Distributism

One question that players are likely to ask about any game universe is what kind of economic system is employed in the game. In many games differing economic systems are even a stat of local worlds in the planetary design system. It may be imagined  by some that with its strong support of commodity money by the Highland government and humanity as a whole, that capitalism is the prevailing economic system in the New Diasporia universe. This is not accurate. In the Highlands, at least, the prevailing economic philosophy is distributism.
What is distributism? It is a third way economic philosophy which is neither socialism nor capitalism. Under distributism the ownership of the means of production is spread as wide as possible among the general populous, rather than being centralized under government control, as in socialism or in the hands of a few wealthy individuals as in capitalism.
In its purest sense individuals own the means of production. That is farmers work their own land, craftsmen own their own tools. Larger collectives of production do exists in the form of guilds. Guilds differ from unions in that guilds are made up of both employee and employer cooperating for mutual benefit. So for example while a ship builder might employ workers in the construction of ships by providing materials and shipyard space, the ship designers and builders will own their own tools and such intellectual property rights which exist to designs or processes, or they will be held by the guild.
Banks tend actually to be closer to credit unions or mutual companies, that is they are owned by their depositors, so rather than customers they are holders in stock in the bank by virtue of their deposits in it.
This cooperative approach at its heart is based on the Church's social justice principles of subsidiarity and solidarity. It does not prevent large scale partnerships with, for example, a whole fleet of merchant ships owned by their captains joined together in a single company, employing factors and agents through a region. It can easily be seen at work in any company which deals with the public primarily through franchises run by individual owners, utilizing employees who primarily own tools of production and are responsible for their own health care and retirement investment.
Distributism  promotes a society of artisans and creates a society with an emphasis on small business. Corporations and mega-corporations are not natural fixtures of human society. The existence of minifacts, that is nanotech run mini factories favors small production over mass production. Long range transport is concentrated on the movement of raw materials rather that the movement of finished products, which is to be expected in a society with nanotech capabilities. Legacy transport of finished materials, mostly nanotech factories from TL A worlds to TL B and below worlds still exists, as do exports to lower tech worlds off the highways. But even on these worlds local production is preferred, especially in food products and clothing, with imports limited to higher tech devices incapable of being produced locally.
Of course the true basis of human interaction in distributism is centered on the family, as the principle unit of the functioning distributist society. In this way the guild is a kind of extended family which promotes the ownership of property by family more than individuals.