Thursday, cigarette #2
John Zmirak suggests a possible alliance between paleo-libertarians and neo-distributists. He does a yeoman's job of finding common ground, but fails to answer the real problem, which is that, even if one were to make a successful alliance, it would still be an alliance of paleo-libertarians and neo-distributists.
I am suspicious of distributism (libertarianism is off the hook for the rest of the week), for one because I don't see any reason why cities can't be "local" in the crunchy sense of the term, and distributism's frequently explicit anti-urbanism worries me. Also, they are the faction from which I most often hear statements like "Salaried office-work is contrary to what labor should look like." There is valuable work other than that done by the sweat of one's brow, and I don't just mean tenured professorships.
The idea that being a mere "wage-earner" promotes servility and degradation assumes that a man whose job makes him a cog will think of himself as a cog. This may be true for some men, but it's just as conceivable that a man would subsume the uninspiring or even embarrassing particulars of his job under the (please forgive the word) empowering fact of being a breadwinner. I might be concerned if there were a man who did not exercise any leadership in any aspect of his life, but distributism, by encouraging each man to be his own boss rather than be a wage-earner, seems to be taking the scenic route towards avoiding this condition. I feel like viewing the family as an arena for leadership does this without eliminating industries I like. (This is why the emphasis on fathers as the heads of families is the thing I find most interesting about Catholic distributism.)
On the other hand, distributists have a great sense of humor.
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