Steve Skojec

Our discussion, going on now for some time and through many comments, is finally beginning to take some definitive shape, with specific examples and ideals being nailed down a bit more.

I must state again at this point in the conversation that I do not yet consider myself a distributist, only that I lean toward distributism as the most Catholic economic system and the one that makes the most sense to me, even if it’s only an ideal.

In terms of the practical limitations of establishing a distributist system (or, restoring “the institution of Property”) Belloc very wisely notes the following:

Economic freedom is in our eyes a good. It is among the highest of temporal goods because it is necessary to the highest life of society through the dignity of man and through the multiplicity of his action, in which multiplicity is life. Through well-divided property alone can the units of society react upon the State. Through it alone can public opinion flourish. Only where the bulk of the cells are healthy can the whole organism thrive. It is therefore our business to restore economic freedom through the restoration of the only institution under which it flourishes, which institution is Property. The problem before us is, how to restore Property so that it shall be, as it was not long ago, a general institution.

Three provisos must be kept clearly in mind before we approach the problem and attempt its practical solution.

The first proviso is that in the restoration of property we are not attempting, and could never reach, a mechanical perfection. We are only attempting to change the general tone of society and restore property as a commonly present, not a universal, institution.

The second proviso is that we cannot even begin such a reform unless there is a favorable state of mind present in society [which demonstrates the point of these discussions - Steve] a desire to own property, suffiicient to support and maintain the movement and nourish institutions which will make it permanent.

The third proviso is that in this attempt to restore Economic Freedom, the powers of the State must be invoked.

- Hilaire Belloc, An Essay On The Restoration Of Property

That’s right. All this discussion about standard of living, and the material goods we have at our disposal today that our grandfathers could never have imagined, and we have completely avoided the question of quality.

I’m guessing that our grandfathers would be stunned at the shoddiness of the things we have in our homes. Our rickety furniture, our poorly-made clothes, our highly-processed foods, our mass-produced goods - everything is disposable, easily broken, and none of it made to last. Much of it is also beyond our ability to repair, a hallmark of prior generations who bought things made well enough that they wouldn’t have to buy them again. Emma Johnson at MSN Money writes about this often overlooked aspect of the generation gap:

Americans in their 20s and 30s are now at least one generation removed from the era of homemade clothing and hand-crafted wood furniture, Underhill says. “In the 1950s, 90% of homes had sewing machines, which means women knew something about how clothes were put together. They could look at something in the store and tell if was of good construction or crappy construction,” he says. “In my office, I don’t know anyone who has bought a custom suit. They don’t know the difference between off-the-rack and custom.”

[snip]

How did this happen? How did we lose track of the value of quality things — objects that hold the promise of decades of use and beauty — and come to view all the possessions in our lives as disposable?

Daniel Nissanoff, online retail entrepreneur and author of “FutureShop: How the New Auction Culture Will Revolutionize the Way We Buy, Sell and Get the Things We Really Want,” says today’s consumer culture actually bucks the mindset that brought us here.

“As human beings we’ve been socialized to buy and save,” Nissanoff says. “In times not as prosperous as today, when we didn’t know where our next food or source of supplies would come from, our ancestors bought things with the notion of holding on to them for as long as they could and then passing them on to the next generation.”

In essence: Our forefathers were poorer than we are, and yet they had better stuff, relatively speaking.

[snip]

But appreciation for quality craftsmanship has been swept aside by freely available consumer credit and high-end design on low-cost merchandise, says Dayana Yochim, personal finance writer at The Motley Fool.

“Credit cards let us instantly satisfy our retail desires,” Yochim says. “Our grandparents had to delay that gratification. They figured that if they had to save for it, they’d better get the best they could. Now retailers want to catch that fleeting desire.”

But now that we know how much a veneered, mass-produced bookshelf costs, it is easy for us to dismiss a pricier, handmade, solid-wood version as outrageous — especially if you have never experienced fine furniture, Yochim says.

“All that information is telling us where to set the (price) bar,” Yochim says. “We’re looking at pricing before quality.”

