Political Economy
by Ryan Setliff
"To live within a just order is to live within a pattern that has beauty. The individual finds purpose within an order, and security—whether it is the order of the soul or the order of the community. Without order, indeed the life of man is poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
—Russell Kirk
"Economics can tell us how wealth is created, and how, once created, it is distributed; but it is powerless to tell us how wealth should be distributed, at least not without explicit information about how much people value their material wealth," notes Samuel Gregg.1 Gregg writes further,
The distribution of the end product of economic activity—that is, material income and wealth—is strongly influenced by the distribution of the ownership of basic resources. If someone owns a great deal of land and capital or, alternatively, is gifted with some rare and highly prized talent (such as a beautiful singing voice,) it usually follows that such a person is richly rewarded by the market system. If the distribution of basic resources—land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurial ability—follows a particular pattern, the distribution of income and wealth will follow much the same pattern.2
Taking this aforesaid observation into consideration, Old Right critiques of political economy characteristically embody a recognition of the interplay between the body politic and the market economy. In recognizing the perilous consequences of political centralization, coercive wealth redistribution and other state intervention in the economy perpetuated by the managerial state, the Old Right favors peaceful steps toward political devolution — thereby supplanting the national unitary state with a truly decentralized federal polity. Samuel Gregg astutely observes,
Economics tells us that changing the distribution of the fruits of economic activity is a costly business. Generally, the distribution can be changed only through the imposition of taxes, subsidies, or regulations of one sort or another. Much theoretical and empirical work by economists shows how severely interventions of this sort can affect the wealth-creating ability of an economic system...3
Hence, the Old Right critique recognizes the folly of such economic interventions as wealth redistribution. Instead, the Old Right favors political devolution, and reforms which mitigate against the centralization of the managerial state and its coercive schemes of wealth redistribution, in favor of the principle of subsidiarity. Political devolution and a renaissance of federalism would contribute to the possibility of achieving the ideals of the humane economy, by structuring economic, political and social institutions on the humane scale. Predictably, within a decentralized republic with vibrant local and regional cultures, the natural tendency of the market for economic development is for a more widespread distribution of private property and capital, a broader more affluent middle class, and the preponderance of small-scale enterprise and entrepreneurship. Joseph Scotchie postulates,
A dramatic decentralization of nearly all government functions is the tenet that unites libertarians and traditionalists. If regional cultures were revived, then they would hardly need a cradle-to-grave social security state to guide its citizens through their lives. How would people live? As Allen Tate explained in the dark years following World War II: "It is my impression that [people] get fed and clothed incidentally to some other impulse, a creative power which we sometimes identify with religion and the arts." Thus culture drives economics, as it does politics. Healthy regional cultures might mean liberation from an overbearing centralized state. This is in essence the distributist ideal.4
There are parallels between distributist and agrarian thought, as both stand for parochialism, tradition, self-sufficiency, stewardship of the land, and local self-government. In American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, from ISI Books, contributor William Fahey notes:
Distributism is a social disposition held by those who emphasize life as lived out in a local community. Distributists see this emphasis as the best response to the modern tendency of man to be attenuated by participation in larger abstract associations. Distributists hold that there is an organic link between the person, the family, the homestead, the city, and the state; they therefore view concentrated political and economic power with suspicion and seek to influence private and public initiatives in such a way as to encourage a decentralized polity and the widespread distribution of property.5
The unitary national polity, which we toil under today, exacerbates the disparity of wealth between rich and poor, foments class warfare, provides for the political spoliation of production and labor, and acts to swell the proletariat ranks of the poor welfare underclass much to the detriment of Middle America. Even the U.S. government publicly acknowledges, "Since 1975, practically all the gains in household income have gone to the top 20% of households."6 However, this radical disparity is not a consequence of market failures as the statist 'progressives' would say, but of the artificial patterns of economic development resulting from overly centralized political and corporate structures and their interplay with market processes through excessive, unneeded regulatory intervention, monetary manipulation and central planning.
