Acton Institute PowerBlog - Entries from Friday, August 29, 2008

Laura Ingraham, the popular talk radio host, will be in Grand Rapids for an event sponsored by the Acton Institute on September 17. Please make plans to join us for this exciting event. Currently there are still tickets available and you can purchase them online through the Acton Institute here.

The event will take place at the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel, where Ingraham will speak, followed by a question and answer session. Also, there will be a book signing of her newest book Power to the People, and a dessert reception.

Ingraham is a refreshing conservative voice with great intellectual depth. I have always enjoyed listening to her commentary. Here is an excerpt from Power to the People:

Too often we have believed that “freedom” means that we have no duties or responsibilities to others. That “anything goes” mentality may appear to be empowering, but it is not. Instead, it creates a sense of anarchy that makes most Americans very unhappy.

The Founding Fathers did not risk their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor so we could become spoiled, pampered, narcissistic and focused solely on our own pleasure. An ordered society was the Founders’ goal — a place where we could live our lives in limitless possibility — but only if we fulfilled our obligations. They wanted us to have the liberty to tap into our creative powers, for our own good and for the good of our countrymen. This is the pathway to true happiness. But that society is only possible if we, the people, have a shared set of values, a common set of beliefs that bind us together. The Founders did not view liberty as a license, but as a sacred responsibility to be used for the good. They understood that liberty cannot be separated from virtue.

Distributism may be a foreign term to many, but it is a movement of some importance in the history of Catholic social and economic thought. Popularized especially in early twentieth-century England by the prolific writers G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, distributism has enjoyed mini-resurgences from time to time on both sides of the Atlantic. That it still packs some punch here in the U.S. is demonstrated, for example, by the recent creation of IHS Press. (IHS is not exclusively a distributist outlet, but distributist literature represents a significant portion of their publishing program.)

In a nutshell, distributism envisions an economic order modeled on the guild-dominated economies of medieval Europe. Advocates take Catholic social teaching seriously; indeed, they frequently insist that CST virtually obligates Catholics to support a distributist program. There is much of value in the distributist vision, including criticism of consumerist culture and an emphasis on wide ownership of property and communal cooperation. (See Wikipedia for a fuller, sympathetic treatment of the subject.) In practice, however, many observers believe that implementation of a distributist agenda would mean major regulation of and restrictions to entry to industries and professions, controls on prices and wages, and heavy-handed government involvement in the economy.

There have been few critiques of distributism published in recent years, but the renewed interest it is receiving demands that some attention be paid. Thus, the latest Christian Social Thought Series, from bestselling and award-winning author Thomas E. Woods, Jr.: Beyond Distributism. Order it now at the Acton Book Shoppe.

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An Evening with Laura Ingraham

Beyond Distributism

Recent Video