>>15524934>bothersome Yeah, I don’t think distributism optimizes for efficiency. But that’s kind of one of the points, it means that Amazon warehouse workers wouldn’t have heatstroke from lack of AC or have to piss in bottles.
I lived in Chicago for a long time and have also had to deal with too many contractors working on our house. Closed guilds can suffer from a corruption of laziness. One thing that’s happened in America is that the trades are full of Mexicans doing cheap, shitty work (I’ve seen the Portuguese version of this in Paris). Trade unions have failed to stop this, I don’t know if this counts as a failure of “real life” distributism or if distributism would somehow counter it by not allowing people to use shitty imported labor. I don’t want to resort to a “that’s not real communism” dodge, corrupt trade unions are the closest thing we have to a guild today but I don’t know if there is some extra mechanism that Chesterton thought of to avoid this. I think he saw more Victorian sweatshops and commie labor agitation and was trying to address this more.
I know one aspect of guilds is that it’s supposed to align interest in a vertical vs. fostering capitalist/labor divisions. So ideally, fwiw, the top tier at a construction firm would want to hire good talent and inculcate a work ethic as part of an apprenticeship. But this is an ideal.
