m an American, born and bred; my people have been in this country for well over three hundred years, and I’m proud of what I am and of what we have been. That said, there are many things about my country now and in the past that I’m not proud of. I don’t like some of our founding principles, for example, and I don’t like either of our current wars, which I think clearly fail the requirements of just war theory.

But I am not a traitor. The Constitution of 1787 gives what I think is a pretty fair definition of treason:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.

In other words, treason isn’t just refusing to support your country’s unjust acts; it’s actively assisting your country’s enemies. That is absolutely despicable.

For example, I opposed our invasion of Iraq. But I did not inform the Iraqi army of our troop movements. The former is simply rational thinking, a perfectly legitimate disagreement with my government; the latter is treason. As another example, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were communists. This in itself is not treason. But they also conspired to, and did in fact, transfer to the Soviets secret information concerning the atomic bomb, which was instrumental in the Soviets producing their own bomb, with which they began to threaten the United States. The former is simply disagreement with the current regime; the latter is treason. And the Rosenbergs, at least, got the just penalty for treason in the end.

Treason is to the nation what attempted patricide is to the family; the guilty party simply cannot remain a member of the society any longer. The betrayal that has been done is too great and too violent to permit any form of reconciliation. The traitor may be reconciled with God; he cannot be reconciled with his country. How can his people ever trust him again? How can they ever again acknowledge him as a member of the same national body? There are only two possible just penalties for treason: denationalization, the stripping of citizenship and all the benefits thereof, or death. Death is the more merciful sentence of the two.

I’m not saying that the Russian spies we’ve caught here are traitors, or even that they’re necessarily spies; they haven’t been tried yet, and I know little of the circumstances. But the incident did inspire some reflections on patriotism and treason, which I found interesting if nothing else.

Praise be to Christ the King!

Immigration: What Should Be Done

I spent some time recently analyzing what has been done about immigration in Arizona; now I’ll spend a little time spitballing about what should be done about immigration everywhere. Everywhere in the United States, that is.

There are twelve million illegal aliens currently living in the United States, including about one in every twenty employed workers. All told, out of our current estimated population of 307,006,550, that means that nearly four percent of our population is illegal. (If that population number includes the illegals; if it doesn’t, the percentage is somewhat lower, but still approaching four percent.) In other words, one out of every twenty-five people you run across in America is an illegal alien, with no legal right to be here whatsoever. The majority of these, of course, are Hispanic, though not all.

This is too many to deport. Sorry; I know this makes me an amnesty-supporter, but we have to face the reality of the situation. Twelve million people simply can’t all be rounded up and sent back to wherever they came from, if we can even determine where they came from in the first place. That’s assuming that their host countries would take them back; I expect that any attempt to deport twelve million people would result pretty quickly in lots of military trucks with machine guns on them meeting our ICE agents at the border. But let’s assume that Mexico wants all of its illegal expatriates back; asks us for them, even. How could we possibly round up all these people and send them back? It would be an undertaking like no other ever embarked upon by our government.

For comparison purposes, the Indian population of the United States prior to the arrival of the Europeans was somewhere between one and eighteen million souls. Twelve million or so is a perfectly reasonable estimate. It took Europeans no less than two and a half centuries to remove these Indians, and they had to commit what can only be described as genocide in order to do it. Deportation of all these people would be similarly ugly. Do we really want to walk down that road again?

No, some form of amnesty would be necessary. But that amnesty must be properly formulated and properly executed. Some necessary terms would be as follows:

• Amnesty should be available only to law-abiding illegal aliens. Any illegal alien found to have been convicted of any felony or any violent misdemeanor should not be eligible for amnesty and should therefore be deported.
• Amnesty should be time-sensitive. The government needs to set a date certain; amnesty will only be available to those in this country prior to that date and not otherwise ineligible.
• The borders must be closed. The above point only works if, at that date certain, the borders will be sealed shut and crossing it tightly controlled. Enforcement of immigration laws would have to begin, in earnest, on that date. Those who remain in the country despite being ineligible for amnesty would need to be rounded up and deported. Otherwise, amnesty will be a sham; we’ll have legalized twelve million illegal aliens only to create another huge body of illegal aliens. Closing the borders is a necessary step.
• Between the passage of amnesty and the closing of the borders, the borders must still be tightly controlled. Only immediate family—those within the nuclear unit—of those already in this country should be permitted to enter. We don’t want to split apart nuclear families. On the other hand, we don’t want people bringing in everybody related to them to the sixth degree of kinship. This seems the most reasonable medium.
• Amnesty must only be available to those who, within a reasonably short period of time after the date certain, complete their citizenship courses and actually become citizens. If illegal aliens are to be legalized, they must also be naturalized and made citizens, subject to all the rights and duties attendant therewith. The right to vote; the right to speak; the duty to serve in the military in time of war; the duty to serve on juries when called; and so on. Those who fail to do so should be deported.

This seems perfectly reasonable to me. Those who are illegally in this country but are otherwise law-abiding on a given date can, if within a reasonable time they complete citizenship work, gain citizenship and remain here with their families. If they don’t do this, they’ll be deported.

What about forcing them all to speak English? This is a ridiculous concept. The United States has no official language. If we want one, we should go to Congress and pass a bill to that effect (though it seems clearly unconstitutional to me, since it matches none of the enumerated powers in any way). Individual states may choose to do so. But as long as neither the federal government nor individual states have an official language, forcing people to speak one language rather than another is foolish.

“But what about their culture?” scream the nativists. What about it? Let’s review. The United States is a large country. It was stolen, in its entirety, from its original inhabitants. Over most of this country the original inhabitants were mostly Indians. Over some of it, there were also French (the Old Northwest and parts of the Louisiana territory were French, and sometimes those French had intermarried pretty thoroughly with the Indians of the same areas). Over an enormous swath of it, however, there were Mexicans. These Mexicans were (are) largely of mixed Indian and Spanish blood, and thus have as much title to being the original inhabitants as the Indians themselves do (given that they are part Indian). Our actions against these Mexicans were particularly ruthless.

