First off, by "conservative", I mean Canadian, small-c conservative, which has very little in common with its American sense. Small-c conservatives used to be called Tories-- enthusiastic monarchists, High Anglicans, and, in England under Disraeli, a political union of lower and upper classes against the middle. In other words, true conservatives: against unchecked industrialism, against radical social progession, for the preservation of the old order. I am not exactly a Tory, and I certainly have many liberal sympathies which are more up Gladstone's alley than Disraeli's. However, in the modern political field I find it most accurate to characterise myself as a conservative.
That being said, the point:
What's Wrong With Modern Capitalism
Only when the last tree is cut, only when the last river is polluted, only when the last fish is caught, will they realise that you can't eat money.--Native American proverb
I suppose I have to begin by saying that I think there is something wrong with modern capitalism. I think (and hope) that only committed ideologues will disagree that capitalism and industrialism, in the form they take today, cause significant problems and injustices, in developed and developing countries, on the social, political, and environmental levels. You know what I'm talking about: export processing zones, urban unemployed, dehumanising factory labour, strip mines, everyone expected to be mobile to find jobs, dumping waste in African countries in exchange for guns supplied to their oppressive governments, corporate rights superseding safety standards under NAFTA, the destruction of rainforests, privatisation of water supplies, oil companies using private armed forces to mow down peaceful protesters in Africa, etc. etc. etc.
It's bad enough here in the First World, but in developing countries the effects are reprehensible. Corporations operating in countries that probably have lower GDPs than they do create colonial elites just like empires did in the past, with the exception that there's no romantic national ideal or home population to eventually come into conflict with the treatment of natives. We're talking about people driving BMWs to the giant swimming pool in their five-star hotels while others die of thirst just outside the police-protected wealthy compound.
I don't think these are simple matters of companies not assuming the costs of externalities, because I think many of the externalities are, literally, invaluable. You can't put a price on human life; nor, in the long run, can you put a price on clean air, trees, land, or clean water. Further, a lot of the problems go beyond the ability of national governments to regulate, so assumption of externalities is not likely to be a fruitful means of solving the issues.
What can be done? And what, exactly, is the nature of the problem? A heck of a lot of people look for answers in varying forms of Marxism; or, if not Marxism, then communal revolt that the elites can easily depict as Marxism. Ironically, of course, Marxism, through its fundamental tenet of materialism, is the source of much of the problem. As John Ralston Saul sardonically observes, the only true Marxists nowadays are neoliberals.
I don't think Marxism is any kind of answer, and populist revolt, in the rare event that it's successful, treats only symptoms. The major problem is that, for people on the wrong end of the capitalist stick, these are often the best hope of betterment. Were I in Ernesto Guevara's position, I don't doubt that the deep feelings of antipathy I have towards these ill effects of capitalism would push me as far into socialism as they pushed him. When Bechtel buys the water supply in Bolivia, uses its clout to coerce the government into banning the collection of rainwater, then quadruples the price of water, as a Bolivian there isn't a single bloody alternative to taking up arms and throwing the bastards out of your country. (The neoliberal comment on a similar situation in the Ivory Coast, plumbing new depths of meaning for the word "cynicism", was that the sharp price increase was a good sign that the citizens of Ivory Coast had a healthy and proper respect for the value of water.)
So not only is the present capitalist system responsible for all the injustices to which I alluded earlier, but also in effect for communist uprisings, the death and destruction caused when these become wars, and the further suffering caused when successful uprisings almost inevitably produce their own dictatorships and tinpot elites. Corporate colonialism narrows the options of natives until communism is the best or only way they have to improve their lives, and with an inevitability of which Marx would have been proud, they find their Lenin and revolt. In many cases they're not even ideological communists; but for an armed uprising treading roughshod over sacred capitalist principles to retake anything "for the people", the cynical First World vocabulary has few words available: communists, Marxist rebels, socialists.
The thing is, this outlook isn't even cynical, it's cynicalised. Everyday people, average people, common people, are not by nature cynical. Common sense militates against basically everything that is wrong with the capitalist system. What person, if asked to construct a reasonable way of running things, would think it a good idea to have teams of marketers whose job it is to find new ways of exploiting children in order to sell worthless junk to parents? What person would suggest that it would be helpful if every major company were to have a "CEO" whose salary is equivalent to that of 1000 of his workers (or 20 000 of his Third World labourers) combined, but whose responsibility to the company is so non-existent that they pay him to leave after he takes apart the company to raise the stock price and cashes his options? What person would think to create a system where companies are so mobile that they can tell employees, "Right, you have to uproot your lives and move halfway across the country if you still want your job,", or hold governments hostage by threatening to relocate their operations, in order to win unpopular concessions? Who would insist that people be able to earn outrageous salaries by manipulating money markets without producing anything?
