"Many involved in "Front Porch Republic" embrace the idea of a smallholder economy based on family production under conditions of widespread ownership of productive resources. This was the vision of a moral economy held by the more radical republicans among America's founders and revived in the 1790s by Thomas Jefferson, George Logan, John Taylor and other leaders of what would become the Democratic Party. Even John Adams had thought this way in the revolutionary fervor of 1776. "The only possible Way then of preserving the Ballance of Power on the side of equal Liberty and public Virtue," he wrote in a letter that year to James Sullivan, "is to make the Acquisition of Land easy to every Member of Society: to make a Division of the Land into Small Quantities, So that the Multitude may be possessed of landed Estates."
Catholic distributism, also important at FPR (see John M'edaille's several recent posts on the subject), helps us to ground the American smallholder ethic in a Christian anthropology and a natural-law understanding of the common good. As in all Catholic thought, this religious understanding includes a strong presumption of political responsibility for securing a cohesive, stable social order. Thus it is important today both for the political necessity it entails (given the existing pattern of wealth concentration) and for the particular kind of order it envisions. By the end of the Reagan Administration, Glenn Hubbard found, less than 9 percent of households had active business assets worth more than 5,000, but those few that did controlled about 40 percent of total household wealth. The bottom half of American households now controls less than 5 percent of our total net worth. Our republican founders could not have imagined a distribution of wealth so concentrated, nor a democracy so threatened by the rule of property.
James Matthew Wilson recently reflected here on the smallholder vision as embodying "the need for autarchy." Property right, in this view, is designed to secure a moderate economic competence for one family and the next, but instead, Wilson argues, it has become a tool of unlimited accumulation. Of course we have social laws that restrain even "rightful" accumulation in a few minimal ways. But underlying this, it seems to me that "autarchy," an essentially Stoical construal of the idea of a household economy-complete self-rule based on ownership of productive resources-cannot be the basis of a stable society or the ideal moral condition of its members. Most obviously, it goes too far (potentially) in opposing the household to the common good. The very architect of the idea of self-rule based on ownership of property, John Locke, already predicted the grim proletarian future of this idea in the famous passage in his Second Treatise describing the "turfs my servant has cut" as part of the landowner's "labor" entitlement. THE FRUITS OF THE LABOR OF THOSE WITHOUT PROPERTY WERE INSTANTLY ASSIMILATED TO THE JUSTICE OF PROPRIETARY AUTARCHY. THUS MODERN CAPITALISM WAS BORN IN CONTRAVENTION OF THE FUNDAMENTAL LAWS OF GOD AND NATURE, WHICH PROVIDE FOR A WIDE DISTRIBUTION OF PRODUCTIVE RESOURCES AND POLITICAL RESPONSIBILITY TO SECURE AS MUCH. LOCKE'S LIBERAL SEDUCTION OF CHRISTIAN THOUGHT IN PHILOSOPHICALLY SANCTIFYING PRIVATE PROPERTY AS A NECESSARY AND VIRTUALLY LIMITLESS EXTENSION OF INVIOLABLE GOD-GIVEN PERSONHOOD PENETRATED TO THE CORE OF WESTERN CULTURE ALMOST WITHOUT RESISTANCE UNTIL THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Standing athwart the anti-human extremes of liberalism and socialism, Catholic social thought, beginning with the Jesuit neo-Thomists who laid the intellectual groundwork for Rerum novarum, devised a theory of individual or household property balanced by public responsibility for securing conditions of widespread ownership or self-sufficiency by other means. Leaving much room for technical debate on the proper means for securing these ends, I ask if we can rebuild a republican-Christian synthesis in American politics today, and if we can, what kind of common action, duly justified, can dismantle the existing pattern of wealth concentration and restore the sovereignty of families and communities."
"The bolded section contains the thought I want to reflect on for a moment. To own something, from a Christian perspective, is surely different than what it means to own something from a secularized liberal perspective. Christians "own" property in the sense of being stewards of that property and, since the property really belongs to God, Christians have a responsibility to use that property for the common good. It is in this sense that private property is not an absolute in Christian thought. To accumulate endlessly and use property selfishly is unChristian. Property should be distributed as widely as possible, which means that all should be taught to accumulate some property but not become greedy and turn the acquisition of property into a vice. This, of course, is difficult because of original sin; yet it is the essence of responsible stewardship.
Locke's liberal seduction consisted of telling men that they are like God and can own as much as they can acquire absolutely and with no responsibility to anyone else; this is the whitewhashing of the vice of extreme acquisitiveness combined with an unqualified or absolute right to private property. This is part of the modern project of making man into God. It is in this sense that capitalism is a contravention of the laws of nature and of God.
The Christian answer is not to remove the temptation by abolishing private property or by removing the possibility of entrepreneurship and initiative. It is to teach men to strive to resist the vice of acquisitiveness by means of God's grace and to recognize their social responsibility to use property for the common good. Socialism has no room for grace; it is a religion of pure law. In the socialist solution, private property is taken from the rich by coercion and redistributed according to the will of an elite group - either the Party or some sort of ruling class, perhaps a professional class of civil servants who manage wealth distribution. Socialism leaves the individual as vicious as it finds him and therefore is able to achieve its goals only with regard to external and superficial equality without addressing the heart. The potential for cynicism and alienation, not to mention on-going institutionalized violence, is ominous.
Now, it seems to me that in both Capitalism and Socialism, the common thread is the control of power and wealth in society by a small group which is supposedly more virtuous than the common herd. In Capitalism this is the small group of rich people who control the means of production and they are seen as more virtuous because Providence has smiled on them and made them rich. In Socialism this group is usually the hardened, revolutionary leadership whose virtue is proven by their willingness to sacrifice for the sake of the revolution or a profession managerial class of civil servants with a politically correct ideological vision. In both cases, the common citizen is reduced to a beast of burden, someone who must be "managed" or "employed" by those with power.
Christianity stands for the dignity of the common person, who is called by God to exercise responsible freedom and choose to share, to be a good steward and to provide well for his family. This way of life, embodied in the free peasantry of much of Europe in the Medieval period and which has continued into modernity - though much assulted by industrialism, Capitalism and urbanization - is the best way of life from a moral perspective. I realize that that sounds categorical, but one needs to say it strongly because this view is so strongly hated and rejected by so many today. The independent, but interdependent, family farm or business enterprise embedded in a local community that functions as an economy is the heart and soul of democracy. It is the vision of the American founders and was rightly percieved as well-suited to a vast, unsettled continent. But under the pressures of urbanization, industrialization, commercialism, urbanism, consumerism, globalization, we see an increasing gap between rich and poor, an increasingly artificial and hedonistic way of life and an increase in depression, suicide and low-level violence.
Neither Capitalism or Socialism has the power to repair the torn social fabric. Only a revival of Christianity can do that - and even then massive social reform will be necessary, the shape of which is difficult to percieve in advance. But only Christianity has what Capitalism and Socialism lack - a God who loves all people equally and who gives grace to those who strive to be responsible stewards.
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