My wife is a big one on the philosophy of, “Invest now, save later.” She prefers to buy her cars new, despite depreciation, because she knows exactly how well they’ve been taken care of and how they were broken in. She’ll buy things like furniture used because she is able to evaluate the sturdiness of a chest or armoire in a way that she can’t peek into an engine.

She learned this from her father, a Chinese immigrant who left the poverty stricken agricultural area of Guangdong when he was 14, and came to America, leaving his family behind. He had nothing. He worked hard. He joined the Navy. He worked in a butcher shop. He learned how to run a grocery store. With the help of a loan from his in-laws, he bought a grocery store. Then he bought a shopping center. He bought other businesses too.

He was a guy who worked his way up from literally nothing. He grew up in the poorest of third world conditions, without any of the things we take for granted. The houses, made from cement and bamboo, are extremely small, with rooms only big enough for one full-sized adult to lay on what looks (in the pictures) like a concrete slab that sits on the dirt. The room is just large enough to stand up and walk out of. The “kitchen” consists or a room just as small, but the concrete slab is waist high and has a hole in it to build a fire in for cooking. Often, the eating is done outside because there is no space. The nearby river serves as toilet, washroom, and drinking water supply for the people. The eat dog, frog, bat, cat, crickets…the kinds of things that Anthony Zimmern might have a hard time with. As my wife put it when I asked her about it, “Everyone is just one step up form the (tribal) people in the Amazon. At least my family wear clothes.”

What my father-in-law learned along his journey from squalor in China to modest American business owner is this: never settle. Save your money when you can, and you’ll have it for later, but don’t blow it on junk. It’s not worth it.

He is literally allergic to cheap stuff. I have no idea how his body knows, but it reacts. You give him a glass of cheap bourbon, and he sneezes after taking a sip. You hand him a snifter of Hennesy VSOP, and that’s a different story. With experience as a butcher, there are only certain cuts of meat that he’ll eat. When he bought clothes for his children, he bought them the best, most durable kind. Pay more upfront, but they’ll last longer later. His philosophy can be summed up as follows - “Why spend all your money on a bunch of junk? It’s no good and then it gets thrown out… might as well as put your money in the garbage.”

And yet, that’s what the free market forces a lot of families to do. I’ll bring up the big box stores again (if for no other reason than to poke at Joe Marier because they simultaneously drive many small businesses out of business, and then hook the low-paid wage-earners on their rock-bottom prices - prices made low because nothing they sell is made here. (It’s made by people from China, living in squalor.) Of course, the quality standards of the products being produced in the factories of the third world are horrible. Nothing lasts. Planned obsolescence, which was invented here in the good ol’ U.S. of A., has become the norm. If I can coax this toaster oven through the next 12 months, I’m happy, because I only paid $20 for it. Then, I’ll just replace it.

When you start adding up the cost of all those things you have to replace, it makes you begin to wonder - is it worth buying the cheap stuff? I’d say no, but what choice do we have? For most of us, getting it cheaper is far more important than getting it better. We have tight budgets to keep.  Sure, I’d love to buy that rock-solid Pennsylvania Dutch dining room set that I can pass on to my kids, but it costs as much as a small car. Our wages reflect the reality of our global economy, not a domestic, attention-to-detail, craftsmanship-based system of goods.

I can hear the shouting about mass-production and how I’d never have a DVD player if they didn’t and blah, blah, blah. The fact remains that it would be great to have local, well-made goods. I try, when I can, to buy from farmer’s markets and local food-producers. It’s one of the only places I can invest in a system that encourages quality and relationships between producers and consumers - relationships that demand accountability, I might add. Years ago, I started buying New Balance sneakers, because most of them were made in the U.S. Many are now made overseas, though they do keep a decent amount of production stateside. Economic patriotism isn’t dead out of pure apathy, it’s dead because people have been trained to try to get the most quality they can out of the cheapest possible product, even if it’s made by children. Even if the children are slaves.

I’m guessing that some of my capitalist objectors here might say that the money I spend at the farmer’s market, or on locally produced goods - all of which are more expensive - are a luxury that artificially bloats my cost of living. But that’s because capitalism seeks to maximize profit and lower expense, not correct what is wrong with the system. If I want to vote with my money, that’s fine, but I shouldn’t complain then about not having enough of it. After all, I could get by with less.

