G. K. Chesterton championed an economic model that was the antithesis of both capitalism and socialism. As Americans, we tend to view capitalism and socialism as the last two survivors of economic evolution, who are now locked in a titanic struggle. Our more immediate concerns in the U. S. revolve around the next elections and whether big government will get bigger by raising taxes, expanding programs, and redistributing the wealth or will it withdraw and give the reins to big business and the profit motive?
In 1935, near the end of his life, Chesterton reflected on his G. K.'s Weekly, which had just released its 500th edition:
I am the editor of the only a paper in England which is devoted to what is a perfectly normal idea - private property. Most modern property isn't private, and ordinary capitalism makes it even less private if possible than ordinary communism. The system under which we live today is one of huge commercial combinations in which property isn't private ... What we mean by private property is that as many people as possible should own the means of production; the ground in which to dig, the spade with which to dig, the roof under which to sleep at night, the tools and machinery of production should belong to as many separate individuals as possible. There is a case for communism; there is even a case for capitalism; but they are both cases against private property. They both mean that it is not a good thing that separate men should own separate tools, separate farms, separate shops, but that all should be linked together in one great machine, whether it is a communist State or a capitalist business.
If Chesterton could see the division of labor we have today in our "huge commercial combinations" he would probably stagger. Our ever increasing division of labor has cut workers off from nature and, as Chesterton said, this means being cut off from the "causes of things." This distorts our perception of reality as we begin to think that food comes from supermarkets and clothes from malls or that everything comes from Super Walmart or Target Greatland.
In light of the industrial revolution, was Chesterton longing for something impractical ? Maybe. But even though Chesterton was an idealist he was practical. Even though he romanticized the small cities and the country life of noble peasants of the medieval past, he had a plan for his day. Merry England might have been a faint memory, but England could still be the home of merry men if the land were distributed as equally as possible to the maximum number of them. This would mean that people would be able to sell what they made and buy what they needed in their local communities. This would produce a quality of life that has been largely lost (and cut down on transportation costs too).
Chesterton's economic model is called Distributism. Is Distributism feasible apart from a Marxist type revolution or an economic catastrophe? Chesterton thought it was: "Every contract by which small property would pass into the possession of large property should be prohibitively taxed, and similarly the setting up of every small business or every small ownership of land should be advantaged in the same fashion."
Could it be that easy?
