87: Distributism

Last fizzy, it's more fuzzy. Wait, so I'm doing this as a thing. I'm not going to be who correctly identifies drinks. The classical world's you and classical is kind of weirdly defined.

Basically we should roll stuff. That's kind of how we do it. My general policy is like 18 hundred and four. But you know there's all kinds of definitions about classical.

I like to think that the Greeks like to read some of the rules and that's what I think. You know, you have a sake margin. It's a free 1700 I feel really solid about it. But today's topic like 19th century.

Yeah. It's on proposed by two man who were classical thinkers. Okay. So you're like classical circuits.

They're classical work and then you're sort of taking it from them. I'm sorry. So today's led by the two adults. So today, we are going to be talking about a economic theory put out by GK Chesterton.

We talked about the classical four. The Catholic thinker in the 19th century in England and his friend, Hilar Bellock also a Catholic thinker in the 19th century England. What's a Hilar Bellock? What?

That's the name of the ball rock. Hilar Bellock. So two, so they were Catholic thinkers and they had this way of thinking about economics that came out of a couple of people, I guess they're bulls or missiles, which are both of those things are encyclicals. All three of those bulls are not awesome.

If you put it on, I don't know. Which we call your very bulls. That's very aggressive. Anyway, so Pope Leo the 13th wrote an encyclical called Rayrom Novarum.

And I don't know if I don't know what that translates to. But it was one of these encyclical rights and duties. All right. So I mean, in response to kind of the growing industrialization and kind of the growth pains that were coming with an specialization and these new ideas that were floating around your own especially around communism and socialism.

And then of course 100 years later, the rise of fascism and sort of internationalism. And so Pope Leo the 13th writes this document and also Pope Leo the 11th has another document later taken up these themes. And then Pope John Paul II in the 90s has a third document that kind of takes up this question of what is man vis-a-vis money and institutions. This is kind of the idea.

Well, what? And from one of those documents I can remember which one, there is the great line that markets are in service to man, man is not in service to markets. I mean, that's John Paul II's quote. So there was, and all these sort of documents get crystallized under the Wikipedia article.

If you're trying to figure out how to, yeah, the category for this, it's either known as Catholic social teachings kind of what it's offered to. And you get variants of this Catholic social teaching that pop up in the southern agrarian writings here in the US. I guess you would say that she was a farmer guy. Like, you know, he sort of maybe fits into that.

You also have this Dorothy Day and these Catholic social movements that have an, they're all part of this. But you get trusted in Hilar Bellar. Device this idea and it's more of a sort of a prediction of what state capitalism will do over time and sort of the history of money looking back. So in order to understand something like sort of put out their thought, especially Hilar Bellar's idea of this and then we'll kind of like, I want to get your reaction on whether or not you think that this is crazy.

Crazy talk. No, no, no. Crazy talk. So the first sort of thing we understand is this idea is the Catholic idea in rare environment of subsidiary.

That's crazy talk. Well, your experience. Sorry. Sorry.

Sorry. That was not the thing. So subsidiary is kind of this idea that a community of higher order should not be on the freedom of communities of lower order. That's actually a quote from a rare environment is, a community of higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order and then he goes on to say that it should support it.

So, which students should remember life is not so much rich. It's more like, so the present. Nice. If you are trying to set up your neighborhood softball league for your kids, you don't need the city to tell you what to do with the state.

You should only take the state of Texas to regulate your neighborhood softball league. That's kind of the idea. So the idea of subsidiary is decision should be made at the lowest communal level that they can be made reasonably. I know it's pretty, it's pretty loose term and it's far a lot of argumentation.

I can come from that. I think your orientation would just be what? Yeah, what could the decision be able to be level? Yeah.

So the classic one that gets brought up a lot in these conversations is the idea of the educational children. So parents should be allowed to educate their children the way that they see fit and that a higher level of community, so let's say the school board, shouldn't be allowed to say you cannot learn these kinds of things in your family. Right? So if you're a kid and your kid has to sit through this kind of lecture or this kind of series of lectures or this curriculum in school, you have to do it.

That would be going against this principle of subsidiary. The lower or the smaller community rights should trump the bigger communities. Because families can make a decision. They shouldn't be a decision.

Even if there's a certain thing. So what if I'm just throwing this out? So if like certain things that country we want everyone to be taught is not a place in the federal world to say everyone to learn math as a part of their own science. Yeah.

It'll do a decision as someone says actually. I guess the legitimate question is like a level of the subsidiary should that decision be made. It's federal. If it's federal, why not go one step higher and say like it's a UN declaration, you can write every student learns single math.

So it is a fear of not not so much fear, but it is pointing out the problems of when something becomes a centralized idea. So when someone comes to centralize, you start to get sort of these inboundities or you back, such with documents as you start to infront of natural frames of human beings. Again, I'm just laying up here. I don't even know myself.

