Some advocates of distributism relax the requirement of individuality a bit and include small group, even community, ownership of means of production but never the anonymous, aggregate corporate or indirect ownership that characterizes virtually all 401(k) retirement saving and investment schemes.

The system of natural liberty, or “capitalism” as its detractor Karl Marx insisted on calling it, is quite hospitable to distributist organizations of production – as long as they are profitable. Should a technology arise that is more productive than existing ones, can produce at small scales and yet has large diseconomies of scale, the system of natural liberty will encourage its widespread adoption and the creative destruction of existing mammoth corporate forms of ownership and worker anonymity.

Nothing quite matches the obtuseness of distributists, who are wont to call capitalism a total failure because there are recessions, while forgetting that even in recession the capitalist participants are vastly better off than they would be under distributism. Capitalists do make dumb comments, but not so much when they are advocating for a market system. Distributists, by contrast, are congenitally blind to reality.

Of course not, but I also don’t try to claim I ‘produce’ something when it’s really done on the backs of other people.

These organizations have sometimes had to thrive in environments hostile to their growth. Left-wing thinkers tend to prize a defined-benefit pension from the government, which provides a greater measure of security than 401(k)s (unless your government reneges and/or runs out of money, as state employees sometimes discover). On the other hand, banks (which are for-profit) sometimes try to enact laws that hinder the growth of credit unions, and many corporations try to make it hard to set up and maintain a co-op.

In any case, advocates of capitalism are also likely to say some pretty stupid things. After all, we also live in a culture that assumes that even disproportionate wealth is a sign of success and/or hard work, rather than temporary accidents or the consequence of luck, dishonesty, and/or exploitation, and that income disparities resulting from the same can be dismissed as mere covetousness.

And of course you make all of your own clothing, grow all of your own food, make all of your own tools and typed your comment on a computer that was manufactured by high-wage earning workers in a factory fueled 100% by sustainable energy.

But we shouldn’t let that stop us from engaging in a good ole back-patting.