"Hardly anybody…dares to defend the family. The world around us has accepted a social system which denies the family. It will sometimes help the child in spite of the family; the mother in spite of the family; the grandfather in spite of the family. It will not help the family. … We live in an age of journalese, in which everything done inside a house is called ‘drudgery’ while anything done inside an office is called ‘enterprise.’"
-- G.K. Chesterton, Dec 1931
2 comments:
It's interesting that this was apparently a problem even that long ago.
Indeed. That is much of what animates my interest in distributism and Catholic social teaching in general. It's not like the USCCB just pulls these "justice and peace" documents out of their collective mitre. There is a long and startlingly clear history of how "market ideology" has gone wrong time and again (the same holds for socialism), and yet the more perilous capitalism becomes, the more we are told "that's not 'real' capitalism" (just as we are always told, "well, that wasn't 'real' socialism"). So I ask people, When did 'real' capitalism actually flourish in a sustainable way? The two answers I can find are 1) when capitalism is taken to mean the pockets of success known as families or 2) when there's a strong (but not 'too' strong) government nanny to integrate information penalize or reward fraud or good service, respectively. Read De Soto's book on "the mystery of capital". Libertarians will deny a place like Somalia is 'really' a free market (even though it's one of the least regulated areas in the world), because… well, donchaknow… the government is too weak. As De Soto's research shows (despite his subtle but recurring libertarian axe-grinding), a government so weak that (to channel Rothbard) it merely 'policed' and did not enforce stringent legal standards across the board for all people claiming a share in the polity––a Rothbardian mere-aggression-reducing state would not be what it takes to produce real capital. Pardon my ramble, but my point is that the recent "crises" of capitalism are not a unique surprise: they are, apparently, as old as 'unrestrained' capitalism itself.
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