Similarly, centralization and statism have beget excessive urbanization and exorbitant concentrations of populations in urban areas rather than a more dispersed population. Jonathan West writes:
Our cities used to be exciting livable avenues of interaction and advancement. They were communities, neighborhoods, and homes to people attracted by job and family. Today, thanks to a welfare-addicted underclass, personal irresponsibility in childbearing, politicized courts, and an undefended border, our cities have been invaded and occupied by aliens. They have been turned into hideous, third world war zones, unsafe and unproductive for redevelopment despite having billions of dollars having been spent on cosmetic repairs. 7
With excessive urbanization, we have witnessed a rise in social pathologies, crime, poverty and have seen the blighted urban wastelands of inner city Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit and New Orleans take form. Cities are no longer built on the humane scale. Russell Kirk observed:
Detroit, the city I have known best, has worshipped the great god Efficiency. During my own lifetime, Detroit has produced tremendous wealth in goods and services. But the city has been a social failure, and so have most of America's other cities. Once called "the arsenal of democracy," nowadays Detroit, become ruinous and ungovernable, more frequently has been referred to as "the murder capital of America." 8
Donald Livingston elucidates the conceptualized "humane scale" as it relates to the city:
Aristotle argued that everything in nature has a proper size, below which or beyond which it becomes dysfunctional. A cottage is not a small mansion, and a mansion is not a large cottage. The charm and beauty of both is lost when the size is out of scale. What is the human scale of political order? From Plato, Aristotle, and St. Augustine down to the present, there has been remarkable agreement regarding the optimal size. A city-state of 50,000 to 200,000 is all that is necessary to produce a flourishing culture. Some would push the limit to 500,000, but beyond that, nothing is gained. Experience confirms this. Athens (with 50,000) and Renaissance Florence (with 40,000) produced cultures that excelled in nearly every form of human endeavor and from which we still gain inspiration. 9
Russell Kirk acquiesced, noting, "My argument is this: unless we begin to think of humanizing our American economy, our cities will continue to disintegrate, and the American people will increasingly grow bored and violent. Some folk in authority are beginning to apprehend that human nature may revolt at having an inhumane scale thrust upon mankind." 10 Livingston explains further,
As the population of a city increases arithmetically, space increases geometrically. Problems of transportation, water, sanitation, crime, poverty, and corruption, which were easily handled on a human scale, increase geometrically as the population of a city moves into the millions. Vast bureaucracies are erected, often creating as many problems as they solve. Corruption and political alienation grow, and entire sections of the megalopolis (which can no longer be called a city in the traditional sense) are written off as blighted areas and resemble the results of carpet-bombing. A megalopolis in the millions, such as Sao Paulo (19 million) or New York (8 million), requires more resources per capita to maintain the monster than would be required for a city of human scale, leaving fewer resources for the cultural luxuries that are the reason for the polity in the first place. Cities of this dysfunctional size appear only recently. The largest cities during the revolutionary period in America hovered at 30,000. New York did not gain 100,000 until 1820. The monster cities of the last 150 years are the creation of the centralized states in which they are embedded. 11
Wilhelm Roepke, while granting respect for private property rights, suggests some level of town and country planning will be needed. Its purpose would be to break up "industrial and habitational clumps" and to prevent the sprawling of big cities. This is not tantamount to "ribbon development" or "suburbisation" either, or any spurious chaotic decentralization. Rather, the beau ideal decentralization "means the creation of fresh small centres in lieu of the big city." The big city people mingle in an "anonymous and mechanical" sort of way instead of constituting "close communities embracing all classes and functions and possessing a geniune community spirit of neighbourliness."12
William Fahey notes that the socio-political thought of distributist thinkers can be set out to the following canons:
(1) subsidiarity, or the understanding that higher associations should not, without grave cause, usurp a smaller organization's ability to accomplish its task; (2) proprietary interest, or commitment to the widespread ownership of property and the means of production; (3) defense of the local, or a suspicion of private or public entitites that threaten (1) or (2), and a willingness to support public policy that encourages small, locally controlled economies over the domination of large retail chains and global corporations; (4) craftsmanship, or the confidence that local, community-based economies tend toward greater beauty, quality, and trust between the makers and users of goods; (5) agrarianism, or the belief that a rural society is the best environment for safeguarding tradition, typically understood as comprising a family-centered life, self-sufficiency, anti-majoritarianism, the dignity of labor and craftsmanship, good health, small communities, and religious vitality. 13
Later-day Old Right advocates for economic and political decentralization are particularly careful to avoid the charge of demagoguery, as they are adamant that they have no intention of effectuating distributist ideals by forcible redistribution. Besides, the Old Right is a firm respecter of property rights, and remains opposed to the means and the instrument of effectuating coercive redistribution, namely the managerial state. Political re-appropriation of wealth only inculcates dependency and further saps the vitality of the body politic. It is not the want of redistribution that we seek, but a more humane economic structure compatible with the human condition. In recognizing the interplay of political structures with the market economy, one of the most prudent means of achieving the distributist ideal is by political decentralization. Within such a polity, the emergence of a "natural economy" (as John Taylor of Caroline dubbed it) would gradually take shape over time. For this reason, devolution of political power coupled with the restoration of dual federalism are amongst the most effectual means of realizing the ideals of the humane economy.