I feel about it. You like it. I'm sympathetic to it. I do like it.

I'm trying to give another example of, but then yeah, but families don't get to make decisions about the sewer systems of neighborhood. Like one family doesn't get to make that decision. And that's the city probably should because it's an interconnected system that the entire city is responsible for. Right.

You can't even make it at the neighborhood level because whenever it is I decide to know all their junk in the sewer system. That's right. But it is kind of silly if you have the federal government telling Austin how to do their sewer system. Maybe they can have, maybe federal government can have sort of guidelines, but actually have somebody, you know, like 500, 700 miles away making decisions for the city.

That's sort of a silly, efficient thing. Okay. Exactly. Yeah.

Awesome. Okay. So this is really, this is going to be really, I'm just, I'm still aware of that. Before we start recording you guys, this is really called me.

I'm going to need Thomas underneath your help on this because I'm going to go. I'm going to go. I was like, hey, you guys, I'm going to feather in my shirt. I'm going to like my cat's breath.

I'm like, sorry, I didn't mean to bother you. I'm not going to. So then, Hilar Bell takes this idea of subsidiary and he thinks about it in terms of, okay, if we want to be skeptical and concerned of the centralization of any of things, he applies that to the idea of economics. And so, and this is where Hilar Bell gets kind of, he's one of those people where, from market capitalists think he's a socialist and socialist thinks he's like, free market capitalists.

So because he's one of those people that other people think is on the opposite side, already he should be a person of interest. He's already interested in him because if he thinks something that sort of both of these camps are using him holding an opposite view, then he's doing something interesting. But that means that you sort of have to be nuanced about this. So as far as Hilar Bell is concerned, well, this is the final term, socialism.

So socialism or collectivism, that sort of is a big umbrella. Is the idea that economic decisions are made at the level of government and that government is in control of the means of production. So nationalizing the railroad, nationalizing oil industry, what would other sort of examples of, I mean, the most extreme one being like communism is in control of all means of production. And then really on the opposite side of that, so if communism is far left, fascism is far right, but fascism is collectivism just under a different name because it's still the state control, but it's, I don't know, it's a difference.

There's one in, is even supposed to be state control and communism? Like it's in theory, it's like no control. Exactly. But it means, there's anything happening to it.

Exactly. So it's sort of strong centralized control over the means of production by the government. Doesn't matter how the government comes into power, whether it's a government or whether it's a strong government, if the government is in control of the means of production, that is a collective socialism. And then the other hand, and this is where Hilar Bell kind of, so I think most most free market capitalism is like, yeah, that sounds terrible.

It sounds terrible. It sounds very smart. Hilar Bell looks at the other end. He says capitalism, sort of free market capitalism, the way that we have it, is only a transitional state.

Something that is moving towards an end goal, and when it hits that end goal, it's going to be another kind of collectivism. It won't be one under state control, but it'll be one under either, you'll just have like five companies in the world that went everything, and Amazon has bought all its competitors and, or we're not, and Google runs the internet and Facebook runs the media, or wherever. It's like an old-guard view of. Yeah.

And then also the idea of money. So money, the actual capital itself is going to flow into fewer and smaller and smaller hands. So that's called, when you went all of the, the capital is controlled by very small amount of people called the plafocracy. So plafocracy is, you know, give me a small number.

That's one percent, one-10th of one percent owns X amount of the capital 90 percent of the capital, starting at 100 percent. You are a little bit. Who's who? And 10 percent.

That's really the same thing, you guys, you know, they're probably going to be very same for you. Can you break centers? That's right for a while. I believe it.

But I got a people. I did recently re-watch Christopher Rock in February, so let me tell you what you're talking about. I didn't know. I was watching him like two weeks ago, and I had a ton of like, how did this get me?

Anyway, that's a whole lot of polar backgrounds. So the idea being, so in socialism, you're ability, the individuals ability to control their own means of production sticking away from them. Yes. the state now runs the economy and tells you what your job is.

On the other hand, you have a similar kind of problem. Because the means of control, and so with capital, it has been sort of siphoned into a small place. It's not so much the state that has it, but it's small groups of individuals. Whether that's monopolies or whether that's just like unfathomably wealthy people that actually have the vast majority of money that you need in order to do endeavors.

So both of these things become centralized problems. So he makes the argument in the survival state, which is about that he wrote in 1912. So we're still under the 100 remarks. I don't know how you do that.

My next comment on the news. OK, we are. Is that capitalism, the way that he sees it is incredibly fragile, because it has as capitalism is successful, it basically makes the game harder for everybody to play. We Christmas comes.

I mean, I'm not sure. But as something that's more successful, it's harder for people to play, especially if money is becoming more centralized and means production become more centralized. So he lays out this belief that his time goes on. People are going to be more beholden to companies and companies wages in order to survive.

