Editing Distributism (section)

===Tenets===
Distributism can be defined by four major tenets, which all distributists agree are necessarily distributist: 

*Widespread ownership of property: Workers should be owners and businesses should be comprised of worker co-operatives, family businesses, or ESOP-based traditional businesses whenever possible and that people should own both their own personal private property as well as maintain some kind of ownership of private productive property whenever possible. 
**The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself. - Hilaire Belloc

*Anti-Trust Legislation: Large businesses must be broken up into smaller, more local businesses whenever possible. 
**The problem with capitalism is not that there are too many capitalists but too few. - G.K. Chesterton
*The Principle of the Subsidiarity: The government should never intervene in cases where a lower level of government (down to, and including, the individual, who governs himself) would be able to fix the issue. In short, if problem cannot be solved by level X, it goes to be solved by level (X + 1) and so on. This is also called "stratification of the federal government" or sometimes just "decentralization". 
**Civil society exists for the common good, and hence is concerned with the interests of all in general, albeit with individual interests also in their due place and degree. It is therefore called a public society, because by its agency, as St. Thomas of Aquinas says, “Men establish relations in common with one another in the setting up of a commonwealth.” - Pope Leo XIII

*The Indivisible Unit: The smallest social unit is the family, not the individual as in capitalism. This means that laws must be considered with the full thought of the familial consequences as well as that laws must provide for family units rather than individuals because distributism recognizes that an individual is a part of the larger collective of his family and that what happens to him affects the family.  
**Hence we have the family, the “society” of a man’s house — a society very small, one must admit, but none the less a true society, and one older than any State. Consequently, it has rights and duties peculiar to itself which are quite independent of the State. - Pope Leo XIII