Time for the Third Way

As Dr Peach points out, the Third Way already exists in the Papal Encyclicals and the writings of G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.

From Crisis

By Andrew J. Peach, JD, PhD

The ahistorical Left offers repackaged communism, the deadliest human failure and most triumphant demonic achievement in history. And the gilded Right screams about communism while peddling a ludicrous laissez-faire fantasy.

Everyone knows the grim reality. According to the Congressional Budget Office, America’s top 1 percent owns 30.5 percent of the country’s wealth, and the bottom 50 percent owns 3.5 percent. In other words, the top 1 percent owns around 10 times the wealth of the bottom half. And it doesn’t get much better after that. The top 20 percent owns 86 percent of the wealth; or conversely, the bottom 80 percent owns 14 percent of the wealth. In short, America is a plutocracy.

Everyone also knows the Punch-and-Judy retorts to these jarring facts. The ahistorical Left offers repackaged communism, the deadliest human failure and most triumphant demonic achievement in history. And the gilded Right screams about communism while peddling a ludicrous laissez-faire fantasy. Meanwhile, the economic divide gets wider.

More people are beginning to realize it is the same puppeteer behind Punch and Judy. Like all apparatchiks, Congress’ “socialists” and “communists,” like Nancy Pelosi and Bernie Sanders, are multimillionaires, enriched through years of lucrative “public service,” including insider trading. President Obama increased his wealth 5,300% between entering and leaving office. The Covid regime, largely under President Biden, produced one of the greatest transfers of wealth in American history, increasing the billionaire class by 70 percent. So much for the little guy.

It is long past time for a third way. Hilarie Belloc’s An Essay on the Restoration of Property is a good place to start.

Writing in 1936, Belloc sought to restore “economic freedom” to postindustrial England through “widely distributed property.” “Economic freedom” is the ability of a family to control the means of production of wealth sufficient “to express that diversity which is life.” In other words, the family should own sufficient property, including land and a house, to meet its material needs and enough leisure and resources to develop their creative faculties. 

In a “capitalist” society, “in which a minority control the means of production, leaving the mass of the citizens dispossessed,” economic freedom is the privilege of a few. The masses are “wage slaves,” beholden to the wealthy few. The result is dispossessed masses facing insecurity and insufficiency and society becoming increasingly unsustainable. 

For Belloc, a “capitalist” society facing widespread insecurity and insufficiency has three options short of revolution. 

First, communism.

Under this…system the means of production are controlled by the officers of the State, who are masters of all the workers (slaves of the State), and the wealth produced is distributed, at the discretion of the State officials, among the families, or, if an attempt be made to abolish even the family, then, among the individuals of the community.

Ninety years later, the Left is still hawking this same bloody bromide. Yet even in 1936, before corpses began piling up, Belloc knew communism was “of its nature unstable but practicable at a heavy strain…for only a comparatively short space of time.”

Belloc makes short work of the delusion of “communal property”:

No man feels of public property that it is his own; no man will treat it with the care or the affection of a thing which is his own; still less can a man express himself through the use of a thing which is not his own, but shared in common with a mass of other men.

The second option is the “Servile State.” As Belloc fleshed out in a separate work of that name, the Servile State achieves stability among capitalism’s dispossessed masses “by keeping them alive by exploiting them at a wage, and when they cannot do this, still keep[ing] them alive in idleness by some small subsidy.” “[E]very family—or every individual, if the family be eliminated—shall receive at least so much wealth as will maintain a certain standard of comfort and leisure.”

If America is not currently a Servile State, it is fast approaching one. According to USAFacts, a third of the country received some form of government assistance in 2022, with nearly half of all children receiving assistance from programs like WIC, NSLP, TANF, Section 8 housing, etc. Recently, billionaire Elon Musk proposed that the federal government issue “universal high income” checks “to deal with unemployment caused by AI.” Whether that proposal, which is in its early stages, will include fentanyl rations or Netflix streaming is unclear. 

The Servile State is a society of widespread government slavery and dehumanization. The slaves’ necessities may be met, but they are met at the cost of their economic freedom and, thus, at the cost of their dignity, initiative, and creative faculties—i.e., their humanity.

http://But there is a third way: Belloc’s “Proprietary” state. That state is “a society in which property is well distributed and so large a proportion of the families in the State severally OWN and therefore control the means of production as to determine the general tone of society.”

“[I]t is the only [form of society] in which sufficiency and security can be combined with freedom.” Communism and the Servile State may provide a basic minimum income, but both are forms of slavery. The only difference is the master—government on the one hand or government and the wealthy on the other. 

The Proprietary state is a society in which homeownership is widespread and family businesses are the norm. To quote George Bailey from It’s a Wonderful Life, the men and women who “do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community” will have “a couple of decent rooms and a bath”—that is, a roof over their head that is their own. It is a society in which communities of families have not only economic freedom—the ability to meet their material needs and develop their creative faculties—but also the power to stave off threats to that freedom from developers, box stores, and national chains.

Far from the bloviating on the Left and Right, the Proprietary state is truly “democratic.” As G.K. Chesterton observed in What’s Wrong with the World, “Property is merely the art of the democracy. It means that every man should have something that he can shape in his own image, as he is shaped in the image of Heaven” (37). 

How this state can be achieved, if at all, will be the subject of future columns. But, in short, it will require the resurrection of the family, a transformation of personal ownership and spending habits, detachment from material excess, new customs and expectations, and—yes—legal changes. 

The Proprietary state may never come to be, but it is nonsense to object that we need to “keep the government from interfering with the market.” Giving Walmart the power to destroy small town America is just as much “market interference” as giving the richest man in the world $38 billion in government funding through contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits. The government was, is, and always will be a necessary market player. The only proposed difference is to make that player serve the common good—i.e., everyone.

Again, Belloc: “All the powers of the State have been invoked by Capitalism to restore servile conditions; we shall not react against servile conditions unless we avail ourselves of the same methods.”

A consensus seems to be emerging that the fabric of American society is coming apart. As Patrick Deneen documented in his brilliant Why Liberalism Failed, the economic individualism of John Locke and lifestyle individualism of John Stuart Mill have together eliminated nearly every economic and cultural bulwark of community life; and as a result, America is collapsing. That collapse, however, is an opportunity to restore a Judeo-Christian civilization built upon the God-given dignity of every person. To embrace Belloc’s Proprietary state is to embrace that opportunity.