The war against home-based businesses

Go into any city or suburb and you'll find a zoning war going on against home-based businesses. The idea seems very sensible to most suburbanites. Businesses should be in the zoned business district instead of creating traffic in our child filled neighborhoods. The sensibility is based on the assumption that our residential homes are alcoves away from the bustle of the business world. What they really do is create unnecessary barriers for a new family business. In most towns and small cities a majority of all the prime retail space are owned by a few real estate capitalists who routinely up the rent when a business becomes successful. I found it was the same in Yellow Springs, Ohio as Ashland, Wisconsin.

What can distributists do? Next time you hear about changes in the local home-based business laws (which are always attempts to make them more restrictive) go and stick up for them. If you don't own your own home-based business you'll be the first person whose ever gone to the council meeting who doesn't have a vested interest in favor of these businesses.

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Crunchy Con Day

If you haven't heard, today (my son Patrick's birthday) is Cruncy Con Day. Ron Dreher's book which is publishing today which I believe ushers a change of the conservative alliance which created the modern conservative movement. The conservative alliance combined various streams in conservatism (libertarianism, traditionalism, hawks) into a combined force to resist communism. Well, last I heard the Berlin Wall came down and its time for the conservative movement to realize that trads will no longer be considered blindly in the alliance.

Here is Ron's Cruncy-Con manifesto which would appeal to most distributists:

1. We are conservatives who stand outside the conservative mainstream; therefore, we can see things that matter more clearly.

2. Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character.

3. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.

4. Culture is more important than politics and economics.

5. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative.

6. Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract.

7. Beauty is more important than efficiency.

8. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.

9. We share Russell Kirk's conviction that the institution most essential to conserve is the family.

Dreher is a wake-up call for those who don't consconsider themselveselves traditionalists under the banner of the term "Crunchy-Con". I don't know of the traditionalistalist is as good as it used to be. I prefer the term "neotrad" myself but I don't know if all these different terms are just slicing the differences a little too thin.

Anyhow Ron's blog on Crunchy Con comes from the article he orginally wrote for the National Review

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