Americans were permitted to settle in Texas under two main conditions: that they learn and speak Spanish, and that they convert to and practice Catholicism. In 1829, slavery was abolished in Mexico, as well (of which Texas was still a part). This abolition was widely ignored by American settlers, as were the two other conditions. These American Texans (called “Texicans” at the time) later rebelled against Mexico and stole the state from Mexico, after refusing to obey the laws of their host country. This hardly amounts to fair dealing.

The border of Texas was at the Nueces river traditionally, but the Republic of Texas claimed it much farther south, at the Rio Grande (called by the Mexicans Rio Bravo). Despite the fact that Texas had always ended at the Nueces, Texas required at the treaty ending the rebellion that the Rio Grande be so recognized. This treaty was signed by an imprisoned Santa Anna and was never ratified by the Mexican Congress; Mexico, then, quite reasonably held that Texas still belonged to it, and that even if it didn’t, the border was at the Nueces where it had always been. Texas, of course, held otherwise.

After the United States annexed Texas, the Mexican army was patrolling, as it really had every right to do, the area between the Rio Grande and the Nueces, when it met a patrol of the American army and routed it, an engagement known as the Thornton affair. Happy to accept this excuse to go ahead and steal California, which he already wanted to do, President James Polk mounted a full-scale invasion, crushing America’s smaller neighbor in a two-year war which went well beyond its stated justification (enforcing the Rio Grande as the border between Texas and Mexico). Despite claiming as justification the violation of American territory (specifically, that land between the Nueces and the Rio Grande), the United States extorted from a crippled Mexico the entirety of its claims not only to Texas (which still had, even then, some justice), but also to what is now Arizona, New Mexico, California, and parts of Nevada and Colorado. In other words, about half of the territory of Mexico. This theft is known euphemistically as the “Treaty” of Guadalupe-Hidalgo.

And this doesn’t even count the fact that the English stole from the Spanish a huge swath of what is now the American southeast, going from the northern border of Florida all the way into Virginia (which the Spanish called by its Indian name, Ajacan) and the Chesapeake Bay (which the Spanish called “la Bahía de la Madre de Dios,” the Bay of the Mother of God). Jamestown was not far from a Spanish Jesuit mission in Ajacan, founded some thirty years previously (and slaughtered by the Indians after about a year); Parris Island in South Carolina held a colony called by the Spanish Santa Elena.

Yet, despite all this; despite the fact that a huge swath of our country was simply stolen from Mexico; despite the fact that the greatest number of Hispanics in this country live in those parts of it which were stolen from Mexico; people still grumble about Mexican immigrants not sharing our culture. Why should they? Their culture is perfectly honorable and dignified, and it’s already been substantially wronged by ours as it is. Why should they surrender it still further simply because they are moving in large numbers back into lands which are really rightfully theirs anyway?

Now, as unjust as the Mexican war was, it happened and this territory belongs to the United States now. Nobody says it should be ceded back to Mexico. But to attempt to reject these people because their language and culture don’t match our own is ridiculous. There are many very good reasons to limit immigration; let’s not make them look bad by including these terrible reasons among them.

Obviously, the issue is complex. But this is a basic outline of a solution that would, I think, work. Does anyone have any further suggestions or comments relative to this?

Praise be to Christ the King!

Immigration and Arizona

Let’s be clear at the outset: I think, over all, Latin American immigration is good for the country in a number of ways. But let’s also be clear: the hullabaloo over Arizona’s new immigration law is nothing short of idiotic. It can only be due to people simply not reading the text of the law. So what’s the problem?

It’s always helpful, in cases like this, to go ahead and actually read the law. Like the case of the partial-birth abortion non-ban, it tends to elucidate what the law really says and what it doesn’t. So let’s begin. The Arizona immigration law begins with the following statement:

No official or agency of this state or a county, city, town or other political subdivision of this state may limit or restrict the enforcement of federal immigration laws to less than the full extent permitted by federal law.

In other words, those federal laws which are already in place regarding illegal aliens and their presence within the United States cannot be ignored by state or local officials in Arizona. Local officials can’t ignore federal laws? Shocking! Do people really think that this is racist, or are they just repeating things they’ve heard others say?

The bill continues with the language that seems to have everyone so unreasonably upset:

For any lawful stop, detention or arrest made by a law enforcement official or a law enforcement agency of this state or a law enforcement official or a law enforcement agency of a county, city, town or other political subdivision of this state in the enforcement of any other law or ordinance of a county, city or town or this state where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien and is unlawfully present in the United States, a reasonable attempt shall be made, when practicable, to determine the immigration status of the person, except if the determination may hinder or obstruct an investigation.

So for non-lawyers, what does this mean? Well, it means exactly what it says. It means that, if a police officer has already made a lawful stop, detention, or arrest of any person, and there’s reasonable ground to believe that that person is in Arizona illegally, he has to exert some reasonable effort to find out if the person is illegal or not. More importantly for our purposes, though, here’s what it doesn’t mean:

• It doesn’t mean that police can stop people they think are illegal. The police must have already stopped the person “in the enforcement of any other law or ordinance” (emphasis added). The visions of police roaming the streets stopping Mexicans and demanding their papers is made-up, a complete and wholesale fabrication with no basis in reality.
• It doesn’t mean that police can simply demand papers from any Hispanic they pull over, other than papers they’d demand from anybody else (like a driver’s license, for example). They can only do this where “reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who and is unlawfully present in the United States.”
• It doesn’t mean that police must do this every time they pull somebody over and they reasonably believe that person is an illegal alien. They only must do it “when practicable.” Even then, they must only make a “reasonable attempt”; if it’s too hard, or the suspect is clever about concealing his status, or ICE takes too long to get back to them, they can just get back to work and let the suspect go.

