And another month later: Distributionism and Subsidarity in Taxation

I guess I'm running out of truly crazy ideas that fit. In reality, I've been posting more on other people's blogs.

One of those is Inside Catholic- a spinoff of Crisis Magazine, it's a place to discuss politics and economics and religion from a Catholic point of view. Recently, this post on the Flat Sales Tax got me thinking: what would a truly distributionist American economic system look like?

Well, as I've written before, the first thing we'd need to do is repeal Article I, Section 10 of the US Constitution. Allow states to create and manage local economic systems. This would grant a new level of freedom to individuals and government, and create a big headache for big business! But it would certainly be distributism.

But then, how would we fund the Common Defense and promotion of the General Welfare? Here's my thought- we do it the same way we currently apportion the government. We take the current federal budget, and divide it by the number of House of Representative Congressional Districts. Each state, then, is given the right to figure out the taxes to fill this bill. The neat part? No more IRS, just like the flat taxers want- but more populous states get higher tax bills, and smaller, less populous states get lower tax bills, in proportion to their population.

I am assuming that eventually, there will be evolutionary change and economic winners and losers in any distributionist experiment; states that balance their taxes, trade, and money supply the most successfully will draw population to them, states that fail to balance the money supply, taxes, and trade successfully will lose population. This way, the federal government gets to share in the wealth of the success of distributionism.