The Importance of Being Learned

Let's be honest: which would you rather read.

This?

Or this?


If you bothered to follow the links, you'd find the former is the text I'm ostensibly writing about for an academic paper and the latter the text I've actually been reading.

Since finishing the copy of Father Brown stories I happen to own, my Chesterton binge hasn't slowed, fueld by the availability of much of his work online. The man's wit and wisdom make it easy to wile away the hours, but that doesn't mean I'm entirely uncritical of him. While I appreciate the Chesterbelloc desire to find a third way between capitalism and socialism, I can't say I think Distributism is it. If I've learned anything over the past year from my exposure the work of free-market economists, it's that sometimes, the apparent obscures the real.

Chesterton's critiques of capitalism -- "Too much capitalism doesn't mean too many capitalists, but too few" -- strike an immediate chord, but overlook deeper questions. Certainly, modern capitalism produces vast disparities of wealth. A number of studies over the past decade have demonstrated unmistakably that the gap between the wealthy and the poor has steadily increased for years and looks to continue to do so. But the real question is not one of inequality, it would seem, but rather poverty.

If the wealth of the well-heeled grows by 100% and that of the poorly-shod a mere 25%, the gap betwixt the two will necessarily enlarge. But that's not to say the poor are in a worse place economically. Assuming over the same period that the cost of living increased only 10%, then it seems undeniable that the least among us have still improved their living conditions.

A fascinating discussion of this topic just concluded last month over at Cato Unbound. David Schmidtz, Peter Singer, Tom Palmer and Jacob Hacker all elaborated upon this and related questions to produce an eminently readable and valuable conversation. I highly suggest you take a look, beginning with the lead essay by Schmidtz.

Of course, all that is neither here nor there. I'm supposed to be discerning the difference between Locke and Hume on the subject of ideas, the self, and custom. Sigh.