But really, what’s to stop a police officer in Arizona from just questioning every Mexican about his citizenship status, regardless of “reasonable suspicion”? The question is best answered by another question: what’s to stop a police officer from doing that anywhere else? The law and the policy of his department. If he does that sort of thing, he gets in trouble. That’s what stops him. Unquestionably there will be the occasional bad cop who does bad things, but that’s the case right now, and it’s an unavoidable circumstance of the human condition. All we can do is limit it the best we can by means of law and policy.

And the law does an excellent job of so limiting the police officer’s discretion. It’s very specific, in fact:

A law enforcement official . . . may not consider race, color or national origin in implementing the requirements of this subsection.

Originally, the law included “solely” in front of “race,” but that’s since been removed. In other words, race can form no part of the officer’s determination of reasonable suspicion whatsoever, not even as one factor among many. When he’s explaining his reason for the investigation to ICE and to his superiors, he has to come up with objective criteria that have nothing to do with race, color, or national origin. Indeed, when the officer is shown to have acted in bad faith, he is subject to a civil suit (as section K makes clear). How much more limitation of alleged police racism could one possibly expect?

The law has a few other provisions; they’re all eminently reasonable and really serve only to enforce immigration laws that have been ignored for decades. Take, for example, the conviction provision:

If an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States is convicted of a violation of state or local law, on discharge from imprisonment or on the assessment of any monetary obligation that is imposed, the United States immigration and customs enforcement or the United States customs and border protection shall be immediately notified.

What’s objectionable about this? If somebody has already flouted our laws by living here illegally, and then further flouts our laws by actively breaking them while living here illegally, shouldn’t we inform our immigration authorities about it? Note that that’s all the law requires: inform immigration authorities. What those authorities do about it is entirely up to them.

One very interesting provision is the lawsuit provision, which actually provides a way for citizens to require their government to actively enforce the laws that the government has passed:

A person who is a legal resident of this state may bring an action in superior court to challenge any official or agency of this state or a county, city, town or other political subdivision of this state that adopts or implements a policy or practice that limits or restricts the enforcement of federal immigration laws including 8 United States Code sections 1373 and 1644, to less than the full extent permitted by federal law.

What this means is that any legal resident of Arizona who objects to local government or government agency policy that refuses to enforce immigration laws can sue them, and the judge can then order that local government or agency to do its duty. We need this type of provision in more of our laws; it puts requiring the enforcement of the laws into the hands of the people, who are ostensibly the people who passed the laws in the first place, instead of in the hands of largely unelected government careerists. Why would anyone object to this?

The law does establish some new crimes, crimes which are designed to enforce our immigration laws and lead them to their logical conclusions. For example, it establishes a crime of trespassing when an illegal alien is present on Arizona soil. This is perfectly reasonable. Trespassing is the going on of somebody else’s property without permission, or against their explicit wishes. That’s exactly what illegal aliens are doing; that’s why they’re called “illegal.” This law merely formalizes what’s already true. It’s certainly not racist or discriminatory by any stretch of the imagination.

Also, just in case we were wondering, the trespassing code again reiterates what is said earlier: that police cannot consider race, color, or national origin when enforcing the law.

The law makes it illegal for illegal aliens to solicit work, as well as to drive them around in the state (presumably to get them to work, though driving them around for any other purpose is also prohibited). It also makes it illegal to knowingly employ illegal aliens. This all makes sense, too. Why should we allow those in the country illegally to work when so many of those who are rightfully here can’t find gainful employment? And, of course, the law here again reiterates that race, color, and national origin are impermissible considerations when enforcing this law.

Finally, the law requires those applying for state or local public benefits to prove that they’re in this country legally. This proof is not onerous; simply submitting some normal form of identification will suffice. This is required for all applicants, without regard to race, color, or national origin. Those wrongfully denied benefits under this section have the right to sue, and can receive costs and attorney’s fees in the settlement. What’s the problem here? Those who are not here legally are not paying taxes like everyone else and are therefore not eligible for the benefits that those taxes support. Is this racist?

The bottom line is that this law is completely innocuous; all it does is insist on the enforcement of immigration provisions that already exist, as well as make some obvious legislation comporting with those provisions. It is most certainly not racist or discriminatory.

Yet Felipe Calderon, president of Mexico, insists that this law is discriminatory against “migrant workers.” First of all, of course, the law has nothing to do with migrant workers, only workers who are illegally in the United States. The fact is, though, that Mexico actually deports more illegal immigrants annually than we do, and illegal immigration is a felony that can carry prison time.

All countries have a right to enforce their borders and govern who lives within them. Why is it totally unremarkable when Mexico does it, but racist when the United States does it?

It’s not; those who call this law racist are either simply pro-immigrant or ignorant. If the former, then they’re welcome to their opinions, but they should criticize the Arizona law on the grounds that restricting immigration is bad for Arizona, not on the grounds that it’s racist. If the latter, then they should educate themselves or stop talking. It’s that simple.

Praise be to Christ the King!

More State Capitalist Duplicity

So how are those bailouts going?

Swimmingly, we’re told. Indeed, Ed Whitacre, CEO of what is still euphemistically called the private corporation of General Motors, has been bragging about GM’s many accomplishments this past year or two. He notes that many people didn’t want to give “GM a second chance,” which seems an odd way of referring to bulldozing boatloads of public funds into a corporation dedicated to private profit. But Mr. Whitacre proceeds further, justifying this public largess by arguing that GM has paid back its full loan, with interest, five years early. (This bold claim occurs at 0:15.) Mr. Whitacre then states, “But there is still more to do.”

