The Distributists

About the same time that Ludwig von Mises was writing his Theory of Money and Credit, and Thorstein Veblen was writing his Theory of Business Enterprise, yet a third – and somewhat more obscure – group of social theorists was busily trying to come to grips with the faults and failures of the economic system around them. Like the others, they also thought that things were becoming too centralized, and did not trust to the general benevolence of such arrangements. Unlike the other groups, they had a strong religious bent informing their views. The two principal proponents of this view were lay Catholic writers, G.K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc, who even in their day were known more for their political journalism, religious writings, and fiction than their economic opinions. In fact, they were not even economists at all, and appear to have been less concerned with the efficiency of any production scheme than with its being well suited to the lives and dignity of those who participated in it. The group I am speaking of is the Distributists. Today, their views live on in the books of these two prolific writers as well as some few modern adherents to their views.