To Be or Not to Be...a Conservative

I read an article today from the excellent blog The Chesterbelloc Mandate by Thomas Storck on why he thinks the term "conservative" is muddled.  I find myself feeling much the same as a Catholic seeking to understand the teachings of the Church on the political and social order.  I have always considered myself a conservative and still do, but I am increasingly finding myself at odds with what exactly I'm advocating conserving in our current cultural situation.  If we are like the early Christians in Rome pre-Constantine, would a Christian be conservative?

Enjoy!

 Link to Article by Thomas Storck

How to Destroy Small Businesses

Belloc’s Seven “main ways unrestricted competition destroys the small owner”, 

from his Crisis of Civilization

Belloc lists seven tendencies that give the large business advantage over the small in a field of (nearly) unrestricted competition.  

1. “Overhead charges” are proportionally less as capital is concentrated. E.g., “Ten small shops cost more to run all put together than one large shop ten times the size of each small unit.” (CC:129).   Hence, chain stores, department stores, large factories are more efficient, making the deck stacked against the small owner and so, in a field of unrestricted competition, able to be more often than not outdone, or even destroyed.

2. The large unit gets more information and more quickly than the small unit, and so, concerning what next moves to make in a field of unrestricted competition, the large unit has a tactical advantage over the small.  [Question: how does the internet and the globalization of markets affect this?  I would guess very little, since being larger typically means having more capital and thus more resources to collect more, more diverse, and more wide ranging information about proximate and distal markets.]

3.  The large unit gets more publicity, partly, but not exclusively, through the proportionately better marketing and advertisements his greater capital gives him access to. [Again, I ask what of the internet?  I reply: it has lessened but certainly not reversed this tendency, as TV and print sources are still widely used for publicity.]  Furthermore, the large unit is more indispensible to news agencies, giving, beyond the publicity of advertisements, more press and exposure.  Hence, in a field of unrestricted competition, the smaller unit never has home-field advantage.

4. The larger unit can, sometimes disreputably or nefariously, use secrecy, e.g., large animal agriculture and its collusion with environmentalist groups, or, again, the collusion of large food industry giants with the FDA, while at the same time can protect itself by pretentious cases of plausible deniability, through its ability to absorb huge legal costs.  Or, again, a single large unit can fund lobby groups to pressure Uncle Sam to make regulations that appear to restrict his business, and under the false front of a political competitor, e.g., the case reported by Tim Carney of the automakers who lobbied against using aluminum (I believe it was that metal) here so as to exploit overseas markets and eat up competitors. Hence, in a field of unrestricted comptetition, the small man cannot afford to dodge transparency, nor, when accused, extricate himself by expensive legal shenanigans.  

5.  The growth of capital is easier for a large unit than a small.  Large can accumulate capital without any need to curb luxury, and indeed, must prevent swelling, whereas the small must sacrifice and vigilantly remain abstemious. “…the first steps in the accumulation of capital are immeasurably harder than the next, and the last steps . . . come, as it were, automatically.” (CC:132)

6.  Large has easier access to credit, and on comparatively easier terms, than the small unit. “It is perhaps on this line of easier credit that large capital today does most harm to small capital, drives it out and ruins it.” (CC: 132)

7.  The large can undersell the small. “It is a grossly immoral act and one which in all sane societies has been severely punished – but in the competitive society of today it is taken for granted.  The small man cannot stand the loss to which the large man challenges him during the struggle between them; he is ruined where his rival survives.” (CC: 132)

“In general, under competition unchecked by cooperative rules and the spirit of the guild or by usage having the force of law and restraining the eating up of the small by the great, that murderous process takes place inevitably, and, as it were, automatically.  Now the man who was once a small owner and is now dispossessed, becomes proletarian.” (CC: 132)