So basically, you have the fact that you are, you're beholden to the companies for wages. I mean, wage-lab is probably a extreme way of saying it. But you need the flow of money from the owners to you to labor to the worker. I mean, I'm there.

I don't have a lot of money for it. So hiller Bellox and GKJJJJ's idea is that economic freedom for human beings is to have, this is why it's called the street. It's a basic sound like socialism, because it's a sort of terrible branding name problem. You need to rename it.

But the basic idea is that human beings are more free insofar as human beings have direct control over their means of production. And that means other land for back when they're writing this a grain of farming. But that also means the owning of tools for being a blacksmith or doing anything and having capital in order to start up your enterprise, whatever it is. I guess in modern equivalence of this would be something in the lines of kind of like the wave of independent contracting positions that there are.

The internet is given people the ability to freelance or Airbnb your house. These kinds of things have distributed ideas or companies that are looked at through that land of vinyl. So I'll talk a little bit about this in the production thing because hiller Bellox uses an example from history to talk about how this happens. So he starts to serve out state with a question, why was there less slavery in the middle ages?

That kind of is idea. Why was there less actual? And what he means by slavery is legal contracts between workers and the owners. Like slavery was an engine that drove the Roman Empire.

And then he says, we then slavery began to again become more potent and formalized in what? 15, 16, 17 centreding of the transatlantic slave trade and you have all this that's a repairability committee. And he says, how come in the middle ages? No, there were slaves in the middle ages, of course.

If you look at history of the middle ages, there's still slavery. There are states who were traded as slaves who preached the gospel to their pagan masters and then they became Christians. So there was slavery. But hiller Bellox reasoning is that it was less institutionalized as it wasn't Roman Empire.

And it was also less institutionalized as it was after the end of the middle ages. And he's a very fascinating question. Why? What was going on working land?

There was a monetary or church would land. And then people that community would work that land. I get the details wrong. So there was a amount that they owed.

So they didn't own the land. And they were getting stuff in land. They had a pays or an amount. Like so they were harvesting grain.

Then they would have to get ten bushels of grain a week or whatever. That's right. And they get that to the monetary and the people and the people who went on to that. So yeah, that's kind of a good deal.

A lot of people criticized Bellox by saying that he's kind of this medieval apologist that says everything was Roman and the religious. And you're sort of living in this like, you know, this feel good anarchy of varying communities. And it's not. There's still laborers and still owners.

They still have their still habits. They didn't have toilet paper or peanut butter. So fair. Nothing can be that great.

But he says jellyfish. What's that? What's that? Did he have jelly?

I don't know. I have to. I'm just sure. Are we in the candy cone?

I don't know. We later. That's a bad idea. I'm going to get a big idea.

Kitchen. But anyway, so he's not a kitchen. So hello, well, it puts up the idea of, OK, this is how kind of medieval social order worked is you did have owners, landowners. And for the vast majority of places, it was the monasteries.

The monasteries were the actual care takes of the land. And you also had noble lords who were care takes of the land. And there was a week centralized power in the kings. So you did have kings, but they weren't anything like the centralized powers of nation-states that we have today.

Everything was basically henchakes and goodwill. And as you listen to the plantationate series, you know that every king's problem was he needed to have a lords on the side. And the lords needed to have, and in the meantime, the church on the side was this whole sort of interconnected network of power as opposed to a hierarchy of power. And I think that's a really important distinction is that it was more network than hierarchy.

Anyway, the king was in charge. But if you didn't even want to come, if he was backing, the noble is going to be a bell. That's what somebody else is in there said. So you had owners of land, but it was distributed amongst many, many, many more monasteries and small little ownership groups than after the dissolution of the monasteries in kind of the eighth.

So this was sort of his idea. So you have the owners of the land are these monasteries. So these monasteries as a sort of the simplified version of it. And they are groups of people that whether or not they believe that or whether or not they did, they have taken some kind of valve party.

Now, as we know, not every monasteries held to that, they accumulated vast wealth. But probably not as vast wealth as we kind of, we think of it. We think of it. No, no, no, no, no.

They're not bezos. Anyway, so you have these monasteries who have taken this valve of poverty and then have a vast tracts of land and accumulated more land as people died and gave up the able land to it. And so they did the monasteries had agreements with the local workers. They did they had they had enough monks to work the land.

And so you had local farmers who live in land raised their families on there. And yeah, but I'm like he said, they had to pay a tithe to the church. So for simplicity sake, let's just say that the tithe ended up being around two days of work and then you had five days of work after that. That's pretty much how it worked itself out.

The tithe was 10% or the tithe was whatever it was. It probably varied from a monastery to a monastery in Lord of Lord and if it was more people got to it and if it was less than a monastery would lose money or whatever. So let's just say two days a week. So two days a week, the work that you do, the better fruits of that labor go to the monastery.

