There is a third form of society, and it is the only one in which sufficiency and security can be combined with freedom, and that form 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; making it neither Capitalist nor Communist, but Proprietary.Mr. Belloc, writer of children's stories, also turns out to be clearheaded and precise in his observations of society. He may sound pessimistic, even of his own suggestions, but I think this is more his realism speaking than any sort of morbid outlook. One glance at his poetry can tell you that the man is anything but a dark soul.
Property, as a general social institution, well-divided property, having disappeared and Capitalism having taken its place, you cannot reverse the process without acting against natural economic tendencies. Well-divided property will not spring up of itself in a Capitalist society. It must be artificially fostered.
It is the conviction that a change of philosophy is not possible in time to be of service, which has decided most of those who have enough historical knowledge and enough moral sense to hate capitalism, and at the same time enough intelligence to despise Socialism, to stand aside or (or what comes to the same thing as standing aside) to discuss the abstract doctrine of economic freedom without attempting to issue a concrete programme for its re-creation.
In the case, therefore, of the artisan, as in the parallel case of the shop, the thing to work for is a revolution in political principle; a new set of ideas and therefore a new set of enactments, the reverse of those which built up industrial capitalism. We need enforceable laws and actual institutions which shall artificially advantage the small distributor against the great, the small craftsman or small user of machinery against the large manufacturer. That is, of course, "uneconomic." In other words, it will cost effort. So do the luxuries personally enjoyed by the big capitalists today. A well-made piece of furniture, neither repulsive nor mechanical in design, will cost more than a piece turned out by mass production. But you are buying something for society at a price, and it is a something well worth society's while - much better worth while in our eyes than cheap furniture. That something is citizenship, and the escape from slavery.
Either we restore property or we restore slavery, to which we have already gone more than halfway in our industrialized society. I do not discuss here whether slavery (whether to a very rich man, or group of men, or to the State) is a bad thing, or a good thing. I only say that, without well distributed property, freedom cannot be; and that, if we leave things as they are, slavery must come.
When men have become wage slaves they think in terms of income. When they are economically free they think in terms of property.
In other words, high taxation destroys the middle class. It dries up the stream by which a middle class is brought into existence and maintained. It breeds plutocracy.
Credit is not a vital element in all societies; it is not a permanent and general social, economic, or political problem. The modern function of credit is of comparatively recent development; it has already gone woefully wrong, and appears to be approaching catastrophe.
But he may make you into a depressed mind with his numerous cautions and warnings of the waywardness of economics and society. It will weigh even more on your shoulders when you think that he was writing almost a hundred years ago and predicting the imminent demise of freedom. It must raise the question in your mind, how much freedom do we actually have?
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