Poor Dorothy Day, being confused with everyone from Ayn Rand to the communists.... I suppose the price of been a deep and free thinker is to be universally demonized and adored often by the same people.
I don't get that. I mean if Dorothy Day was a communist by that measure, I guess the Pope is a Buddhist.
Look, you can always find commonality between two groups but that doesn't make them identical. Day expressly advocated property ownership for the poor and that's enough to disqualify her from any sort of communist movement. The big difference there is that while communists of various sorts tend to argue that the workers should collectively (usually through some sort of government) own the means of production, the Distributists have always argued that private properly ownership is a fundamental right, and that it should be spread as widely as possible. In this way, individual workers should own their own means of production.
Moreover if you say that the mere idea that there is a collective responsibility to take care of the poor makes one a communist in that regard, then FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower were all communists.... At that point I don't think the term is very meaningful since it includes just about everyone except for Ayn Rand cultists.