And then whatever you can get from five days a week was your steep. This was essentially how the middle ages worked. Now those people, you didn't own the land, the monastery on the land, but you essentially controlled the means of your own family's survival. If you worked harder or more efficiently or took better care of your tools and then you got to reap those benefits.

If you were, if you didn't, then you were in trouble. Okay, so for the layer of that lock, the big change happens, non-nearest revolution, which is a lot of how a lot of history talks, we're talking about the rise of capitalism. It's a revolution, we got cotton gin and then we sat the house on it. But he says no, the big change happened when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries.

So Henry VIII became Anglican, or became Anglican, starting a church by the North's wife. Sorry, I'm joking from it, that was a second. When he was, he became a seabird. But he dissolved monasteries were now seen as a threat.

And he, for a period of time, the king of England actually controlled all of the land that he dissolved the monasteries on. So he dissolved the monasteries on the 100 crown. And the tolerance for crown control over this was a little bit higher. He said, oh my goodness, we have a strong king in strong England, this is a good thing.

And then as Henry needed political favors from his lords he began to distribute the land to nobles and to people that he needed to curry favors from. When everything started to shut itself out, you had thousands and thousands of little parcels of monasteries in these parishes that had been pushed, that had been sort of conglomerated into a handful of giant trash of land, now owned by lords. And I think, I remember reading, I think this was, I remember reading in Churchill's history of the English speaking people, that's something like 11 lords or 15 lords owned like 60% of the farmable land in England at some time. So this extreme centralization of power.

Now everything would be all well and good if everybody can work on that land could have the same deal with the Lord. But it didn't end up working that way. And so that was for Hilary Bell, that was this first big problem, is that less people control the means of production. So more people were beholden to those owners.

Is that fantastic? Okay. So generally if you had a freedom index, freedom index has gone way further down because as an AJ now no longer has to have a face-to-face meeting with the local monasteries where he can figure out what his relationship is, he now has relationship with the Lord who is in parliament, who is not anywhere near his farmland. And so AJ's out shooting in the dark or he's now working with a bureaucracy, he's now not working with the local government who owns it.

So for Hilary Bell, that was a big shift. And then the next big shift comes on one yes, you now have this rise of industrialization and instead of having basically serves who, the rosiest way you can talk about surfs or independent contractors, that's probably $2,000. That's a great way for me. But they at least had control, whether it's still pre-rementric, but they still had control over their means of production.

This kind of shifts as Hilary Bell's argument is when people were moving into the idea of wages and salary, that's the next big change for Bell's, and they're moving into the idea of salary. So the words are paying out as salary. It still seems to be up. You give your two bills or your two days or whatever to the Lord, you still get it five days.

So then that's where we're losing our wages. Yeah, so the next revolution we're just coming and then you've got this new way so that people are, the individual is no longer seen as a member of the Paris who works, but an individual seen as someone who has labor that they trade their time under labor for cash. And so, so the more the system is set up where the person is being paid a wage as opposed to them controlling their means of production, as far as Hilary Bell is concerned, the more fragile that system becomes. The free man can refute, this is a quote from one of the free man can refuse his labor in order to bargain.

And that still exists today. Like if we wanted to, we could refuse our labor to this school, we'd say I'm not gonna teach, I wanted that our salary and they can say, I believe our salary or we'll just find something to your job. We do have that bargaining power. But, Hilary Bell's fear is that as time goes on and as capitalism moves forward and more and more money going to these companies or going to these individuals, there's going to be a reform movement in nations.

And a reform movement is basically going to take, Hilary Bell says the reform movement is gonna take, is people are going to say, the rich need to serve the poor because the rich have all of the means production and they have all of the capital. They're the one that they're the ones that are taking, they're the ones that are working on the rich. They're the ones that they're the ones that they're the ones and then the vast majority people are gonna say, we want to work for you because we want your money so we can survive, we need our wages. And we need you to give us jobs.

And the rich say, okay. And then there's the push and pull back and forth where the rich say, no, we will try to find whoever can do this job is the cheapest. But, Hilary Bell, especially for the future, is that eventually laws we put into place that the means of production holders, those who hold the means of production, written into law have to take care of everybody who is a wage-ner. So this can take, it turns out different ways that this can play itself out.

This could be lifelong contracts, which we don't see, but every now and then you hear it floated, like in Silicon Valley or something. I will, I don't know, any other things now? They were made fun of in, was that maybe? Sorry about you?

Yeah, sorry about you. There was a, what was it, it was called home, good, something? Home, home, home away, not home. Real thing, it was, basically you signed yourself into, I don't know, works later, but you can get it, but you would provide a home and food and everything else that you needed in return for your work every day.

