Roomin' House Blues

My Political Biography  For various reasons, dear reader, I need to post my political biography before further political activities,  This is not intended as a monument to my ego, but for the edification of others I will be working with politically, and my other readers as they can benefit from it. The latter part of my post will deliberately read like a resume, the beginning more literary.  Aristotle says that man is a political animal and I have been very much a political animal in my life, starting from a childhood infatuation with JFK, my burst of tears on his assassination, an early addiction to newspaper reading, and my rapt attention to the 1964 party conventions. My first practical political activity in the conventional sense was to canvass for a school bond at age 15 to better fund my public school. But I learned I could use leverage  at age 14 when I told an unfriendly parish priest that I could resolve the matter at hand by calling a priest I kne...

I have been considering systems of economic and political thought that stem from Catholic social teaching and try to apply it.  In Rerum Novarum Pope Leo the 13th talked about the need to create greater social equality without extending the power and responsibilities of the state beyond it's proper role.   This proper role was not well defined, but it is clear that Pope Leo say in state socialism the dangers of too much state control over individual human beings and accelerated class conflict.  He did not, I think, have a libertarian view, although it would not be irrational to read that into the document.  But I think the fact that the emphasized that the state did have a proper role runs contrary to libertarianism.  He did say that the poverty and suffering of the workers needed to be alleviated and that greater access to production and property on the part of the workers was needed. It is from this that the idea of distributism,...