Toward the Third Way

Americans have lost faith in either party to bring about a just economy. The Left has descended into communism, putting the means of production and the power to distribute property in the hands of the State. The Right disingenuously touts a free market while tilting the playing field toward the rich and wealthy corporations. Whatever crumbs either provides to the masses come at the cost of freedom. Both create slaves—the Left to government and the Right to the wealthy few (and government). And both the Left and the Right increase the gulf between rich and poor. 

There is a third way. As argued in my previous column, Hilaire Belloc’s “Propriety State” steers a path between these two failures. Set forth in An Essay on the Restoration of Property and The Servile State, Belloc champions a society in which property and the means of production are widely distributed among families. The Proprietary or “Distributist” State is the only form of society that combines economic sufficiency and security with freedom. In short, it is the only Christian way of organizing society. 

But some believe that the Proprietary or Distributist State is a pipe dream, a practical impossibility. “That will never happen” is the usual refrain. Belloc himself was not naïve about his odds. “The forces against even the partial success of such an attempt are ubiquitous and highly organized, and what is worse, they have become instinctive.” 

How, then, will the Proprietary State come about? Are there insurmountable barriers in its way? 

Belloc understood in 1936 what is still true in 2026: the greatest barriers to the Proprietary State are cultural, not legal. “Where you have a public opinion supporting well-divided property, a state of society which takes well-divided property for granted and therefore a philosophy consonant with well-divided property, institutions and customs conservative of property will arise of their own accord.” 

The greatest cultural barrier to the Proprietary state is the collapse of the family. Reversing that trend would take us far down the Distributist road. Brad Wilcox, a leading sociologist on the family and director of the National Marriage Project, found that, by their 30s, married couples enjoy a significant “marriage premium” over their single or cohabiting counterparts. The income of married men is 226 percent that of singles and 140 percent that of cohabiting men, and the income of married women is 237 percent that of singles and 133 percent that of cohabiting women. 

The causal arrow, however, runs both ways on the family and the economy. Wilcox again: “Men who are employed full-time and well paid are more likely to be viewed as attractive prospects for marriage, to get married, and to stay married.  The opposite is true for men who are not gainfully employed.” In other words, the conservative trope that poverty is caused by broken or never-formed families is only half-true. Poverty also breaks up families and keeps them from forming. Yet any headway that can be made toward resurrecting and stabilizing the family will also be headway toward the Proprietary state.

The second great cultural obstacle is that Americans fundamentally see themselves as placeless wage earners and consumers rather than grounded owners and producers. The American vocational quest is “What job can I get, how much will I get paid, and how will I spend it?” We are willing to travel far and wide to pursue the highest paying job and enjoy the latest “experience.” A Proprietary State, however, requires families who see themselves as home and community builders, not tourists on a lifetime of sightseeing.

Americans need to put down roots, claim a place as their own, and spend their lives serving that community. As Austin Ruse put it: “[C]ontinue your family story, yeah unto the sixth generation. Let them know in 2525 that you were here and that you inherited something beautiful, you held this compact for a little while and then passed in on to them.”

The legal obstacles to the Proprietary State are also formidable. To bring it about and restore economic freedom “the powers of the State must be invoked.” But the danger of government involvement is real. Any viable road to the Proprietary State must navigate that hazard. Government will always be thoroughly corrupt and will always have interests at odds with the common good.  

Belloc understood these facts as well as anyone. Other than an absolute monarchy, which is “too wealthy to be bullied,” “all other forms of government” will succumb to “pressure” from the wealthy. “[W]hen the wealth class is supreme and has complete economic power over the mass of citizens, laws will inevitably be made favouring the continuance of the system and handicapping the better distribution of property.”

Among Catholics, perhaps the most pervasive concern about Distributism is that it is government “redistribution” of property and, therefore, indistinguishable from the evils of socialism and communism. For example, the anonymous author of “Against Distributism: Who Does the Distributing?”believes it is a “form of confiscation” and, therefore, a cure that is worse than the disease.

But Belloc does not advocate simply taking from the rich and giving to the poor.  (The “Against Distributism”author attacks a straw man.) Belloc’s legal project is to change default rules—sometimes through differential taxation—which currently tilt in favor of the wealthy. Viable laws favoring widely distributed property will not be essentially confiscatory. Confiscatory laws would be violently opposed and, even worse, accumulate property in the hands of government, which should be avoided at all costs. 

Three examples should provide a general direction of what a Proprietary legal regime would look like.

First, Belloc was prescient in advocating a differential tax on residential and business property. “There must be a radical difference in the burdens imposed upon land occupied…by a human family living thereon and land occupied by others from whom the owner draws a tribute.” Many American states embrace that difference through homestead exemptions. We do not regard that favoritism as “confiscation” but rather as the embodiment of the ideal that “a man living under his own roof, and on his own land, shall have the advantage over a man who uses his property only to exploit others.”

Second, Belloc addresses the urban housing crisis through a lease-to-own rule.

As for the urban type [of land], there ought to be a simple rule: every lease should automatically contain the power of the purchase by installment; any lease not containing such a clause should be void if it were a lease for more than a certain number of years. And, should this ordinance lead to the restriction of long leases, that should be met by forbidding the short lease without the option of renewal for a longer period. 

Belloc’s rule, which would require refinement and perhaps carve-outs for college housing, enables renters to become owners and landlords to be justly reimbursed for their property. Government is not enriched. Belloc’s rule is a moral decision favoring real property owned by families over real property used to extract rent from families. 

Third, Belloc understood how large department stores destroy small single-category businesses. He knew that “[t]he larger unit of capital can afford to lose on its wares for a longer time than the smaller unit”; and eventually, “[t]he small man will break, while the large man is still solvent.” Department stores like Walmart eliminate competitors through “predatory pricing”—underselling small single-category competitors and absorbing the temporary losses through other departments.

To protect small businesses, Belloc proposed differential licensing.

Let [a business license’s] cost be insignificant to the man who applies for only one or two licenses [each for a category of goods], but then let it begin to rise more and more steeply as the number of licenses applied for increases.

Like antitrust laws that remove monopolistic barriers to the marketplace, differential licensing is a moral decision to advantage small businesses over large ones, to advantage family ownership over wage suppression and cheap goods.

The Right’s view that the current division of property is a natural result of the natural laws of a naturally occurring marketplace is a fiction. The current division is a manufactured result of manufactured default rules and the consequences that follow from them. There is no reason we cannot change those default rules to advantage the small landowner over the large one, the homeowner over the landlord, and the small business over the large one. That’s not confiscation. That’s the choice to live on Christian principles.