Nobody, that's who. Or perhaps a sociopath. An outsider considering the way we run things would probably conclude that our economy was designed by a sociopath with a twisted sense of humour. But something has alienated the average person so far from their common sense that they rarely think about any of this, and when they do, they usually just feel vague unease, or impotent rage, or despair. Nothing can be done about it, it's just the way things are, there is no alternative. I know I have frequently felt something like this, and I'm willing to bet many of you have as well. We have been cynicalised, not by any one person or group, but by the slow erosion of common sense. And whatever it is has done a damn good number on us.
So what is the real issue?
EVERETT: What about you, Delmar? What're you gonna do with your share a that dough?
DELMAR: Visit those foreclosin' sonofaguns down at the Indianola Savings and Loan and slap that cash down on the barrelhead and buy back the family farm. Hell, you ain't no kind of man if you ain't got land.--O Brother, Where Art Thou?
This morning I had one of those rare but wonderful moments of lucidity, where you wake up and just lie in bed, and something forcefully and simply occurs to you. And the thought that occurred to me today was that these problems seem to be, by and large, the result of two major principles that have been adopted by the West, and which by our time seem to everyone to be unquestionable laws of nature:
1) That the value of land is tradeable in the form of paper money, and may be exchanged with any other kind of money;
2) That it is reasonable for a person to pursue the maximum possible economic gain for himself.
I don't think it will be easy, or perhaps even possible, to reverse number 2) as a means of solving anything. Not because it is immutably true-- it wasn't commonly believed until perhaps a century ago, give or take a few years-- but because to actively reverse it would inevitably require regulating individual action to an unconscionable degree. It is a folkway, and a fairly well entrenched one at that. Certain limits still apply, thanks to basic human nature: the average person certainly does not maximise his economic value, and would refuse to push an old lady off the sidewalk in order to get by more quickly. However, the fact that we acquiesce in permitting other people to do these and much worse, in other countries and even in our own, shows that we tend to accept the principle in general. I'm not proposing that governments determine what level of economic gain a person may pursue, so we'll just have to hope this folkway returns to a more sensible position.
However, I think we can and must do something about number 1). I think this idea had its beginnings in early modern England, when propertied townsmen began to use state power to dismantle feudally structured land holdings. But, as far as I know, it really only took off in the late eighteenth century, at the same time as the Industrial Revolution; I think the first clear example of this was the assignats, paper money valued against confiscated Church property after the French Revolution. But today, the point is that land is viewed as a tradeable asset like any other. You can own land and dispose of it as you wish, just as you can own gold or dollar bills and do the same. I am proposing that this is not a necessary way of treating land; further, that the problems of today's world mean that it is no longer a sane way.
Land is singularly not a transferable asset. As Mark Twain remarked, they're not making any more of it. There is simply nothing with which human beings can replace land. You can't live on money, you can't drink stock portfolios, you can't grow wheat in a bank account, and you can't fish in oil barrels. I have to revise my opening statement: for the average person, land is not a transferable asset. If you own enough of it, it can be, but we've reached a point where some people having that much land is not consistent with everybody having enough land to live.
Part of my point is that it is essentially weird for, say, an American company with a deed to some arable land in India to have a greater claim to that land than Indian people who live nearby and could farm it. It seems to me that the notion of property, applied to land, breaks down at a certain degree of separation between the proprietor and the property. The bottom line is that it is purely artificial that a man in an office in New York can "own" land halfway across the world, or even in his own country. I'm aware that this kind of thing was given a basis by John Locke, but frankly I don't find it very convincing; it's more rationalisation than reasoning.
My gut feeling is that beyond a certain amount of land that I could personally use, exploit, and enjoy, there is no reason to permit me to reserve a right to additional land. Further, given the power of principle 2), there is a very good reason to prevent me from reserving that right: I feel little or no compulsion to preserve land that I don't have to live on or depend on, and it's probably in my short-term economic interest to strip mine it, or to cut down all its trees, or to hunt its animals to extinction, or build a big nasty factory on it. Land that somebody else could use to live on is thus wasted, and when this is done on a large scale it has effects which are permanent, or long outlast the conditions in which I make my economic decision. For example, short-sighted urban sprawl where I live, around Toronto, has caused what is, for our purposes, the permanent destruction of vast areas of prime agricultural land. We're talking some of the richest soil in the country, great swathes of it, paved over with roads and covered with subdivisions of gigantic houses that will fall apart in twenty years. Heck, as if to make my point even more clearly, they actually skim off all the topsoil before building houses, and sell it-- literally converting land into money. Now, if we had to start growing vegetables, we'd be dealing with poor soil, poisoned with deck treatments and God knows what else, and much less of it than there could be.
To me, this is almost criminally stupid. We've built up this gigantic, impressive economic system that allows most people to live without needing to use land for anything. Everyone I know could conceivably do their job and live in cells in their office building, not that they would enjoy it (although I'm sure they could get used to it). As such, nobody, and certainly not those with wealth, needs to give a flying fig about what happens to land. As long as they can buy food at the grocery store, live in a house, and perhaps have a park to play in, they will be reasonably content. But, of course, the system that allows them to do this is the same one that causes all the misery, injustice, oppression, and suffering which I made a faint attempt to catalogue above.
