"Unrestrained competition"

“Under the present system of unrestrained competition, the ownership of the means of production, transport, distribution, information and especially in the hands of a few, you have an increasing tendency to monopoly, and the community is subservient to monopoly.” ─ The Way Out.

“This monopoly of credit only touches the ordinary man when he has a mortgage from a bank himself. The proletariat, living on a wage, is not aware of the new power. Yet it is the power which, more than any other, is threatening our civilization with ruin.” ─ The Way Out.

~Hilaire Belloc

"Thomism...“the official philosophy” of the Church"

“Scholasticism, as it is called, or Thomism (from the final great work of St. Thomas), might be called “the official philosophy” of the Church, as it had stood throughout the later Middle Ages: but it was (and is) important to distinguish between this “official” acceptation of Thomism and the invariable teaching authority of the Faith. For instance, in St. Thomas’ philosophy and that of his predecessors, the Real Presence is expressed in the term of “Trans-substantiation”; but no Catholic is bound to accept the scholastic doctrine of substance, and so long as the truth of the Real Presence is maintained (i.e., that the whole of the Humanity and Divinity of Our Lord is present in the Blessed Sacrament after the words of Consecration, and in either element; and that the original bread and wine wholly cease to be), Catholic doctrine is satisfied.”

~Hilaire Belloc: Characters of the Reformation, Chap. 1.

Descartes

“DESCARTES, a whole lifetime after the beginning of the Reformation, set out to begin if he could, the whole thing [philosophy] over again—to ask and settle all those questions which scholastic philosophy had also examined from the very roots. He even started with the discussion as to whether man himself, the mind originating the discussion, existed or no. He took as his starting point the undoubted truth that since man thinks, he “is”; and on that he would base his system. In the expansion of that system he insists upon only accepting knowledge that is “proved,” and that is where he had so great an influence upon all the thought which followed for three hundred years; for all the modern scientific habit until yesterday proceeded from Descartes. He himself had no doubts upon the Faith, but his insistence upon the axiom that our acceptation of truth must depend upon the external proof of it or upon deductive reasoning from observed constant natural “laws” did make profound inroads upon ordinary belief. It was from this attitude of mind that all that is called the “rationalistic” attack upon the Faith has ultimately grown.”

~Hilaire Belloc: Characters of the Reformation, Chap. 1.

"Unrestricted Competition destroys the small man"

“COUPLED with Usury, Unrestricted Competition destroys the small man for the profit of the great and in so doing produces that mass of economically unfree citizens whose very political freedom comes in question because it has no foundation in any economic freedom, that is, any useful proportion of property to support it.”

~Hilaire Belloc: The Crisis of Civilization.

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Darwin and Marx

“WHAT Darwin had supplied to Materialism in biology, Marx supplied to it in sociology; and the two combined not to form as causes but to present as symptoms, the common Materialism which in the later XIXth century was to sweep over the cultivated mind of Europe.”

~Hilaire Belloc: The Crisis of Civilization

Economic freedom

“OUR fathers rightly thought of a free society as being made up of men economically free. One can only be fully free if he owns the means by which one lives. These owners who made up the bulk of the old society, before Industrial capitalism and Big business arrived, were what we call today “small owners.”

~Hilaire Belloc: The Way Out.

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"The Catholic philosophy"

“INDEED, to our race, save when it is trained in the Catholic philosophy, wealth and power appear as being almost self-evidently the objects of life. St. Thomas has discussed that illusion in his famous question: “Whether money be the main good?” and all men not caring to pursue the reasoning to its conclusion, answer “Yes.” Even where the Faith is preserved men pursue wealth and power inordinately. Where the Faith is lost they pursue nothing else.”

~Hilaire Belloc: Survivals and New Arrivals.

"Democracy is the noblest form of government”

“DEMOCRACY, that is government of the community by the community: a state wherein a man stands equal with his fellows, and has to suffer neither subservience nor the corruption of flattery and power; a state in which office alone commands, and not the being clothed with office—that is the ideal at the back of every man’s mind who cares for right in public affairs, and who has within himself anything left of private honor. It is simplest put by saying that democracy is the noblest form of government.”

~Hilaire Belloc: The Cruise of the "Nona"

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