Should wealth be a prerequisite for having well-made goods? Should our reliance on globalization-induced pricing mean that our standard of living should preclude concerns about quality, or local sources? And by the way, what about adjustments for inflation? Speaking of our grandfathers, how did salaries then compare to now?

According to MeasuringWorth.com, a site dedicated to helping compare costs between various years according to a variety of metrics,

In 1931, an accountant in the US would be earning about $2,250, an amount that would represent a comparative purchasing power of $30,631 in current dollars. However, this salary is almost 45% more than what the average household spent in those days. This would correspond to $72,300 today, a “status” of nearly twice the national average.

So even with higher-quality goods, many of them local, a household in 1931 could live on $2,250, which amounts to Kevin’s arbitrary standard of $30,000 (in today’s dollars) with approximately $13,500 (today’s dollars) to spare. To accomplish a proportionate living standard today, a salary of $72,300 would be needed.

Yeah. I’m guessing our grandfathers would be surprised by our standard of living in more ways than one. They might be impressed by our TVs and dishwashers and DVD players, but overall, I’m willing to bet that their quality of life might make us pretty jealous.

Talk to me.

In our last comment thread, someone suggested that,

if a family wage was instituted, then bonuses or raises would still be applied appropriately- even if it meant giving raises when the man had a new baby.

To this, commenter Aaron responded:

How exactly does this in particular benefit the employer? Compensation is usually given to high-performers and/or talented butt-kissers. A corporation does not really care whether its employer has another child; it only cares about ROI. If it is a good investment to give a high-performer a raise, then the corporation who sees this will do so. If a low or average performing employee gets a raise based on having a child, how does that encourage people to perform well?

What Aaron has done here, in spectacularly succinct fashion, is underscore with several thick, black lines what is wrong with the current system. It is summed up in this sentence: “A corporation does not really care whether its employer has another child; it only cares about ROI.”

In the introduction to the IHS reprint of Hilaire Belloc’s An Essay On The Restoration Of Property, the editors state:

Readers will therefore not find, in Belloc’s works, traces of that skepticism which speaks of politics as merely the “art of the possible,” and of economics as a science of hypotheses based solely on observable phenomena and codified into a collection of equations, charts and graphs. As an integral Catholic, Belloc followed in the footsteps of St. Thomas the realist, who spoke of Politics as the moral science “which considers the proper ordering of men,” and Political Economy as that science “concerned with the using of money…for the good estate of the home.”

Thus is Belloc’s treatment of economic questions, in Restoration of Property, Economics for Helen, and the Servile State, concerned with reality in both its profoundest sense and its most practical. Profound because Belloc has always before him a knowledge of the Purpose of the sciences, a knowledge that all of the tools, techniques, and means means employed by them are given clear and well-defined directions and orientations by their various Purposes. And practical because when Belloc considers economic matters he is concerned not with the pie (-in-the-sky) charts of modern economic theoreticians, but rather with how to solve the problem of securing for men the material necessities of life in a manner most befitting both their dignity as free men and their sublimity as souls destined for Heaven. There is nothing novel in so doing; Belloc simply follows St. Thomas in subordinating the acquisition of wealth to the true needs of man: “That a man may lead a good life, two things are required. The chief requisite is virtuous action….The other requisite, which is secondary and quasi-instrumental in character, is a sufficiency of material goods, the use of which is necessary for virtuous action” (On Kingship, I, xv).

Such an approach has for a long time seemed quaint and “unrealistic” to a society concerned with satisfying “the bottom line” and getting “more bang for the buck.” Has seemed quaint - until recently. Today such an approach is touted almost as a “revelation” by many moderns who, all of a sudden, are realizing - even if unconsciously - that St. Thomas had the order of economic priorities exactly right. Protesting the domination of academic activity by finance, and the lawlessness of corporate America, a recent editorial in the Nation declares, “The larger purpose of the economic order, including Wall Street, is to support the material conditions for human existence.”

How charmingly similar to the approach taken by the classical and Catholic political economists, men forming a constant and coherent tradition extending over 2200 years, from Aristotle of the fourth century B.C. to Charles Devas of the early 20th century A.D.!

