Dabney on Corporations vs. Family Economy

An excerpt from The Philosophy Regulating Private Corporations by R. L. Dabney:

"I urge, third, that the forms of industry promoted by the powerful corporations tend to to undermine the domestic and personal independence of the yeomanry. The associated means of production supplant the individual, the products of the older and more independent forms of industry retreat before those of the corporations. The time was when manufactures were literally “domestic,” the occupations of people in their homes. The producing yeoman was a “free-holder,” a person whose vital significance to British liberty our times have almost forgotten. He dwelt and labored under his own roof-tree. He was his own man, the free-holder of the homestead where his productions were created by the skill and labor of himself and his family and servants. Now all this is changed. The wheel and the loom are no longer heard in the home. Vast factories, owned by corporations, for whose governors the cant of the age has already found their appropriate name as “kings of industry,” now undersell the home products everywhere. The axe and hoe which the husbandman wields, once made at the country forge, the shoe upon his mule’s feet, the plough with which he turns the soil, the very helve of his implement, all come from the factory. The housewife’s industry in brewing her own yeast can hardly survive, but is supplanted by some “incorporated” “baking powder,” in which chemical adulteration may have full play. Thus the centralization of capital leads at once to the centralization and degradation of the population. The free-holding yeoman citizen is sunk into the multitudinous mass of the proletariat, dependent upon the corporation for his work, his wages, his cottage, his kitchen garden, and privilege of buying the provisions for his family. In place of the freeman’s domestic independence, he now has the corrupting and doubtful resource of the “labor union” and the “strike.” His wife and children are dragged from the retirement of a true home into the foul and degrading publicity of the festering manufacturing village...Thus conditions of social organization are again produced more incompatible than feudalism with republican institutions."

The family economy has been decimated by our modern social systems, leading to economic and political slavery, and the disintegration of the family in life and culture. Come to the Family Economics Conference as we learn how to restore the family in today's society.