So I mean, that is maybe, now at point that is, that's a thing that is, it's rightly made for me. Very free, but there's also, I think that, you know, that's not going to take right now, there are folks proposing a 90% tax on the top, 1%, right? 90% is incredible, not money. So that is, so there's a lot of extra, there's a lot of extra, there's a lot of extra, there's two ways about it.

There's a social media, which is the redistricting of wealth, where you take money from those, how the money, and you re-sear it to those, you don't have the money through some sort of means. That's just actually cutting a check for people, or that's what's called the, what they're gonna guarantee in account, that idea of this. I mean, what does, well, I can say, what does our hilarious, what does our So these things are, are, are, are, are these things are trying to figure out what do you do with all these people who need to survive by wages? When everybody who can sort of, and those who can supply those wages, eventually, they're going to be forced, and probably, I don't know, right?

So, but logically so, are going to be forced to play, to have some sort of system where they guarantee work for everybody, and those people give that work, because they don't, the things gonna come fall apart. That's like, this is a Marxist-American, that's like capitalism, you have to guarantee those jobs, like from Du Bois, or Donald Rest, you guarantee those jobs to avoid social unrest. And so then he says at some point, it's going to be enshrined into, into actual law, it's a term for it. That is just law.

He's got, he's got other specific term for it. But, and then he says, when that, when that thing happens, now you kind of set up people who are, whether, whatever mechanism it's from, there's a legal obligation between owners and sellers of their labor. And he says that is essentially, Sir Billy, which is what it's called, Sir Val State, or slavery in another term. And he says, that's something through the means of a centralised government control, which would be socialism, or some sort of, sort of, plutocracy, or some sort of monopolies, which would be a corporation control.

He says either way, the move is going to be towards some sort of social contract between those, where people are giving their labor for a guaranteed basic income or guaranteed wages. And that's, and then you sort of institutionalise this, this kind of slavery. He says, so then the opposite of that is people having the ownership of their own, a means of production. So the universal basic income, you're basically saying you are, then they're forced to leave to the state.

Yeah, or it now becomes a totally dependent on them. It now becomes a tool of coercion, because the criminals get universal basic income, do, you know, the organization of a legal drug, do you get any question to who doesn't get it? And if the giving and the taking away is not essentialised thing, are your employer, your mega employer or the government, well now you've got people who are kind of having play ball or be destitute. But if this is a thing that people are proposing, if they want that relationship to the state, they want to say what the matter that is, or if they take a self-doubt that this is a horrible place to be.

I think he takes it as a horrible place to be. So are we increasing down? Then if, then you're expecting down the drop your entities are being, or we're increasing down. Or at least the seller, he was concerned, like he was raising a stake when Parliament England made a legal to collect firewood in the nationalised parks.

Because he's hunting gay foul, it was a legal, because it's now government-private property. And so he says, if people live in country, you can't just go to the woods and get firewood. Because it's now owned by the government, and how do they get firewood that they're paid for it? Do they have to do they get like state-given firewood that's coming out of their taxes?

So then if I were to get a ration, so he says this is, again, breaking this rule of subsidiary, why is it centralized federal government trying to get us regular firewood? And I don't know if he is more in favor of forming employment. There's all this apply now when, you're supposed to land on the same asset. Land is really the same value now, I forget the exact number, but I think it's going to be in the middle of our farmers.

How does this apply when your main piece of cattle isn't land? Yeah, so what is this a great point? So the question is, what are some kind of more modern examples of things that are moving towards a decentralization and then towards a centralization? And yeah, on so these things, exactly.

I mean, we're enough. That's, it's anything that gives someone the ability to do, make their own things, and sell their own things without your free government. Although you do have to pitch a little bit towards equity, but that's the equivalent of market. Exactly.

So any of the internet is a four to a lot of these things. So another example is Airbnb. We are producing a podcast. We haven't produced them all the time yet, but AJ that is DJing on the side.

You own your own your own all the equipment that you use for that. Oh, that's government. That's why freelancers are the graphic designer and owns computer. But yes, you're right.

So then there are these sorts of things. And then there are other ones like open source technology, like Linux and GitHub and Python. All of these things are not centralized companies. They're decentralized platforms.

They're run basically by people who I mean, Wikipedia are doing it for what, I mean, basically they're doing it for the utility of essentially. Oh man, so every time we have this thing called morning moment where we look at our students and I realize I can edit any page to say anything ever. And one of the art pieces have very little information. So I think that's the way that I've added that it was recently sold to ArcLaker Thomas Meghan for $3 million on keeping it at home and showing every December.

No, I took it down within a minute because I thought we could see it. I was creating band forever. So there's one where students changed it and I said that the art thief sold it. And I think I figured I was the art thief or I was the defense that bought it anyway.

I put it back up after last night with the cleaners. I think it wasn't the guy that was the guy that was the guy that was. They went back and did it. Yeah, I have 100% of the time.

