Caustic Ramblings

Here's a paraphrased summary of question from reddit on the topic of distributism and standard small businesses:

Is a family business really a distributist enterprise? Wouldn't the business in question have to be a co-operative in order to qualify as one? Isn't any standard business an enabler of what some might call "wage slavery?"

In my view, small local and family Businesses (in addition to co-op's, ect.) are vital parts of a Distributist economy. In many cases, a family business might have a small handful of employees, if needed. In the most traditional sense, those employees might be the children or close relatives of the proprietor, or at least members of the local community. In short, we could plainly state that a family business boosts both familial and local community relations magnitudes more than something like a corporate chain could ever hope to do. And having hired help is just a fact of life for any organization more complex than a sole proprietorship or a one-person consulting business; The need for wage and salary employees won't be going away any time soon. The mere existence of that is not synonymous with "wage slavery."

On the topic of co-ops's, I have not heard of any distributist thought/principles that asserts all business must be cooperatives. Have you? I think the overall solution is to encourage distributed ownership of property and resources rather than getting mired in specific details on how owners should and shouldn't run their own enterprises. In short, this system is called Distributism, not Redistributism.

The way I see it is that on a higher conceptual level, ownership is not just having a piece of paper that says you own property or a share of something. IMHO that's just being a stakeholder or investor. Real ownership is not a mere profit-sharing agreement, but rather something that requires having skin the game in addition to being endowed with a conscientious temperament and the ability to cultivate the stewardship skillset required to be successful at the art of ownership. Someone who's only skills and/or abilities at their job is operating a cash register and taking out the trash is not an owner of that business. Sorry but that will simply never be true.

Should having a much wider distribution of stakeholdership be a thing? Of course. I don't think many proponents of distributism would argue against that. There's no real community without ordinary people feeling and experiencing some degree/sense of investment in their social surroundings. But ownership itself is something that must be earned. And of course the perks of ownership comes with responsibilities.

Having said all of that, I do recognize that there is certainly a psychological type of ownership and this can be bestowed upon people who may not have much experience or skill when it comes to owning things. For example, an employee of a co-op who passes whatever probationary period is required and is thus granted a small share in the organization now has a direct incentive to improve their own on-the-job performance because they now feel a sense of "ownership" in relation to the organization they work for. They still might not be good at managing anything beyond their own workload, yet they still feel the organization is party theirs in a way. Cooperatives do sure sound like a really effective way of boosting employee morale.

I agree wholeheartedly with the concept of profit-sharing (Though I'm still weird on calling it "ownership" in the physical sense) and I certainly believe that way more businesses/organizations **should** (incoming is/ought explanation...) adopt that model. But there would really need to be some kind of significant cultural shift for that to happen in a consensual manner. Greedy proprietors and executives will opt for the business model that rewards themselves with the highest slice of the take they can get. But yeah, consent is key; economic decentralization and mass profit sharing should never come about due to top-down government coercion. Get the government involved and they will always find a way to screw things or even make the situation way worse then it was prior to their act of meddling.

Overall, mass wage servitude is good for no one except a tiny oligarch class. Distributism can certainly help create a much wider sense of ownership among the people.