A sort of Agrarian Manifesto. What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 5. What would that look like, and why would it fix anything, other than limiting my choices and lightening my wallet? The Distributist Impact
So, having published this screed over a period of days, and then dropping the topic, we resume with the question.
Why, exactly, do you think this would do a darn thing?
Well, here's why.
A daily example.
When I started this entry on Monday, March 4, I got up, fixed coffee and took the medication I'm now required to as I'm 60 years old, and the decades have caught up with me. The pills are from a locally owned pharmacy, I'd note, not from a national chain, so I did a distributist thing there. It's only one block away, and I like them. Distributism.
I toasted a bagel, as in my old age the genetic "No" for adults consuming milk has caught up with me. I got that at Albertson's and I don't know where the bagels are made. Albertson's is a national chain that's in the process of trying to merge with another national chain. Corporate Capitalism.
The coffee was Boyers, a Colorado outfit. Quasi distributist there.
I put cream cheese on the bagel. It was the Philadelphia brand. Definitely corporate capitalist there.
I'd already shaved (corporate capitalist, but subsidiarity makes that make sense).
I got dressed and headed to work. My car was one I bought used, but its make is one that used to be sold by a locally owned car dealer. No more. The manufacturers really prefer regional dealers, and that's what we have. All the cars we have come from the dealer when it was locally owned.
I don't have that option anymore. Corporate Capitalism.
In hitting the highway, I looked up the highway towards property owned by a major real estate developer/landlord. A type of corporate capitalism.
I drove past some churches and the community college on the way in. Subsidiarity.
I drove past one of the surviving fraternal clubs. Solidarity.
I drove past the major downtown churches. Solidarity.
I drove past a collection of small stores, and locally owned restaurants adn bars, and went in the buildings. Distributism.
I worked the day, occasionally dealing with the invading Colorado or other out of state firms. Corporate Capitalism.
I reversed my route, and came home.
So, in this fairly average day, in a Western midsized city, I actually encountered a fair number of things that would be absolutely the same in a Distributist society. But I encountered some that definitely ran very much counter to it.
Broadening this out.
A significant thing was just in how I ate. And I eat a lot more agrarian than most people do.
The meat in our freezer was either taken by me in the field, or a cow of our own that was culled. Most people cannot say that. But all the other food was store bought, and it was all bought from a gigantic national chain. In 1924 Casper had 72 grocers, and it was less than a quarter of its present size. In 1925, just one year later, it had 99 grocery stores. The number fell back down to 70 in 1928.
When I was a kid, the greater Casper area had Safeway, Albertson's, Buttreys and an IGA by my recollection, in the national chains. Locally, however, it had six local grocery stores, including one in the neighboring town of Mills. One located right downtown, Brattis' was quite large, as was another one located in North Casper.
Now the entire area has one local grocery store and it's a specialty store.
Examples like this abound. We have a statewide sporting goods store and a local one, but we also have a national one. The locals are holding their own. When I was young there was a locally owned store that had actually been bought out from a regional chain, and a national hardware store that sold sporting goods. So this hasn't changed a lot.
And if we go to sporting goods stores that sell athletic equipment, it hasn't either. We have one locally owned one and used to have two. We have one national chain, and used to have none.
In gas stations, we have a locally owned set of gas stations and the regional chains. At one time, we only had local stores, which were franchises. The local storefronts might be storefronts, in the case of the national chains, as well.
When I was a kid, the only restaurants that were national were the fast food franchises, which had competition from local outfits that had the same sort of fare and setting. The locals burger joints are largely gone, save for one I've never been to and which is a "sit down" restaurant, and we have national and regional restaurant chains. We retain local ones as well.
We don't have any chain bars, which I understand are a thing, and local brewing, killed off by Prohibition, has come roaring back.
We used to have a local meat processing plant that was in fact a regional one, taking in cattle from the area, and packing it and distributing it back out, including locally. There are no commercial packing plants in Wyoming now. The closest one, I think, is in Greeley Colorado, and the packing industry is highly concentrated now.
We don't have a local creamery, either. We had one of those at least into the 1940s, and probably well beyond that. The milk for that establishment was supplied by a dairy that was on the south side of town. It's no longer that and hasn't been for my entire life.
We've been invaded by the super huge law firms that are not local.
Our hospital is part of a private chain now, and there's massive discontent. That discontent took one of the county commissioners that was involved in the transfer of that entity out of county hands down in the last election. But that hasn't arrested the trend. My doctor, who I really like is part of a regional practice, not his own local one, anymore. This trend is really strong.
And then there's Walmart, the destroyer of locally owned stores of every variety.
So would distribution make anything different?
The question is asked by a variant of Wendell Berry's "what are people for", but in the form of "what is an economy for?".
It's to serve people, and to serve them in their daily lives, as people.
It's not to make things as cheap as possible.
On all of the retail things I've mentioned, every single one could be served by local retail stores. If we didn't have Albertson's, Riddleys and Smith's, we'd have a lot of John Albertson & Son's, Bill Riddley & Family, and Emiliano Smith's stores, owned by their families. If Walmart didn't exist, and moreover couldn't exist, it would be replaced locally, probably by a half dozen family owned retailers. . . or more.
Prices would in fact be higher, although there would be competition, but the higher prices would serve families who operated them, and by extension the entire community. And this is just one example.
Much of the old infrastructure in fact remains. As discussed above, numerous small businesses remain, and according to economic statistics, small business remains the number one employer in the US. But the fact is that giant chain corporations have made a devastating impact on the country, making all local business imperiled and some practically impossible to conduct.
Reversing that would totally reorient the local economy. Almost everyone would work for themselves, or for a locally owned business, owned by somebody they knew personally, and who knew them personally.
And with that reorientation, would come a reorientation of society.
We'll look at that a bit later. Let's turn towards the agrarian element next.
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