So anyway, so here's another quote from Sirile State that Bellock says that here's like kind of the definition of what all this has worked up to you. This is definition of Sirile State. The arrangement of society in which so considerable a number of families or individuals are constrained by positive law to labor for the advantage of other families and individuals as to stamp the whole community with the mark of such labor. So in other words, 98% of everybody is working for the 2% of people and the 2% are paying the 98% and it is something that has been codified in two laws.

That's the way positive law. It's been codified in two positive law for this to happen for the good of the whole. And he says that is a slavery under a different name. That's sort of the civility.

Now, of course we're not there. You can put your job if you want. And so the idea I was on, I can still fire everyone and be done. Right.

He's a really interesting question because he's an inverse your whole. But this is not just a public that's a public trade that has been a lot of people. Anybody can come vote. Well, I'm sorry.

So yeah, so then there are good, yeah. So we're raising sort of the good counterpoint to this. So the Bellock was not an idealist. He knew that this was what he was talking about was it's more of like guiding principle than it is a, I can hope that he says we hope to get to.

The guiding principle is we should enact policies and we should have society set up to maximize the ability for individuals to have control their means of production. Does that make sense? So Chester can always say this is two acres in a cow. So yes, Thomas talked about your sort of a growing idea.

But modern ideas of what this would be, you know, you're talking about like being free lines or there's other, so there's no company. They do, they run base camp based camps, base camp. Sorry. Sorry.

So I think it's only in fact that it's not a company. It's only in 2018. Well, here's one case. Let's say that all the shareholders, every single shareholder of Amazon got together.

And you're like, you guys, this is great run. This is awesome. But we're done. Do you think that we as like a company in a country, which is, I guess we do think that the government is allowed to happen.

No. Amazon being so deeply entrenched into people's lives. That there wouldn't be some kind of way to try to go around. It was the growing case of guess more about it.

So my question is what do you mean by shut it down? Because essentially they would sell their shares. And if, you know, put it into the company, we'll just sell the shares, we'll plummet, but then we'll buy it. And then like the company we can take around the ownership of the corporation and we're way.

Yeah. And I guess that's kind of one of the other ones. The business of distribution is ownership and operation are kind of separate. Yeah.

So there's a hundred thousand Amazon police. So like, I think that's a world wide number. But yeah. So government would care about that.

Yes. But the thing is, as it gets bigger, as it becomes more successful, it becomes more deeply entwined in the social fabric. And it will, I mean, essentially kind of like the too big to fail or even though it's that is that if something happens to it, mismanagement or whatever, it'll get bailed out or it'll get saved. And then because we don't lose too many jobs, people need those jobs because they need their wages.

So this is a kind of a kind of a bellock is uncomfortable with. So you asked for it. And I don't forget what something was. Sorry.

Listen to me like you're on the other. Yeah. I'm trying to make sure I thought before we were saying, oh, yeah. So the base camp.

So the group we're working together. Yeah. So base camp is software. So it's a great thing to realize here.

Well, the guy that made base camp, we're a really great book called rework. And with base camp, they have something like 15, 20 employees. And they've kind of actively kept it that size and fought against growth. And so those 20 employees own, it's not a call up at everybody owns that company.

All those 20 employees own 120th of the company. Maybe it's distributed in different ways. So in this kind of weird way, this is similar to the agrarian farmer where the more work that he puts in and healthier the company, the more he's kind of, he's worth it because he owns this company that is making this kind of money. The owner of the company had some interesting quote about.

I have a, what was it? It was something like, making this company I can have a 80% shot of making 3 million, a 20% shot of making 30 million and a 0.1% shot of making 300 million. And he's like, what am I going to go for? And he's like, why are we going to make 80% shot of 3 million?

And everybody else got to as well. And this company can continue and we can weather downturns because we're small. Listen, if this is another thing that you sort of find interesting, another book you can read is Shumacher's Small is Beautiful. With delightful subtitle of economics as if people matter.

The guy's not. I don't know. Small is beautiful. But a similar kind of idea that growth is not necessarily a good into and of itself.

When it comes to economics. Because you get at a point where it comes to kind of a certain thing where it has an over-weighted control over the community. Small is also helpful because Shumacher's pushing back against their being only two categories of your either social or your capitalist. And that's kind of what Bellock's doing too.

I haven't read Bellock. But it's just about saying that you're looking at it. You're looking at it. You're looking for it.

I don't know if you're going to have a lot of money. But I think Shumacher breaks governments and economic models and eight different categories. And essentially says you can pair these up in any way you want to. Anyway, it's very interesting.

But other criticisms of the Shumacherism are it kind of doesn't provide as good an engine for innovation as. what we have right now because it's essentially conservative economics. We're trying to to keep communities in the way that they're sort of. We're trying to keep people to be able to have a rational or to have a flow of life that is more predictable or more in the hands of the individual.

