JANUARY 1, 1984 ❣
Exerpts from the article... A Distributist Society🎔♡
For Americans to believe that democracy has meaning, they must believe that life itself has meaning. And yet “there is no meaning in anything if the universe has not a centre of significance and an authority that is the author of our rights.”
“the idea of private property universal but private, the idea of families free but still families, of domesticity democratic but still domestic, of one man one house.”
"The most important American social development of the past half-century has been the emergence of suburbia as the home of what very shortly will be an absolute majority of Americans.
In 1912, Hilaire Belloc wrote that suburbanization was the first step in the restoration of property. He wanted the English government to guarantee loans for small land purchases, claiming “there is a universal tendency making for private ownership of houses and small plots just outside our great urban centers, and here a revolution upon a great scale could be effected.” Belloc’s suggestion has been enacted in the United States through the VA and FHA programs".
"Other prominent Americans agreed with Jefferson. In his first annual message to Congress, Andrew Jackson declared, “the wealth and strength of the country are its population, and the best part of the population are cultivators of the soil. Independent farmers are everywhere the basis of society and true friends of liberty.” The Homestead Act of 1862, which provided 160 acres of the public domain to any citizen after five years of continuous residence, would, it was hoped, guarantee the future of the United States as a nation of self-sufficient, agricultural proprietors".
"This most urbane of Americans wrote to John Adams in 1811, “I have often thought that if heaven had given me choice of my position and calling, it should have been on a rich spot of earth, well watered, and near a good market for the production of the garden. No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth.” His acquisition of the Louisiana Territory in 1803 would, he believed, provide enough land to insure the nation remaining an agricultural paradise for centuries".
It is thus not surprising that the Declaration of Independence identified the ownership of property with the “pursuit of happiness,” that the early state constitutions guaranteed the right to own property, and that the first amendment to the Constitution provides that no one can be “deprived of life, liberty or taken for public use without just compensation.”
"The widespread distribution of property, both the idea and the reality, has been central to the American experience since the colonial period. The literature promoting immigration to the colonies emphasized the opportunity to acquire land. With land virtually limitless, fee simple ownership was the norm during the colonial period, while economic dependence was infrequent and generally temporary. In the South, plantation farming existed only because of slavery. In the Hudson Valley, where tenants worked on vast estates, the “patroonship” system was continually challenged, particularly in the 1760’s by a group called the “Westchester Levellers.”
"Its wage-slaves will either sink into heathen slavery, or seek relief in theories that are destructive not merely in method but in aim; since they are but the negations of the human appetites of property and personality.” For Americans to believe that democracy has meaning, they must believe that life itself has meaning. And yet “there is no meaning in anything if the universe has not a centre of significance and an authority that is the author of our rights.”
"As early as the first decade of the century, Belloc and Chesterton defended the individual proprietor and warned against political and economic centralization. In What’s Wrong with the World (1910), Chesterton wrote that the “real vision” of mankind was “the idea of private property universal but private, the idea of families free but still families, of domesticity democratic but still domestic, of one man one house.”
"Actually Distributist principles were more highly valued and more widely practiced in the United States, that strange land across the ocean where resided John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, and J. P. Morgan, the symbols of modern capitalism and industrial-financial plutocracy".
A Distributist Society
Exerpts from the article... A Distributist Society🎔♡
For Americans to believe that democracy has meaning, they must believe that life itself has meaning. And yet “there is no meaning in anything if the universe has not a centre of significance and an authority that is the author of our rights.”
“the idea of private property universal but private, the idea of families free but still families, of domesticity democratic but still domestic, of one man one house.”
"The most important American social development of the past half-century has been the emergence of suburbia as the home of what very shortly will be an absolute majority of Americans.
In 1912, Hilaire Belloc wrote that suburbanization was the first step in the restoration of property. He wanted the English government to guarantee loans for small land purchases, claiming “there is a universal tendency making for private ownership of houses and small plots just outside our great urban centers, and here a revolution upon a great scale could be effected.” Belloc’s suggestion has been enacted in the United States through the VA and FHA programs".
"Other prominent Americans agreed with Jefferson. In his first annual message to Congress, Andrew Jackson declared, “the wealth and strength of the country are its population, and the best part of the population are cultivators of the soil. Independent farmers are everywhere the basis of society and true friends of liberty.” The Homestead Act of 1862, which provided 160 acres of the public domain to any citizen after five years of continuous residence, would, it was hoped, guarantee the future of the United States as a nation of self-sufficient, agricultural proprietors".
"This most urbane of Americans wrote to John Adams in 1811, “I have often thought that if heaven had given me choice of my position and calling, it should have been on a rich spot of earth, well watered, and near a good market for the production of the garden. No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth.” His acquisition of the Louisiana Territory in 1803 would, he believed, provide enough land to insure the nation remaining an agricultural paradise for centuries".
It is thus not surprising that the Declaration of Independence identified the ownership of property with the “pursuit of happiness,” that the early state constitutions guaranteed the right to own property, and that the first amendment to the Constitution provides that no one can be “deprived of life, liberty or taken for public use without just compensation.”
"The widespread distribution of property, both the idea and the reality, has been central to the American experience since the colonial period. The literature promoting immigration to the colonies emphasized the opportunity to acquire land. With land virtually limitless, fee simple ownership was the norm during the colonial period, while economic dependence was infrequent and generally temporary. In the South, plantation farming existed only because of slavery. In the Hudson Valley, where tenants worked on vast estates, the “patroonship” system was continually challenged, particularly in the 1760’s by a group called the “Westchester Levellers.”
"Its wage-slaves will either sink into heathen slavery, or seek relief in theories that are destructive not merely in method but in aim; since they are but the negations of the human appetites of property and personality.” For Americans to believe that democracy has meaning, they must believe that life itself has meaning. And yet “there is no meaning in anything if the universe has not a centre of significance and an authority that is the author of our rights.”
"As early as the first decade of the century, Belloc and Chesterton defended the individual proprietor and warned against political and economic centralization. In What’s Wrong with the World (1910), Chesterton wrote that the “real vision” of mankind was “the idea of private property universal but private, the idea of families free but still families, of domesticity democratic but still domestic, of one man one house.”
"Actually Distributist principles were more highly valued and more widely practiced in the United States, that strange land across the ocean where resided John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, and J. P. Morgan, the symbols of modern capitalism and industrial-financial plutocracy".
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