Solid Foundations

It was good to have Samuel Gregg’s review of Alexander W. Salter’s book The Political Economy of Distributism (“Can We Have Common-Good Capitalism?” August 14), and especially its treatment of the thought of Wilhelm Röpke. But this is not some long-dead debate among scholars of Catholic social thought, as important as they once were.

There is a long history in this country of advocacy for the necessity of expanded ownership of private property as the foundation of a free republic, dating back to Jefferson and Adams, through the Homestead Act, the federal housing and farm-ownership programs, and IRA and 401(k) plans. It was succinctly affirmed in Ronald Reagan’s 1980 Republican platform: “The widespread distribution of private property ownership is the cornerstone of American liberty. Without it neither our free enterprise system nor our republican form of government could long endure.”

President Reagan wrote to Delaware governor Pete du Pont in 1981: “I have long believed that the widespread distribution of private property ownership is essential to the preservation of individual liberty, to the strength of our competitive free enterprise system, and to our republican form of government. . . . We must work to create the conditions for expanding the ownership of the nation’s wealth, so that all Americans may have their fair chance to become the true proprietors of their country.”

Alas, little effort was expended to bring that to pass. But wake up, Republicans! It’s not too late.

(Note: As a senior policy adviser on the 1980 campaign and in the early Reagan White House, I was involved in drafting that part of the 1980 platform and the president’s letter to Governor du Pont.)

John McClaughry

Kirby, Vt.

Correction

A paragraph in the Week in the August 28 issue stated that thawed prehistoric worms were found in the Serbian permafrost. They were found in the Siberian permafrost.