The quintessential conservative Edmund Burke avowed, "to be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affection. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind."14 For the Old Right, the emphasis on the timeless principle of subsidiarity as it relates to the institutions of civil society is vital:
A community of higher order (e.g., the state) should not interfere with the internal life of a community of a lower order (e.g., a private charity,) thereby depriving the latter of its rightful functions; instead, higher order communities should support lower bodies in case of need and help to coordinate their activities with the rest of society. 15
The burden of proof is always on the high-level institutions to justify abdicating the exercise of power and authority from local institutions.
If the functional autonomy of social units is to be respected, if localism, regionalism, and the whole spirit of voluntary association is to flourish, power wielded by government must be distributed into as many as hands as possible—not abstract, desocialized political hands but those who actually see in the social order, those of workers, enterprises, professionals, families, and neighborhoods. Centralization, Lamennais wrote, breeds apoplexy at the center and anemia at the extremities. 16
Anyway, it is through the embrace and recurrence to this fundamental principle of subsidiarity that we can sustain the benefits of a prosperous broad-based market economy on the humane scale. Roepke describes the "humane economy" ideal:
In such a society, wealth would be widely dispersed; people's lives would have solid foundations; geniune communities, from the family upward, would form a background of moral support for the individual; there would be counterweights to competition and the mechanical operation of prices; people would have roots and would not be adrift in life without an anchor; there would be a broad belt of an independent middle class, a healthy balance between town and country, industry and agriculture. 17
In a willingness to advance the distributist dispensation, the Old Right are apt to eschew the demagogic elements of early avowed distributists. G.K. Chesterton once quipped, "To give nearly everybody ordinary houses would please nearly everybody; that is what I assert without apology."18 Admittedly, his proposition is reductio ad absurdum. In contrast, the economic and social thought of twentieth-century sociologists and economists, such as Robert Nisbet and Wilhelm Roepke, resonates much more with the Old Right of today. Ironically, neither Nisbet nor Roepke were avowed "distributists." They did not conceive of capitalism as an ideology or the market processes as such, but rather they posited the ideal social conditions in which a free market order could thrive based on an empirical interdisciplinary study of economics, history and sociology. Furthermore, the humane economy ideal has sponsors who embrace economic laissez-faire as well as economic protectionism. That's a side issue to the debate.