He’s absolutely right, of course. Not about the paying the government loan back; that’s a deliberate deception, though the shenanigans GM played with public dollars do make it fall short (just short) of a bald-faced lie. He’s right about there being still more to do. Specifically, paying back most of the fifty billion dollars poured into GM’s trough in 2008. Not to mention, of course, the more than eight billion dollars generously donated by the Canadian government.

GM, see, received nearly fifty billion dollars ($49.5 billion, more precisely) from the American government in 2008. Of that, precisely $6.7 billion was an actual loan, which required paying back with interest. (7%, which is apparently an extremely generous, to GM, interest rate given the enormous risk of investing in GM at the time.) The rest was a purchase of stock, stock which was worth practically nothing at the time; in other words, the rest was a gift. GM has paid back the $6.7 billion loan; the rest of the $49.5 billion remains in its coffers, still a gift from the public to the already rich.

That alone makes Mr. Whitacre’s claim a bit deceptive; he makes it sound as though the taxpayer’s been made whole, which he clearly hasn’t. But it gets even better. GM didn’t pay this $6.7 billion dollars back from its own earnings; indeed, GM hasn’t posted a profit since 2004, even with all the bailout money we’ve given it. No, GM paid back its government loan with—wait for it—its government gift!

Let me explain. $13.4 billion of the bailout money was put into an escrow account for GM. GM paid back the loan from this money. In other words, GM paid the public back part of its bailout by using another part of its bailout. Brilliant; only twenty-first century capitalism could possibly analyze this and call it a free and fair loan repayment.

But, just when we all thought it couldn’t, it gets even better. GM has recently applied for another government loan, this time from the Department of Energy. This loan will have only a 5% interest rate, much lower than that of the TARP loan. So GM paid back the government with government funds in order to get more government money at a lower interest rate. Score: GM 50 billion, public -50 billion. Not counting, of course, the new loan from the Department of Energy.

The whole sordid scheme is well-known and well-demonstrated, despite the media’s persistent parroting of Mr. Whitacre’s line.

So what can a distributist draw from this comedy of errors? Quite simply, we can note that this proves us right.

Belloc noted nearly a century ago in The Servile State that capitalism inevitably either devolves into socialism or collapses under its own weight. It took longer than he expected, but we’re on the cusp of one or the other right now. When productive property is concentrated entirely or almost entirely in the hands of the few, and the many are simply laborers on that productive property (in other words, a proletariat, whether white- or blue-collar), those owners of productive property become extremely powerful. They become so powerful, in fact, that the government comes to serve them, rather than the public. That’s exactly what happened with our bailout, and what happens daily with our regulations and even our culture. The extent of this ownership of our government by wealthy, private interests has been more extensively explored elsewhere, and in the end it’s undeniable. How long until, as John Médaille facetiously but possibly presciently quipped, “politician[s] [are] required to begin and end each speech with the statement ‘This message brought to you by …’ and list the names of his three top contributors?”

The capitalists, those few owners of productive property, own our society, and they will not give that up just because one of their own was caught in a clear deception on national television. Indeed, that deception is still being aired on the networks on a nightly basis, despite its being thoroughly and publicly revealed as such. No, they will continue as they are, secure in their knowledge of their ownership of America.

So insurance companies will rejoice in legislation that requires everyone to buy their plans while offering no real competition to them. Goldman Sachs will support Wall Street reform, because they know that in the end it will only benefit them. Goldman Sachs is the government; so are the insurance companies. The government is bought and paid for; we live in a plutocracy.

As distributists, we cannot let this continue unabated; we must oppose it from start to finish. But let’s not just continue to address the symptoms; we must address the disease. The disease is the concentration of productive property in the hands of the few, while the many are consigned to remain proletarians; that is, the disease is capitalism itself. Only when property is so widely distributed that society as a whole takes on the character of owners rather than of nonowning workers will the plutocracy end.

Praise be to Christ the King!

Sex Abuse Scandal or Media Attack?

I’ve already written On Clerical Sex Abuse, and frankly I think it’s clear that the timing and selectiveness of the media outrage on this topic, here and in Europe, makes it plain that this is nothing more than an attack on the Church, rather than attack on sex abuse. I presented some considerable evidence to that effect in the aforementioned article.

However, a new article, Moral panic flares again by Massimo Introvigne, has made me want to revisit the issue. I’d encourage everyone to read the article in full; it’s well worth the trouble. I’ll present some excerpts here. Mr. Introvigne notes:

According to studies by Jenkins, if one compares the Catholic Church in the United States to the major Protestant denominations, one discovers that the presence of paedophiles – depending on the denominations – is from two to ten times higher for the major Protestant denominations compared to Catholic priests. The question is important because it demonstrates that the problem is not celibacy. Most of the Protestant pastors are married.

In the same period in which about 100 American priests were convicted for sexually abusing minors, the number of gym teachers and coaches of junior sporting teams – also mainly married – who were convicted of the same crimes in the US reached about 6,000. The examples could continue, not only in the US. And above all, according to regular US government reports, two-thirds of sexual abuse against minors does not come from strangers or educators – including priests and Protestant pastors – but from family members: stepfathers, uncles, cousins, brothers and, unfortunately, even parents. Similar facts exist for numerous other countries.

Mr. Introvigne is also willing to go where few people are willing to go; namely, he looks the problem in its face and calls it by its name:

While it may hardly be politically correct to say so, there is a fact that is much more important: over 80 percent of paedophiles are homosexuals, that is, males who abuse other males. And – again citing Jenkins – over 90 percent of Catholic priests convicted for sexually abusing minors have been homosexual. If a problem has sprung up in the Catholic Church, it is not due to celibacy but to a certain tolerance of homosexuality in seminaries, particularly in the 1970s, when most of the priests later convicted for the abuses were ordained. This is a problem that Benedict XVI is rigorously correcting. More generally, a return to moral principles, to ascetical discipline, to meditating on the true greatness of the priesthood are the antidotes to the real tragedy of paedophilia. The Year of the Priest must also help.

