Another Response to the Great Distributism Debate

This time from Jimmy Ryan:

Distributism

Discussed at the June 18 meeting of the Irish Chesterton Society in the Central Catholic Library; aroused some heated debate about the ability of "pure" Capitalism to solve every economic problem.

This extract from "Christendom in Dublin/Flutter of Flags" gives the precedence to ethics:

And then as if in a dream, it seemed that the scene had altered and all the world was changed; and old powers began to play new parts. “The poor should as far as possible become owners.” The wiser statesmen of the late nineteenth century begin to hear older and more universal theories of the State, more generous than a cheap radicalism or a tribal Toryism; property as a natural right of men and not a legal privilege of lucky men; economics as the servant of ethics; the servant of the servant of God.

Or as the Lord said, possibly angrily: man does not live on bread alone!
Jimmy Ryan