ELEPHANT TO PLATT
PLATT WROTE:
> "Statism" is a perfectly legitimate and accurate description of Danila's
> proposal for the government to own all property.
(ELEPHANT: Actually Danila only wrote about real-estate)
PLATT WROTE:
> Here's the definition from
> the Random House dictionary.
>
> statism (n) 1. the principle or policy of concentrating extensive economic,
> political, and related controls in the state at the cost of individual
> liberty.
ELEPHANT:
Indeed. One of my points in the previous post was that with the exception of
the word "extensive" this dictionary definition applies to jailing theives.
And then the point to make about "extensive" is that what we regard as
"minimal" or "extensive" state controls is largely a matter of social
tradition. There are traditions within which full free health provision to
the highest standards is regarded as the minimal acceptable level of state
control over the economy: i.e., the UK. In the USA, the very same policy
would be regarded as extensive state intervention. The same applies to Gun
Control.
PLATT WROTE:
I'm not accusing Danila of anything other than perhaps ignoring history and
the role of Dynamic Quality whose "only perceived good is freedom."
ELEPHANT:
Liberte! Freedom, like Quality, is something undefined that we all desire:
as soon as we define it it becomes a minority good, the static pattern value
of a social group. Remarkably, Christian democrats and Social democrats in
Europe, whose political movements have instituted in Europe something
remarkably "statist" by Platt's standards, would think of their "statism" as
motivated by a desire to preserve freedom. Of course, the concrete freedoms
they would be thinking of would be freedoms from ill health, poverty,
ignorance, abuse, unfair disadvantage etc, rather than freedom from
extensive state control. Which freedoms are the more valuable and dynamic?
Different soceities have come to different conclusions about this.
While the land-ownership system Danila suggests is clearly something
Socialist in its full implementation (-your 'history' point is well taken),
there is an interesting sense in which some familiar taxation laws make land
effectively the property of the state, for which the tenant then pays a kind
of rent, even though he owns and has paid for the theoretical title. Such
was the old UK system of domestic Rates, whereby funds for local government
were raised by a property tax which was based on an assesment of the land's
socio-economic value. When Thatcher tried to get rid of this system on the
grounds that it was statist and therefore anti-freedom there were
unprecedented riots in the streets, mass civil disobedience, the legal
system was overloaded with non-payment prosecutions, and there was
eventually a kind of political coup: no more Thatcher. It was concluded
that she had spent too much time talking to american ideologues, and had
thus finally 'gone mad': she was swiftly done away with after becoming
unelectable - unelectable in the UK, that is, in the US she would have done
just fine (as numerous profitable lecture tours amply proved). We now have
a system which is for all practical purposes the same as the one we started
with, so it's fairly obvious that this kind of arrangement is regarded as
High Quality by the English. Does this mean that the UK is anti-freedom?
Lots of people think so (Including M.Thatcher, I guess). I don't. I think
it means that the English see more quality and freedom in a fair system of
taxation, and one that also does something to regulate appropriate land
usage in a crowded island in the style and partial implementation of
Danila's ownership proposal, than they do in any of the concrete
alternatives. A very practical choice that. Pragmatic, not theoretical.
Abstract concepts of individual "freedom", and indeed "ownership", were not
allowed to triumph over practical needs and real freedoms.
John Bull lives.
Yours,
-Eraser-head
(I also appeared in The Elephant Man)
P.S. I see I've made out like some kind of Patriot. Shocking.
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