It is, in short, as I argued before, the abandonment of traditional Catholic discipline and doctrine that has caused this problem, and it’s the adoption of that traditional discipline and doctrine which will cure it.

So why is the media beating this drum so loudly, particularly when there are so many more deserving targets all around? Once again, I’ll let Mr. Introvigne answer:

This is a time when political, juridical and even electoral decisions in Europe and elsewhere are being made about the abortion pill RU-486, euthanasia, the recognition of same sex unions. Only the voice of the Pope and the Church is being raised to defend life and the family.

They are trying to neutralize the voice of the Church. There is only one credible opponent to the agenda of modernity, the agenda of promiscuity and death: the Catholic Church. And so the media is on a neverending witch-hunt to discredit the Church, to ensure that protest as she might, no one will listen.

Let us defend the Pope and the Church whenever we hear her attacked. And most importantly, let us pray for the Pope, every day. I’ve begun the custom of adding to my family’s daily prayers an Our Father, Hail Mary, and Glory Be for the Pope, that he might be strengthened in his efforts to bring the Church back to sanity, a task well requiring all the strength that the Holy Spirit can give him. Let us all pray for the Pope and for the Church, that she might return and forever remain on the right path.

Praise be to Christ the King!

Down with the Plutocracy!

It’s ever-increasingly clear that the Republicans and the Democrats are really just two opposing factions within a single plutocratic party. Their official platforms vary considerably, of course, and their favorite dead horses to beat are different dead horses. But in the long run, they both hold the same basic principles.

Both parties hold that American spending on the military is appropriate, and attempts to cut that spending in any significant degree are met with extreme opposition.

Both parties agree that unqualified support for the Israeli state is a vital part of American foreign policy.

Both parties agree that the “Global War on Terror” is an essential piece of American foreign policy, and that the American military should not be withdrawn from either of our current wars or from any significant number of our countless foreign bases.

Both parties agree that the president, without a declaration of war from Congress, is free to send the American military on adventures that he sees fit, and that defunding such adventures when, very belatedly, they meet with one or the other faction’s disapproval is not an appropriate remedy.

Both parties support the decriminalization of sodomy and other perversions.

Both parties believe that abortion should not be criminalized. I’m aware that this assertion is controversial, but look at the facts. Look at the major candidates presented by the Republican party, for example, in the last presidential election: John McCain; Mitt Romney; Rudy Giuliani. Look at the ostracism that was displayed for the pro-life candidates, who despite temporary success made no headway: Mike Huckabee; Ron Paul. Is there any meaningful difference in the opinions of these major candidates from those of the opposing faction? Yes, Sarah Palin is pro-life (though ludicrously bizarre in many of her other views), but that doesn’t count, because as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first vice president, John Nance Garner, correctly observed, the vice-presidency is “not worth a warm bucket of piss.” A lower half of a ticket thrown as a sop to pro-life constituencies does not a significant difference make.

Most significantly, both parties depend upon large quantities of money to gain and maintain office, and both derive the vast bulk of that money from the same corporate sponsors.

It’s the last bit that I’m concerned with. Plutocracy is rule by the wealthy; it is often used interchangeably with plutarchy, a combination of plutocracy and oligarchy, which is the rule of the few. What we have in America today is not a democracy; it is not a republic, though it has some of the remnants of the old Republic; it’s a plutarchy. But for convenience’s sake, and also because “plutocrat” sounds better than “plutarch,” I’ll be referring to it as a plutocracy.

As the aforelinked Wikipedia article correctly notes,

In a plutocracy, the degree of economic inequality is high while the level of social mobility is low. This can apply to a multitude of government systems, as the key elements of plutocracy transcend and often occur concurrently with the features of those systems.

That fits modern American society exactly. The degree of economic inequality in America is high. It’s middling-high according to the commonly used metric, the Gini coefficient (though even then it’s higher than Canada and Europe, particularly Scandinavia, as well as India and Indonesia, and it’s in the same category as such political and economic utopias as China and Malaysia), but to illustrate the enormous factual inequality only a few numbers will suffice.

The average CEO in America in 2007 made 364 times the salary of the average worker, and the average hedge fund manager makes 16,000 times that average worker’s salary. This is truly enormous, even compared to the recent past; only twenty years ago, the average CEO made only 71 times that of the average worker. This indicates that the income gap has been expanding extremely rapidly; and that is, in fact, the case.

Some very disturbing numbers from the University of California at Santa Cruz indicate an alarmingly widening wealth gap in America. From 1983 until 2007, the total net worth of the bottom 80% of the population went from 18.7% of the nation’s wealth to 15%; in the same period, the total net worth of the top 20%, minus the top 1%, went from 47.5% to 50.5%. The astute reader will notice that that’s an increase of only 3% to balance a decrease of 3.7%; that’s because a full 0.7% of that increase accrued only to the top 1% of the population. And this over less than a quarter century.

The bottom line is that the top 1% of the population controls a full 34.7% of the wealth in this country, and the top 20% controls a full 85.1% of that wealth, leaving only 14.9% of the wealth for 80% of the population. That’s less than one sixth of the wealth being owned by a full four-fifths of our population. Surely this is an enormous inequality of wealth by any reckoning.

The other characteristic of plutocracy is low social mobility. Arguably, we don’t have that in America. Anybody can become fantastically rich without starting that way, the tale goes, and that’s at least facially true. There are no institutional barriers to the child of a homeless migrant laborer becoming president of the United States, or CEO of the country’s largest corporation. We don’t have a caste system, in other words, in which citizens are formally prohibited from being mobile outside of their particular classes. However, the story really isn’t that simple.