Economic nationalist Patrick J. Buchanan endorsed the "humane economy" of Wilhelm Roepke, as the New York Times quotes him:
We have to ask ourselves as conservatives what it is we want to conserve in America. I believe in the market system, but I don't worship the market system. I don't worship at the altar of economic efficiency as I believe some so-called conservatives do. To prefer a 100,000-hog confinement to hundreds of family farms, it seems to me, is not conservatism. I mean, that is to worship as a supermarket civilization. 19
"American society is imperfect; but all human societies are imperfect in some degree," observes Russell Kirk. "The American economy has its faults; but they are faults that may be modified. A free economy, because of its opportunities for choice and competition, has always within it the possibilities of improvement; it does not repress the reformer." 20
It will not do for us to be complacent about our American economy. We have many grave problems. We need to humanize mass-production, and to restore craftsmanship and personal accomplishment to work, and to teach ourselves how to make our leisure something better than boredom. We need to infuse in modern life a sense of community and purpose and hope and deep-rooted security. We need more geniunely educated businessmen and more geniunely responsible labor-union leaders. We need more decentralization of industry and more penetrating regard for the claims of rural life. 21
In envisioning the humane economy of Russell Kirk and Wilhelm Roepke, we should observe that the benefits are not predominantly economic, but rather cultural and spiritual—as it makes possible, the broadening of the range of human freedom and the diversification of the possibilities for human endeavor.
Bibliography / Further Reading
Roepke, Wilhelm, A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market, Hardcover: 261 pages, (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 3d. ed., 1998), Retail: $24.95, Amazon.com: $16.47.
Herbert Agar, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Andrew Lytle, Mary Shattuck Fisher, John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davisdon, Cleanth Brooks, Lyle H. Lanier, Hilaire Belloc Who Owns America: A New Declaration of Independence, Herbert Agar and Allen Tate, eds. Hardcover: 304 pages. (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 1999), Retail, $24.95, Amazon.com $15.72.
References / Citations
- 1. Gregg, Samuel, Economic Thinking for the Theologically Minded, (Lanham, MD: Univ. Press of America, 2001,) p. 49.
- 2. Ibid. p. 49-50.
- 3. Ibid. p. 50
- 4. The Paleoconservatives. Joseph Scotchie, ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1999), p. 19.
- 5. Fahey, William, “Distributism,” American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia. Bruce Frohnen, Jeremy Beer, and Jeffrey O. Nelson, eds., (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), pp. 235-36.
- 6. CIA World Factbook. 22 Nov. 2006. https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/***
- 7. West, Jonathan, The Tragedy of Freedom: An Indictment of Liberal Democracy and A Call For Patriotic Resistance (West Conshohocken, PA: Infinity Publishing, 2006,) p. 3.
- 8. Kirk, Russell, Politics of Prudence, (Bryn Mawr, PA: ISI Books, 1993), p. 122.
- 9. Livingston, Donald W., "Diseconomies of Scale: Dismembering Leviathan," Vermont Commons, 22 Nov. 2006, http://vtcommons.org/node/184
- 10. Kirk, Russell, The Politics of Prudence, (Bryn Mawr, PA: ISI Books, 1993), p. 123.
- 11. Livingston, Donald W., "Diseconomies of Scale: Dismembering Leviathan," Vermont Commons, 22 Nov. 2006, http://vtcommons.org/node/184
- 12. Roepke, Wilhelm, Civitas Humanitas, (London: William Hodge, 1948,) pp. 159-164
- 13. Fahey, William, “Distributism,” American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia. Bruce Frohnen, Jeremy Beer, and Jeffrey O. Nelson, eds., (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), p. 236.
- 14. Burke, Edmund, Edmund Burke: Selected Writings and Speeches, Peter J. Stanlis, ed., (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1963), p. 539.
- 15. Gregg, Samuel, Economic Thinking for the Theologically Minded, (Lanham, MD: Univ. Press of America, 2001,) p. 43.
- 16. Nisbet, Robert, "The Twilight of Authority," The Portable Conservative Reader, Russell Kirk, ed., (New York, NY: Viking, 1982.)
- 17. Roepke, Wilhelm, A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free-Market, (South Bend, IN: Gateway Editions, 1960, p. 35
- 18. Chesterton, G.K. What’s Wrong with the World, Collected Works, Vol. 4, p. 74
- 19. Francis, Samuel, Revolution from the Middle, (Raleigh, NC: Middle American Press, 1998), p. 238
- 20. Kirk, Russell, The American Cause, (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books , 2002), p. 116
- 21. Kirk, Russell, The American Cause, (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2002), p. 117