And so then to create like a new Facebook that service flows and takes over. There's there's less of a fertile ground for innovation. Do it. Do it for things like Tesla.

Tesla can never replace all cars in play because there'd be five. You know, five people in the company, twenty people making cars. And it would never be larger. Yeah.

And the other thing is when all the workers are the owners. There's a studies that show that's harder for those companies to weather changes in the economy. So if you know Jeff fuel prices will ever go down these companies can easily fire workers or can easily restructure their airlines. It's harder to do that when the owners and workers are one because they get they get sort of voting rights.

But there are examples of big co-ops like co-ops and pull like tens of thousands of people. So it's not just 15 people. There's one in Spain called I don't know if you know it's like Mont Dragon or. It's it was it's basically it's a co-op a giant co-op that employs like 70,000 people.

And it's in the best region of Spain. So it's also got this like ethnic localization to it that probably has helped it be cohesive. And if you work there you are an owner of it and everybody gets a vote and they have some pretty sort of stringent voting rights. It's you can still you can still get firing companies can still go bankrupt.

But they don't know a bunch of different kinds of companies under the umbrella. I don't know too much about it. It's really fascinating. But it's kind of in this model of this districtism.

So like you work for that company you're never going to have your boss say hey we've we've liquid age position. And if you want to keep your job you want to see out right. And which is a very real thing happens right now. And so you have then this unwritteness that sort of system that we have that we have brings.

But then there's also all the benefits that system brings like all the innovation and age is you're going to have. So you're going to have to be able to make that possible. But I guess there are also maybe banks are category we don't really need. Like the federal bank is the ability to get your cash and you're free.

That's not that you don't really need a bank. Yes. So anyway. So it seems to me I mean I'm trying to work through this in my head but is it any specialization within society or society itself?

Is not slavery in any other name? Like for example the butcher. I don't know what you're going to do. I still need to meet or I prefer to eat it.

And so I need to make that happen. And honestly under under this guy's definition. No, not slavery. The really important distinction he's making is it works.

How it's working right now when everything is still relatively small and localized. But it's things get bigger and bigger and bigger. You get to this absurd place where it's enshrined into law that these, you know, these meg corporations that own everything need to employ everybody. That's the position that he's worried about.

Is that when we have the government or we have 98% of people saying you need to take care of us because you have, you are the rich. You only company to corporations. You have the means of how our lives work. And we will work for you.

When you need to guarantee that we will not start and die because if you stopped, we would. If you start to turn out your company, we would. And you know, that 98% of people are going to turn to legislative body and say, make them save us. Essentially, that's the problem he's concerned about.

He's not someone who's saying like, um, paying your butcher to do something. You know how to do it. Not saying that. He says, uh, he in fact, independence is very, very good.

Until it gets so imbalanced that it becomes a different thing altogether. That's kind of his point is that, um, so let's think of the land again with the monasteries. Tom is you were right. It was, um, it was essentially the same bargain.

But instead of you being beholden to a thousand different landowners, you were now beholden to 11. And we needed to that point, the power that that one man wields to make a decision on his land can affect tens of thousands of people. Whereas a decision of one habit is only going to affect like a small village. So it's kind of that idea is that as a thing that's more imbalanced, um, that you're going to have these, um, it's the imbalances going to create a situation that is intolerable to vast amount of people that are going to demand some kind of solution.

And about says, you know, the solution is how they're say government, you take it over and that's socialism. Or it's going to say companies guarantee us things and we'll sign the dotted line. And that's essentially like wage slavery. Or some kind of breaking up of the big back into the small back into the distribution.

And if you move through a pass by lock, maybe the other idea would be some kind of technological advance that makes it easier for individual people to control the means of production. And I think that's a good example of that. So that means it's happened. Because even with all these, I like the argument of just some, I like the argument of small companies and really own industries and things like that.

But always in the possible in a capitalist system also. Yes. The gravitational pull is for larger. But it's possible to structure your company, essentially however you want to.

I guess maybe the thing that got me over the whole understanding of the lock is the idea that capitalism isn't so much a finished system as it is like a hallway, at least somewhere. And let's keep on building extensions of the hallway. Which seems like what we're doing with our operating level is in. The only thing to create extensions of the hallway is to allow things to fail.

So here's the problem. If you don't allow things to fail, then you don't allow an innovation. So let's go back to 2008 and the big AIG meltdown. The major luck years.

So for example, AIG has failed out. And then the big debate is, the reason for was if AIG melted down, like we would have been eating dog food in the streets. This is essentially what people were saying. We are going to be in the end of the world.

And of course AIG was definitely making that argument. We had failed, America is dead. So we nailed it out. And if we were only the other side of that trade loss, loss of money or whatever.