The absence of formal, institutions prohibitions on social mobility does not make a society highly mobile; it merely indicates the absence of one means of preventing that social mobility. There are others, of course, some of which are mostly invisible. Tom Hertz of American University has published a lengthy report detailing the state of social mobility in America, and his results may be surprising to those wedded to the standard story we’ve heard so long that in America, all you need to succeed is hard work. You need, as it turns out, a bit more than that.

• Low-income children have only a 1% chance of becoming one of the wealthiest 5% of society.
• Middle-class children (by which I mean here “children born in the middle quintile of parental family income”) have only 1.8% chance of becoming one of the wealthiest 5% of society.
• “By international standards, the United States has an unusually low level of intergenerational mobility: our parents’ income is highly predictive of our incomes as adults. Intergenerational mobility in the United States is lower than in France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark. Among high-income countries for which comparable estimates are available, only the United Kingdom had a lower rate of mobility than the United States.”
• The middle classes are less secure in their income, and getting less secure in it over time, as opposed to the upper classes, who are more secure in their incomes, and are getting more secure in it over time.

In other words, the United States is not particularly socially mobile, at least not as much as we think we are.

Is high social mobility even a good thing? Arguably not; however, its presence in a society in conjunction with a high inequality of wealth is a strong indicator that we’re living in a plutocracy.

So we live in a plutocracy; what does this mean? It means that the people who make the decisions are, to an overwhelming extent, the people who have money. Lots of money. We can see clear evidence of this in the sorts of laws that they end of passing. The financial bailouts are the most obvious example; twenty-three trillion dollars to ensure that the wealthy bankers and speculators are kept safe, because they’re “too big to fail,” a cost which must be born by the public even while their own private interests get the benefit. If there were any doubt that the bailouts were largely motivated by the private interests of the plutocrats, all such doubt should be gone by now.

These, of course, are merely legislators; what about the so-called regulators, who hold much of the real power in the nation? The situation there is, if possible, even more dire. The regulators of our industries are literally in the pockets of those industries, a phenomenon that is well-known in political circles and called “industry capture.” Of course, despite it being well-known nothing is ever done about it because the situation is extremely helpful to the plutocracy. Two great examples will suffice to demonstrate this condition of our regulators, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of the Treasury.

The Department of Agriculture is put in place to regulate, as the name implies, agriculture throughout our nation. As such, it’s supposed to regulate all of agriculture, from the largest of factory farms to the smallest family one. However, family farms have only a little money, while factory farms have a lot of it, and as such the Department of Agriculture ends up regulating family farms right out of business and factory farms into ever-increasing piles of new wealth.

Monsanto, a ridiculously huge agribusiness corporation, is a producer of many farming chemicals, most particularly the fantastically deadly herbicide Round-Up, along with seeds which are genetically engineered to be resistant to Round-Up, which it calls “Round-Up Ready” seeds. Of course, it alone can sell Round-Up Ready seeds, because it has a patent on them. It is illegal, therefore, for a farmer to save Round-Up Ready seeds from his own plants. This is a fairly standard market capture technique here, very similar to that practiced by Microsoft in the computer field, and as such isn’t particularly surprising, nor even particularly plutocratic. But things get even better from here.

Monsanto has totally dominated the Department of Agriculture, to such an extent that one reviewer has noted that “Monsanto employees and government regulatory agencies employees are the same people. Examples of this sort of thing abound. It doesn’t help, of course, that Monsanto spent nearly nine million dollars lobbying in 2008 alone, or that another Monsanto alumnus was appointed to the FDA in 2009. And yet, when the Department of Agriculture, the FDA, and similar farming-related agencies constantly propose and support laws that will make small farming more difficult or impossible, no one in authority ever asks any questions. Because these, remember, are their fellow plutocrats.

The situation is much the same with the Federal Reserve, as well as the Department of the Treasury and similar federal agencies. Goldman Sachs is the name of the game here. Henry Paulson, George Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury, was a Goldman Sachs CEO; Timothy Geithner, our current secretary, is a Goldman Sachs alum prior to serving the Federal Reserve in New York. These officials literally speak out of both sides of their mouth, saying that they want to reduce lobbyist influence while appointing lobbyists—Goldman lobbyists, of course—to their staffs. Neel Kashkari, in charge of overseeing TARP distributions, was moved to that position by Goldman Sachs alumnus Hank Paulson from—guess where?—Goldman Sachs. Joshua Bolton, John Corzine, Stephen Friedman—the list goes on and on and on. And SEC chief operating officer? Meet Adam Storch, Goldman Sachs alumnus, hired at the ripe old age of 29. Yet these are the same men who are supposed to regulate the industry that formed them.

So vote, we are told; if you don’t like the situation, throw the bums out! Vote for somebody new! The only response to this can be, for whom else shall we vote? We’re presented in nearly every election with someone from one or the other faction of the same plutocratic party. We can throw one bum out, but only by throwing another bum back in. How else can we explain the fact that Congress consistently gets less than 50% approval ratings while maintaining a higher than 85% reelection rate?

The situation is so blatantly plutocratic that the plutocrats are starting to be very open about it. Citigroup, a large investment firm which only continues to exist thanks to the plutocracy (bailouts), is the best example. Utilizing the neologism “plutonomy,” Citigroup praises the situation of “income and wealth inequality,” praising the fact that “[t]he rich are in great shape, financially.” They further note that those great religious causes of the plutocracy, globalization and the constant advance of technology, “contribute to the plutonomy,” and do so “at the expense of labor.” In other words, they benefit the rich and harm the poor. All of this, according to Citigroup, an unquestioned and honored member of the plutocracy, is a good thing.

Welcome to the plutocracy, ladies and gentlemen. You’ve been here for a while already.

