The best book on Obama’s America has already been written. The president has two more years in office, six if he’s lucky, but already we know enough about the contours of his mind, his governing instincts, to predict that the volume in question will not be bettered. This is a large claim for a book that never once mentions Obama or America or the gushing wells of oil and words that seem to be, so far, his chief gift to us.
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During the bank bailouts a couple of years ago, I bought the Servile State as a friend of mine told me that he believes how all of this is going to play out. I then picked up Utopia of Usurers. I agree with the author that Belloc saw Bush/Obama coming.
I have found that Servile State should be read in conjunction with ‘Utopia of Usurers’ by Chesterton. They are both critiques of Capitalism/Socialism and Communism. They argue for Distributism which in theory makes a lot of sense to me. It is based on Catholic social and economic theory. Of course it would be very difficult to implement in the United States now but the basic premises make sense to me. More private property, more control of our own labor and more small business versus the capitalism model and the statism model. Chesterton was more charitable to Socialists. He points out that honest socialists would never go along with the servile state. Of course the problem is that most socialists today are not honest and not really socialists.
What he should remember is that Belloc was writing as an Englishman/Frenchman. His solutions are more applicable to European nations Pre-World War 2. On the other hand, my belief is that the devolution of power to the localities and allowing more property rights than less is the way to begin to turn things around. Our government now is going the opposite direction. They are centralizing power and attempting to establish the servile state from DC and New York. It is a situation that cannot last.
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