So we were using different names for the same concept I reckon. I don’t fully agree with, say, granting the right to vote to all landed citizens as this website recommends - I’d add additional qualifiers in the ideal. However, the aforementioned kinist ideal is nearly as good and is certainly within the American tradition. Also, the goal of both is the same.

Your first two questions are just awesome, and should be drummed into the minds of our children as a standard of thought when considering an action to take.

Glad you like it Morality shouldn’t be removed from economics as it is today…

I suppose that might mean that an heir of a family-owned business who is not good at running the business himself should look at selling it to someone who is? or ??? lots of questions for me on this front.

It might be fine to manage a smaller business provided ownership is clear and the owner is held responsible*. Another facet is the sheer size, managers are often in charge of strangers they’ve little in common with, and the transience of corporate ownership (shares are readily bought and sold).

*but distributism definitely frowns on separating ownership from management in general, though it’s not a firm school of economic thought.

Technology really isn’t the issue at all. Agriculture is a form of technology, which is simply the application of technique, or technical know-how, to life. What a Kinist focuses on is the sustainability of the technology he employs, since his radically decentralizing, de-industrializing vision for society will not sustain the varieties of complex, multi-specialization technologies that modern industrial capitalism produces. But it will support technologies that are able to be produced on a community scale, and these are sufficient for prosperous and victorious living.

Technology is not the enemy per se, but rather the industrialism and concentration that produces certain kinds of technologies. In other words, I do not recommend that we de-industrialize to the point where we cannot produce tractors. From a racial standpoint it would be foolish to utterly forsake one of the greatest gifts God gave the white race: its creative ability. What we need is a different kind of society that is still empowered to benefit from the fruits of the mind, from inventiveness, without radically re-structuring it to make independence impossible, and one that restores the balance between self-reliance and specialization.

Over-specialization, over-industrialization, and the misuse of productivity increases have resulted in over-production and necessitated the collusion of government and financial concerns in credit markets to prop up the consumer economy, as social planners attempt to force men to live in high-density cities. Only the consumer economy can sustain the necessary population densities to make this goal of social engineering possible.

As Chesterton once wrote, the problem with capitalism is not too many capitalists but too few. The artisanal economy makes of everyone a capitalist, that is, an owner of the means of production. What we are trying to alleviate is the negative symptoms of massive divestiture of the means and know-how of production, and the transformation of society into one based on employment rather than ownership and consumption rather than production. In order for a very few people to become unimaginably wealthy, it is necessary for society to be composed of mostly consuming employees rather than producing owners, and agrarianism is a big part of the decentralization that leads the way to the latter from the former kind of society.

There are certain technologies that pose a risk in themselves, especially biotech - though breeding is traditional, it is is a wholly separate category. I continue to believe the biotech concern is not fully appreciated, though I don’t want to get off into that again…

There’s also communication technology that could leave kinists vulnerable to outside corruption. And there’s the defense industry.

Also, the modern economy is based largely on maximizing short term returns while risking societal interests, and this maximising is likely advantageous in the short term. We’ll also likely be more skeptical of newer technology - slower to adopt it. Prudence insists we take caution.

We’ll likely spend more resources on raising our children and less on working and, perhaps as a societal whole, on investments since right now the wealthy are often driven to pursue profit for profit’s sake - the wealthy invest a great deal.

Similarly, some technology will be rejected in part, and it’s expected that said rejection will prove disadvantageous as far as short term power pursuits are concerned.

I think there are important concerns, and that a kinist society won’t be superior in every category. What’s desired of course is that it would provide a best possible balance among all of the extremes, though Burnham’s conclusion that the managerial state is inevitable and a superior form of organisation can at times seem correct, though we better understand its nature and its many flaws and inefficiencies today.

I mentioned this to another who told me that a distributist society might more fully develop technology since it would be more interested in pure knowledge and virtuous pursuits that take into account more than mere greed. Also of course societal problems would be minimised, and any outside threats might motivate the population similar to how Jews are motivated, though no one likes the idea of hoping for fear as a motivator… I’m thinking partly of the Solzhenitsyn speech you mentioned earlier (it mentions how too much comfort can be unhealthy - a people need a little competition, a little threat). And then one of Dr. Fleming’s common points is that smaller societies motivate people to become more than they otherwise might in a more anonymous mass society. And peer pressure is stronger in a smaller society.

John Marshall,

You are very right.

John Marshall - 24 August 2008 05:21 PM

Technology really isn’t the issue at all. Agriculture is a form of technology, which is simply the application of technique, or technical know-how, to life. What a Kinist focuses on is the sustainability of the technology he employs, since his radically decentralizing, de-industrializing vision for society will not sustain the varieties of complex, multi-specialization technologies that modern industrial capitalism produces. But it will support technologies that are able to be produced on a community scale, and these are sufficient for prosperous and victorious living.

Some of these newer technologies can be used even if one choeses an Agrarianist lifestyle.