So what can we, as distributists, do about this situation? The sad answer is that we can do very little, in the short run. The very nature of the plutocracy is that it’s tight-knit, hard to break into; unless you’re very rich, or at least can become very rich, you’re just not in it, which means that you’re more or less excluded from the echelons of power. But that doesn’t mean that we can do nothing.

The most important thing to do is take control of our own lives. We are men, not automatons, nor slaves of the machine on which the plutocrats are still, even now, just putting the finishing touches. Most of us may have the knowledge of infants, but we still have the souls of men. Let’s exercise them, train them, and make ourselves what we ought to be: free citizens. A society made up of free citizens itself cannot help but become free itself.

Becoming a free citizen involves some of the same things we’ve been hearing about since our teachers forced us to memorize the Bill of Rights in elementary school. (I know they don’t do that anymore; but they ought to.) We must speak our minds; speak out against the plutocracy, against capitalism, against greed, and in favor of free government, distributism, and moderation. Refuse to be a part of the plutocratic machine. Refuse to confine ourselves to the rival factions; vote for the candidate whose policies are best, not whose are least worst. It may even be feasible to seek political office ourselves, particularly on the local level.

But it also involves things that we didn’t have to memorize in elementary school. Distributism is about freedom, of course, but it’s about economic freedom in particular. There are many things we can do to fight the plutocracy that capitalism has wrought, and that fight can itself further the distributist cause. They are legion, and each distributist will undoubtedly be able to come up with many of his own. A few that immediately present themselves are as follows:

• Begin to produce. Don’t rely on the machine to produce everything for you. Even if you don’t have a lick of soil to your name, grow something in pots. Keep small livestock, like rabbits or chickens. If you are fortunate enough to have any land, no matter how little, you can grow more than you think. Study the matter. Hamilton’s Organic Gardening is the stuff of legend. Most of Logsdon’s works are also excellent, particularly Small-Scale Grain Raising, either the first or second editions; it’s persuaded me quite thoroughly that grains, particularly corn, are feasible even for a small gardener on an urban lot. Storey’s many guides, like the Guide to Raising Rabbits or Guide to Raising Chickens will probably be all the small producer needs to know. And “grazing” or foraging is available to anyone, opening up a world of food products for which we need not depend on the vagaries of an industrial and plutocratic capitalism. Few more distributist tasks can be imagined.
• Walk somewhere. Really, put the keys of the car away and just walk somewhere. We should consider locating ourselves close enough to our places of work to walk there. We must not fall into the modern trap of considering anything longer than a hundred yards too far, either; I might be a young man, but I’ve got a bad knee on one leg and a bad ankle on the other, yet I manage to walk two miles to work nearly every day (I do carpool home pretty frequently), a walk of only about half an hour. If such relocation is not possible, let us walk to the store; walk to church; or just walk for walking’s sake. See people and say hello. Look into shop windows on a main street somewhere. Walk down the street and hear the tweeting of the birds, the barking of the dogs, the cries of the children at their play. Feel the weather. The universe is not seventy-two degrees at all times, and neither should our skin be. Accustom ourselves to the real, physical world. Distributism, despite protestations from capitalists to the contrary, is fundamentally about the real; let us remember what the real is by being part of it again.
• Buy. No, that’s not a typo, but it’s not consumerism, either. Buy selectively. We should refuse to be engulfed in the “save a buck at all costs” mentality that our plutocratic society tries to thrust on us. Try to pay attention to slave-made goods, and avoid them whenever possible. Try to buy local in preference to remote. And support those businesses which respect distributist principles while declining to support those which don’t.
• Relate. Above all, don’t just buy local, be local. Relate to the people around us. Get involved in our local parishes, perhaps trying to spread distributist principles and practices through them. Get to know our neighbors; think how many of us probably can’t even name our neighbors? Next time we have a barbecue, invite a few of them over. Let’s talk to them when we see them outside; share our produce with them; listen to them tell us about their children, their hedges, the annoying person who lives on the other side of their house. These are the people we live with; it’s only decent to get to know them.

The plutocracy hates all of these things, because none of them are profitable for it. Seeking money and power before all else, these practices deprive them of both. These are the actions of a free people taking charge of their own destinies and their own communities. These are really the only ways we can effectively fight the plutocracy. Let’s embrace them, and fight to our last breath.

Praise be to Christ the King!

Our Disastrous Debt Economy

I’m pretty old-fashioned economically, really. I put a relatively new name on my economic opinions (I call them “distributism,” a term derived from “distributive justice” and only in existence for less than a hundred years), but it’s really a set of pretty conservative principles, some of which even Republicans and libertarians will agree with. A few of my fundamental principles:

• An economy, like all parts of society, exists to help its members proceed away from vice and toward virtue. The provision of sufficient quantities of material goods, however it may be done, is a necessary part of this.
• Because economics deals with the distribution of material goods in a society, distributive justice is its fundamental principle. This distinguishes it from, say, criminal law, in which retributive justice is the fundamental principle.
• The bedrock of any economy is production of useful goods for human consumption. We cannot consume what has not first been made. Putting consumption before production is putting the cart before the horse.
• At least considered in the abstract, local is better than remote. The perfection of a society comes in part from possessing the greatest possible degree of self-sufficiency. Thus, encouraging reliance on remote, or even foreign, sources of goods when such goods can be produced locally is a Bad Idea.
• Debt is a burden on an economy; too much debt will cripple or kill it. My grandmother once told me, “If you can’t afford it until tomorrow, wait until tomorrow to buy it.” But she is a child of a different age, with saner principles in her mind.

That last is my topic today. We’re awash in debt. The primary issue most businesses have had during our current “economic crisis” is the inability to acquire more debt quickly enough. Our federal government, even, is in the hole nearly twelve trillion dollars, and that crushing debt is increasing at a record pace while our government lives out to its fullest Dick Cheney’s idiotic principle that “deficits don’t matter“.

