Incidents where Libertarians claim Distributism is some kind of veiled socialism because of the predication of government intervention in the economy betrays the same failure to grasp what socialism is even all about. Socialism was never defined as government intervention into economic life or the running of businesses. If it was then virtually every government in history would have to be socialist, even the Bush administration. Every government has regulated trade to a greater or lesser extent. Rather, Socialism as predicated by its founder, Louis Blanc, and its most well known advocate (Marx) is when the government becomes the universal capitalist. In every system, for wealth to be created, capital must be expended to produce the wealth. This is something as simple as the food a man must eat and the tractors, plows, and livestock he must use in order to produce wheat, or as complex as the scientists that must be paid to develop a drug. The amount of goods consumed in creating new wealth is always capital. The person laboring on it brings the human labor and together with that capital creates wealth.
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