I know this article is from a far-left Establishment blog, but they get it right. For too long because of a label "right" or "left" we fail to even consider the idea if it is not on "our" side. The image of a three legged race constantly comes to my mind when thinking about political parties. If you just look at the legs one may appear to be ahead for a while and then this strange leg seems to come from no where not really fitting to the image we have of either of the legs, but if we look up we see the whole picture and realize that the legs belong to two people who are really heading in the same direction. It appears to be a struggle but the the goal of both is the same, less liberty, personal responsibility, freedom for Jones, who is the common person. The legs can be called big government and big business, republican and democrat, left and right. The each have enough truth to keep up the support and enough of our money bully the rest of us for a while. This was a parenthesis to my main point, which is, let us look for real ideas to fix our country where they can be found and not be afraid of labels. There are good ideas out there and I believe none are to be found in unrestricted capitalism, socialism, or communism.
Distributism is the answer, with smaller everything. Built on cooperatives and guilds, and local currencies, encouragement of small ownership and property, people seeing where their goods come from and how their purchases affect their neighbor. It is so easy to go to the store not thinking about who made that and how does my purchase affect them. With the recent bail-outs I believe we get a rare view of the "middle" leg. Both parties supported it, both presidential candidates. I don't believe it was the fault of unpaid mortgages, the poor are always the scape-goat, and they(I should say we) get to pay for the sins of the rich, who actually broke the law! These defaulted morgtages are supposed to be insured by mortgage insurance, which everyone who owes more than 80% loan to value must pay as part of the monthly payment. Distributism is personal responsibility, which the rich have always objected to.
Here is a quote from guess who, Chesterton in his book "the man who was Thursday" which sums it up well:
"Mere mobs!" repeated his new friend with a snort of scorn. "So you talk about mobs and the working classes as if they were the question. You've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists, as you can see from the barons' wars."
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