The average American’s credit card debt is $8,329. That’s just credit card debt alone; that doesn’t include pesky little things like mortgages, car payments, student loans, hospital bills, and the million other things that people need to take out credit for. Indeed, in 2007 14.7 percent of U.S. families had debt exceeding 40 percent of their income. And then they still had to pay their mortgages, pediatricians, and so on.

Can anyone seriously look at this situation and claim it represents a healthy government and a healthy economy? At first, of course, it seems great; that’s why the Fed “stimulates” the economy by lowering interest rates to encourage people to borrow more. People are flush with cash with which they buy lots of stuff that they otherwise couldn’t afford; this makes car dealers and television salesmen very, very happy, which makes stocks go up, which means people borrow even more because they feel that things are only getting better, and so on. But this is a very limited boost to the economy.

Because, of course, it can only last so long. Eventually, the people lending this money out do actually want it back. With interest. And people begin struggling to make their payments. Many of them default; many of those who do not are forced to forego many purchases which they would otherwise make in order to pay off those bills. Businesses which might have hired one more person with real money, rather than three with debt, have to fire their three debt employees and hire nobody instead while they pay it back. It’s clearly a loss from the individual perspective; but for a while, the economy manages to cancel out those negatives and continue apace, building itself on ever-increasing piles of debt.

Too bad it’s bad debt. Eventually, those individual financial disasters begin to accumulate. They start as a trickle, increase into a flow, and finally crest as a tidal wave. And here we are, at the beginning of the tidal wave, right now, while our years and years of living beyond our means by borrowing for things that we couldn’t afford finally, at long last, catch up to us.

Who’s responsible for this situation? Facially, of course, it’s citizens and businesses who engaged in very risky credit behavior. Namely, it’s almost everybody in the country. But most of these people were relying on advice and on policies from higher up, coming from everywhere from the banks to the Fed itself. I myself, when buying my house, had to deal with constant encouragement from mortgage lenders to spend more than I had, despite my repeated insistence, and provision of a specific maximum figure, that I would spend only this much and no more. Those with less control or knowledge over their financial situation are surely much more likely to succumb.

The banks are really responsible, taking their cue from the Federal Reserve, who encouraged their reckless lending behavior with obscenely low interest rates. (Rates which remain obscenely low even as we speak.) And so, naturally, the banks ended up holding the biggest and heaviest bag when the debt hit the fan. But the banks also had the most money, even if it was funny money. They asked their friends at the Fed and the Treasury to help. And those friends moved heaven and earth to ensure that these banks would never, under any circumstances, face the consequences of their own actions, even as the poor in this great country literally lose house and home for following the advice that the Fed and these banks gave them.

So the banks are the truest of capitalists. Profit is privatized, as they made billions of dollars thanks to the government’s easy-lending policies. But costs are publicized, as the taxpayers of this generation and of countless generations to come pay the price when those policies finally run up against the inevitable wall. This is wrongdoing in the extreme. We have become a country run not by the people, nor even by a despot. We are an oligarchy, in which our very richest get whatever they want, taking the profits of the public largesse while forcing the hoi polloi to stomach the losses.

MSNBC, of all places, put up an interesting monologue which prompted me to return to this topic:

What is said in this video is true. The “Troubled Asset Relief Program,” which sprayed seven hundred billion dollars in free money all over the big banks like a fire hose, is just a drop in the bucket. TARP, combined with other federal programs bailing out the already rich and powerful, comes to 23.7 trillion dollars. This figure comes from our government itself, surely not given to inflating its estimates of its own reckless expenditures.[1] For comparison, the combined GDP of the entire world is only about sixty trillion dollars.

I mentioned earlier my grandmother’s statement, which I’ll go ahead and call Nana’s Principle: if you can’t afford it until tomorrow, don’t buy it until tomorrow. Reactionary advice, indeed. This seemed perfectly natural common sense to her generation; bred in the roaring twenties, matured in the Depression, steeled in the furnace of the Second World War. She and my grandfather, a combat veteran of that war and a sometime coal-miner, were much alike in that way; they grew up growing their own potatoes and shooting a lot of their own meat, and even in their adulthoods didn’t buy what they couldn’t afford. My own mother spent her infancy sleeping in an opened dresser drawer because they couldn’t afford a cradle.

It appears, though, that the apparatus of our government, much of which is only a decade or so younger than that heroic woman from whom I’m honored to be descended, appears incapable of digesting even in its maturity the lessons that she understood by the time she was ten years old. Nana’s Principle, so simple as to seem obvious, is completely beyond it. Its dependency on rich and powerful interests is so pervasive and so complete that it simply cannot contemplate not giving those interests everything they desire, up to and including indebting their country in the amount of over a third of the global gross domestic product to make sure that those interests remain ever rich and ever powerful, and leaving the poor, the workers, and the middle class to foot the enormous bill, in this generation and in the generations hereafter.

As I mentioned earlier, my economic opinions are pretty old-fashioned, though they go by a fancy name. That name is derived from an ancient concept, one hallowed in the annals of philosophy and politics for thousands of years: distributive justice, the giving to each what is his due. That is what distributism is, at its core: the implementation of distributive justice within an economic system. But this bailout system is the exact opposite of distributive justice. It gives profit to recklessness and costs to frugality; it gives benefit to fiscal incompetence, and even to fiscal malice, while thrusting its costs onto the complicit but largely innocent, and certainly less responsible, public. It’s an injustice, pure and simple, a violation of the principles which should guide all economic activity.

We must all pray that our nation recovers from and remedies this idiocy soon.

Praise be to Christ the King!

1. July 2009 Quarterly Report to Congress 137-38 appears to be its first acknowledgment in governmental literature. It appeared in some subsequent quarterly reports, as well; in the January 2010 report, however, it and the entire section it represented appears to be completely missing, without any explanation for the omission that I have uncovered.