Bringing the Good News of Anarchism to the Distributists

Although I've continued to slack in keeping up with my project of recording and indexing here my comments on various blogs (not to mention shifting my attention over to my new blog at naturallawyer.blogspot.com), I have indeed continued to actively comment, particularly at The Distributist Review. I commented on the problems with licensure laws (re: inter alia, attorneys and doctors) here. The author of the blog, John Medaille, followed up with a post that addressed my comments, titled "A License to Steal?", in which he advocated the guild system as a "middle way." The thread for that post quickly evolved, or devolved, into a discussion of theoretical anarchism. [I won't copy my lengthy comments here, but you can find the discussion by clicking the link.] Interestingly, Medaille followed this discussion with a new post on "Zen and the Art of Traffic Control," where he seemed to imply that he was open to the idea that we don't necessarily need government even to regulate traffic (which is generally considered a pretty radical libertarian position). As you can see from the comments to that post, I evidently prematurely got the impression that he was, at least in part, coming around to a more libertarian frame of mind! Finally, the most recent post at the The Distributist Review is a guest post by Lindy Davies on "Henry George and the Earth Imperative," to which I've already addressed several comments. To my mind, Georgism (the idea that all taxes should be eliminated except a "single tax" on the unimproved value of land) is wholly consistent with theoretical anarchism. Most interesting to me is the following claim I'd found in searching around on the internet and included in my most recent comment (you can find the source by following the link):

"Rent -- in the classical economic sense -- has been estimated at 40% of the national income [7]. If the full value of that ground rent were publicly appropriated, total public revenues would come out around $16 trillion -- a sum large enough to cover the federal budget with no deficit, pay off the national debt, and still have plenty -- as in, trillions -- left over [8] [9] [10]. In fact, conservative commentators have faulted land value taxation precisely because it generates such large public revenues, thus increasing the size of government. One solution is simply to return a dividend to individual citizens, as Alaska does with the royalties from its mineral resources (which, like land, are a common resource whose value should thus be commonly shared)."