THE DISTRIBUTIST MANIFESTO

1. Distributists propose to go back to fundamentals, and to rebuild society from its basis in agriculture, instead of accepting the industrial system and changing the ownership.

2. Distributists affirm that the evils which Socialists trace to private ownership of property do not flow from the institution as such, but from the maldistribution of property which has come about as a consequence of laws favoring large ownership at the expense of small, and the absence of laws to prevent the misuse of money and machinery.

3. Distributists would not only restrict the use of machinery where it stands in the way of widespread distribution of property, but also where it conflicts with what they are accustomed to regard as the permanent interests of life.

4. Distributists insist that the interests of society, religion, human values, art and culture come first, and that machinery should be prohibited wherever it runs counter to them.

5. Distributists believe that the only legitimate use of money is to use it as "a common measure of value," and that all the problems of money, which so often people to believe in the existence of a kind of economic witchcraft, arise from the fact that there are so many people in the world who do not want to use money as a common measure of value, but to make more money.

6. Distributists believe that the way to make money a common measure of value is to fix prices, wages, and rents at a just level... [this would be] the first step towards a general restoration of property by destroying the power of the capitalists to undersell small men.

7. Distributists seek a return of a Guild system. They advocate such regulative Guilds (over against productive Guilds) is that the enforcement of standards, moral conduct, and workmanship, over industry, would operate to take the control of industry out of the hands of the financier and place it in those of the craftsmen and technicians.

8. Distributists believe that they key to the problems of property, usury, and credit are seen to be found in the fixation of prices, wages, and rents at a just level.

9. Distributists believe that in a perfect society people are held together by personal and human ties, and not by the impersonal activity of the state. The state is "to enable good men to live among bad."

10. Distributists believe that a society is only in a stable and healthy condition when its manufacturers rest on a foundation of agriculture and home-produced raw material., and its commerce on a foundation of native manufactures.

11. Distributists are opposed to Free Trade theory even more than its practice, recognizing in it the principle of social disintegration... It stands to reason that nations which pursue a national self-sufficiency will have less reason to quarrel with one another than those which follow international policies; while nations with normal and mixed economic will better understand each other than nations of specialists.

12. Distributists do not attempt the formation of a new political party, but seek to attain their ends through the permeation of existing parties, the platform, the Press, and other organizations.

13. Distributists restrict their activities to urging upon the public the necessity of reviving agriculture, to the end of making this country as self-supporting as possible as regards to essential foodstuffs; while in connection with this revival it advocates the fixation of prices at a just level (standard prices), organized marketing, and the control of imports.

Popular Distributists: Hilaire Belloc, Cdr. Herbert Shove, George Maxwell, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Penty, H.J. Massingham, Eric Gill, Harold Robbins, Father Feeney, Father Coughlin, the contributors to I'll Take My Stand and Who Owns America?