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Monday, September 15, 2003 Clown Civilization 2I just noticed that the web version of Agnes de Mille's "clown civilization" essay on Henry George (her grandfather) lacks the promised paragraph on Proposition 13. It was cut. So here -- from a print version -- is the passage I want everyone to read, the stuff that still resonates during recall season. It's long, I know. Read it anyway:"We have reached the deplorable circumstance where in large measure a very powerful few are in possession of the earth's resources, the land and its riches and all the other privileges that yield a return. These monopolistic positions are kept by a handful of men who are maintained virtually without taxation; they are immune to the demands made on others. The very poor, who have nothing, are the object of compulsory charity. And the rest -- the workers, the middle-class, the backbone of the country -- are made to support the lot by their labor [meaning income tax, which is a tax on labor or profit. De Mille and her grandfather wanted a single, simple tax on land, not the same thing as a property tax.] "We are taxed at every point of our lives, on everything we earn, on everything we save, on much that we inherit, on much that we buy at every stage of the manufacture and on the final purchase. The taxes are punishing, crippling, demoralizing. Also they are, to a great extent, unnecessary. "It was rage at unjust and proliferating taxation that drove the people of California to revolt. In June, 1978, they voted overwhelmingly to adopt Proposition 13, an amendment to the state constitution which would greatly diminish all taxes on real property -- on land, houses, gardens, farms, buildings. This was neither a thoughtful nor a searching reform since the improvements and the site and all natural resources were lumped together, and income and sales tax rates were not separated. Under the so-called reform, the great landholdings remained intact and therefore the great profiteering untouched. "The voters believed that there was too much wastage in government, too much public welfare, and that they could do very well with a great deal less of both. The results so far have not been what was intended. State funds will undoubtedly be commandeered to bail out local treasuries and probably the state funding of schools, universities, libraries, symphony orchestras, museums and archives will be drastically reduced while the bureaucracy and welfare remain relatively untouched. [Written in 1979. But de Mille is still right. - msm] ... "All this is galling and destructive, but it is still, in a measure, superficial. The great sinister fact, the one that we must live with, is that we are yielding up sovereignty. The nation is no longer comprised of the thirteen original states, nor of the thirty-seven younger sister states, but of the real powers: the cartels, the corporations. Owning the bulk of our productive resources [including land, which a land tax was meant to remedy -- msm], they are the issue of that concentration of ownership that George saw evolving, and warned against. ... "I do not wish to be misunderstood as falling into the trap of the socialists and communists who condemn all privately owned business, all factories, all machinery and organizations for producing wealth. There is nothing wrong with private corporations owning the means of producing wealth -- with, as the socialists would say, Capitalism. All Georgists believe in private enterprise, and in its virtues and incentives to produce at maximum efficiency. It is the insidious linking together of special privilege -- the unjust outright private ownership of natural or public resources, monopolies, franchises -- that produce unfair domination and autocracy. The means of producing wealth differ at the root: some is thieved from the people and some is honestly earned. George differentiated; Marx did not. The consequences of our failure to discern lie at the heart of the trouble. "This clown civilization is ours. We have achieved it out of the hopeful agrarian society that flourished in the eighteenth century, out of a new government we had every right to believe was founded on reasonableness, wisdom, and justice. We were not compelled to come to this. We knew neither king nor conqueror. We chose this of our own free will, in our own free democracy, with all the means to legislate intelligently readily at hand. We chose this because we insisted on following the worn-out European grooves, because it suited a few people to have us do so. They counted on our mental indolence and we freely and obediently conformed. We chose not to think. "Our government, alas, was predicated for its effectiveness in expansion on free land. Now there is no more free land, and the flaw in the great plan grows evident. We have reached the boundaries and we turn back on ourselves and devour. "Henry George was a lucid voice, direct and bold, that pointed out basic truths, that cut through the confusion which developed like rot. Each age has known such diseases and each age has gone down for lack of understanding. It is not valid to say that our times are more complex. The problems are, on the whole, the same. The fact that we now have electricity and computers does not in any way controvert the fact that we can succumb to the injustices that toppled Rome. "To avert such a calamity, to eliminate involuntary poverty and unemployment, and to enable each individual to attain his maximum potential, George wrote his extraordinary treatise a hundred years ago. His ideas stand: He who makes should have; he who saves should enjoy; what the community produces belongs to the community for communal uses; and God's earth, all of it, is the right of the people who inhabit the earth. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, 'The earth belongs in usufruct to the living.' "This is simple and this is unanswerable. The ramifications may not be simple but they do not alter the fundamental logic." Agnes George de Mille was a choreographer, not some kind of social critic. But as you can see she had a trenchant mind. For more on her grandfather, click here. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 8:31 PM | |
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