And it had to be paid out of taxes. But it actually turned out to be good. But we never got any innovation that would have come if AIG had failed. And now we had basically like a source fire that killed this old road force.

And any kind of opportunities for innovation for some sort of new insurance paradigm to take over. So that's the argument. I guess we can perpetuate a whole way. But if we allow, if we allow, and have a map working on stock, if we allow the failed hallways to crumble, or allow people to have options of hallways, if we don't do that, because something that's too big for it to fail.

And we're going to prop it up and prop it up because its destruction is too un-pileable for every reason. Then we are going to miss out on innovation for changing these kinds of things. And you're just kicking the can down the line for when it becomes so intolerable that the vast majority people say, our government save us or companies take care of us. And that's kind of what's going to be what Bellock felt to worry 100 years ago.

Does this have anything to do with the fact that maybe an I are moving to the woods in a starting farm? Maybe it does. But this is where I want Amazon. Is Bellock and Chesterton weren't idealists.

And they weren't. We need to rip the system down and rebuild it in this image and work towards a sort of utopia. Like how many are socialist are. And in many ways, how a lot of libertarian free market thinkers are.

Their idea was each individual person should take on the responsibility of trying to have as much control or their means of production as possible. And I think that's like a really good takeaway for Christian. I think that's a really good takeaway for Christian too already. I think that's already predisposed to be a little skeptical of, you know, man in materialism and kind of the carrots and sticks that are given to us for how we take part in the system.

I don't think it means that you remove yourself from modern economy, although I'm sure there are some persons out there who do have a cake for that. But I do think a little bit more of a little more thoughtfulness towards how I get my money, where my money goes to and who that money benefits. I think that kind of thoughtfulness needs to be something that is thought more preach more on and Christians should learn or should try to implement that subsidiary principle and also think more about like having a little more control over their the way that they have a means of production, the way they can take care and raise their families. Because right now the system is in very many ways not one that set up for the health of families.

We talked about companies saying, I guess what you're going to see at all. And that's what you can keep your job where you can quit and you can look for something else here. Good luck. That's a really disruptive thing for a family.

But that's kind of like a pretty crappy trade to have to think about. I'm going to move to a new place so I can continue to have money or do I really die sending try to find something else here. That's hard when lots of families go through. And then also the other one being the goods of modern life of so expensive now we need to house a new coming comes for this to happen.

And that's a pretty predictable strain on modern family life. And anyway, something that this will be a game because we're the university model. That's all about that. Anyways, I don't take ways.

I think it's just more that we as Christians need to be more thoughtful about our relationship to the modern system that we find ourselves in. And I'm not as green for the hills, we're on community and the woods kind of guy even though we're moving to the woods. But I think I'm thinking being a part of it is also kind of dangerous as well. I don't know what to take with any of the thoughts.

I think people to develop that skill and then they should be beneficial to its sort of training in the big company and then probably set out on your own. I think people should have an LLC which I don't know if you're going to do things off. But I don't know what to do. But I mean, it's because I don't really need one.

I can talk about it. You're looking for like liability purposes. But people should be developing skill and selling their own labor as opposed to selling it to a company. Yeah.

I agree with all of the ideas of the system. I think most of the results are possible in capitalist systems. Yes. This isn't working against.

Yeah. I guess maybe it's more that we kind of have two strains of capitalism going out at the same time. And when one strain gets big enough, it changes the game. And we have some kind of game changing decision that makes the possibilities of individual needs production labor impossible to do.

And we were saying that we were talking about Etsy and the increased opportunity for freelancing, doing work on your own. So the internet is at the internet. But I was going up numbers. You'll probably have a 90s or today.

More high percentage of people work for companies than did 50 years ago. So there's more opportunities there. We're actually choosing bigger companies. So here's an example.

Let's say that there's enough political movement behind Etsy and they say, you know what, Etsy, if you're going to have people on your platform, you need to provide those people health care. And that says where platform or non-employer. And it says it doesn't matter. Lots of people are using this.

And they don't have their health care. So if it's not going to be locked, then we shut down and they think it's that kind of idea of the centralized power that I think is no longer worried about. Anyway. Alright.

Well thank you for listening everybody. This is been the classical stuff you should know. You can catch us on Twitter at CLS-S-C-A-L stuff. And you know, if you tweet, we will talk back and then you can email us at classicalstuffatveritascounty.net and check our website at classicalstuff.net.

There's a lot of plastic classical like 14 times that a lateral. So I'm a go be a farmer and I hope you will. Yeah. And I'll be growing through the biggest.

So stay out of the root of the market because I'm going to charge just so much online. So we need to talk about guilds. Anyway. That's what we've got, that's what we've got, there's a few things we got wrong but I'm gonna show you all right now so we'll hear about those with your car cars.

Thanks, we'll see you later. Bye!