The editorial continues: “During the past two decades, a profound inversion has occurred in the governing values of US economic life and, in turn, captured politics and elite discourse - the triumph of finance over the real economy. In the natural order of capitalism, the financial system is supposed to serve the economy of production  - goods and services, jobs and incomes - but the narrow values of Wall Street have become the master.”

I have been trying to establish the fact that the obvious contention between the well-being of the worker and the company ROI too often finds the worker losing that battle. It is the health of the company that matters, not the health of the worker or his family. It is the depth of the corporate bank account that is of chief concern, not the ability of the worker to establish his family in a modest but comfortable standard of living. In corporations, the money flows uphill. This is simply the nature of capitalism, which is at essence a nicely-dressed but still greed-based economic model.

Aaron asks “If a low or average performing employee gets a raise based on having a child, how does that encourage people to perform well?”

The answer to that is simple. If a man is a worthless employee, he should still be fired. But if a man is treated by his company as if he is valued; if the employer seeks to ease the man’s financial worry and reward him for his contribution to society through the procreation of children (who will, it should be noted, become the future customers on which the long-term health of all commerce depends) he will have peace of mind and a sense of loyalty to the firm that will more than likely induce good will and a willingness to contribute.

Economic darwinism may produce some favorable benefits of competition, but it also creates bitterness, anxiety, backstabbing, manipulation, and the devious tactics of survival that help a man rise from poverty to wealth. People who aren’t making ends meet don’t give their best to their jobs. They come into work tired from lack of sleep, or hungover from trying to drown their sorrows. They resent those in the company who are prosperous but seem to do little while they are working hard just to scrape by. They may look for supplemental work, which takes more from their limited supply of time, energy, and mental clarity, making them less productive overall.

The model of the business should really be the family. When a new child is born into the world, his parents do not seek to make him prove himself and work his way up in the home; they invest in him with care and patience, and nurture the contributions he is able to make to the home as he grows old enough to bear responsibilities. A family can do this because its chief concern is love, not its bottom line. And if a business will never truly emulate this, it is possible to take true concern for the development and well-being of employees if the goal is modest profit, not infinite growth. Happy employees are productive employees, and as long as everyone in the company has what they need at home, why must a company continually grow in revenues? If every worker in a business is being provided for adequately, what is the great tragedy in annual sales which are flat?

But what man needs goes even deeper than a good company that takes an interest in his well-being. He needs, at some point, to become an owner himself.

Belloc says:

Man, to live, must transform his environment from a state in which it is less to a state in which it is more useful to himself. This process is called “The Production of Wealth.” Moreover, if a man is to live conformably to his nature, there must be available for his consumption a certain amount of wealth, in a certain variety, for a certain unit of time. For instance, in our society, he must have so much bread, so much meat, so much of a number of different foods every day, so much beer or wine or spirits (or, if he be too weak to consume these) so much tea or coffee or what not; a sufficient amount of somewhat complicated clothing, all to last over such and such an amount of time; and a sufficiency of fuel, housing, and all the rest of it, also to last a certain time.

Now this transformation of environment called “The Production of Wealth” is obviously only possible through the use of the instruments of production. A family can only live conformably to its human nature (that is, without undue suffering) in a given civilization on condition that it receive securely and constantly so much of this varied wealth for its consumption. But the wealth can only come into existence through the manipulating of natural forces by certain instruments; and there must also be an existing store of food and clothing and housing and the rest of it so that human beings may carry on during the process of production. These stores of wealth, these instruments and these natural forces are the Means of Production.

It is obvious that whoever controls the means of production controls the supply of wealth. If, therefore, the means for the production of that wealth which a family needs are in the control of others than the family, the family will be dependent upon those others; it will not be economically free.”

So my question to Aaron and the other Catholic free marketeers is this: Why should the business be the most important economic beneficiary in society, rather than the family? Set aside for a moment the system that we have - what should the ideal system be? Shouldn’t society seek to provide opportunities to make men owners, to possess private property of their own, to be able to provide for their families adequately and with some measure of comfort? Or do you think that the dog-eat-dog system is best, and that cheap wages, sky-high CEO pay and the economic advantages of globalization are the best thing for men?