And that's not all. The bigger and the more specialised this economic system gets, the more it needs to sustain it, and the harder the fall will be, if ever it come. If the food supply were to be suddenly cut off-- if a massive oil shortage were to make it too expensive to transport food, for instance-- literally millions of suburbanites would starve to death. Recent forecasts of an impending Prairie dustbowl to make the Depression look moist cause me real concern now, because I've realised that we all depend on other people, mostly corporations, to grow our food for us. If Saskatchewan wheat isn't there for me to eat anymore, what can I do? It becomes easier and easier, as time goes by, for the substitutes for land to be swept out from under us, and the potential effects of such an event grow greater and greater.
What to do about it?
Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.--G. K. Chesterton
So what am I proposing, if anything? It may seem that I'm getting ready to declare Marxism the answer after all, with all of this talk of alienation from the means of production. But I don't think that's the answer, because common ownership of all land could just as easily result in individuals being alienated from their land. Perhaps even more easily, because without the notion of property, the planning council could simply move people around and dispose of their land as it saw fit. Rather, I think it necessary for the government to ardently defend everybody's property rights to a certain amount of land that they can use, and refuse to recognise rights to any more. In Canada, we could easily allow every family to own a house or apartment, an agricultural plot to support themselves, and a rural cottage property. People could also incorporate, and operate a larger property for economic gain-- an apartment building, a large rural agricultural holding, a factory, etc.-- but no more than one, and in no more than one such corporation. Corporate or personal ownership of more than these amounts-- chain stores, franchises, superfarms, massive estates-- would be illegal.
I think this would not be without its problems, but would be a far better and more sustainable system to implement than the current one. I suppose some other financial changes would have to be made-- the country's economists could make themselves useful and figure out exactly what-- perhaps making usury illegal and preventing people from holding multiple bank accounts. Obviously the stock markets as we know them would disappear, and guilds of industry would probably be necessary. I haven't personally thought all of these other implications out, at this point I'm just taking them from standard distributist thought, but they would have to be analysed, naturally. The system would somewhat reduce the need for taxation, because most existing social support mechanisms would no longer be necessary in a large way.
I'm not holding my breath waiting for this to happen. My hope is that Canada will see another Trudeau who would do for this vision what Trudeau did for his vision of multiculturalism, and that other countries would follow suit. There would be resistance at first, of course, especially from big business, but I think the average person would be genuinely enthusiastic about the basic idea, once they realised what it meant.
Anyhow, just a thought.
That being said, the point:
What's Wrong With Modern Capitalism
Only when the last tree is cut, only when the last river is polluted, only when the last fish is caught, will they realise that you can't eat money.--Native American proverb
I suppose I have to begin by saying that I think there is something wrong with modern capitalism. I think (and hope) that only committed ideologues will disagree that capitalism and industrialism, in the form they take today, cause significant problems and injustices, in developed and developing countries, on the social, political, and environmental levels. You know what I'm talking about: export processing zones, urban unemployed, dehumanising factory labour, strip mines, everyone expected to be mobile to find jobs, dumping waste in African countries in exchange for guns supplied to their oppressive governments, corporate rights superseding safety standards under NAFTA, the destruction of rainforests, privatisation of water supplies, oil companies using private armed forces to mow down peaceful protesters in Africa, etc. etc. etc.
It's bad enough here in the First World, but in developing countries the effects are reprehensible. Corporations operating in countries that probably have lower GDPs than they do create colonial elites just like empires did in the past, with the exception that there's no romantic national ideal or home population to eventually come into conflict with the treatment of natives. We're talking about people driving BMWs to the giant swimming pool in their five-star hotels while others die of thirst just outside the police-protected wealthy compound.
I don't think these are simple matters of companies not assuming the costs of externalities, because I think many of the externalities are, literally, invaluable. You can't put a price on human life; nor, in the long run, can you put a price on clean air, trees, land, or clean water. Further, a lot of the problems go beyond the ability of national governments to regulate, so assumption of externalities is not likely to be a fruitful means of solving the issues.
What can be done? And what, exactly, is the nature of the problem? A heck of a lot of people look for answers in varying forms of Marxism; or, if not Marxism, then communal revolt that the elites can easily depict as Marxism. Ironically, of course, Marxism, through its fundamental tenet of materialism, is the source of much of the problem. As John Ralston Saul sardonically observes, the only true Marxists nowadays are neoliberals.
I don't think Marxism is any kind of answer, and populist revolt, in the rare event that it's successful, treats only symptoms. The major problem is that, for people on the wrong end of the capitalist stick, these are often the best hope of betterment. Were I in Ernesto Guevara's position, I don't doubt that the deep feelings of antipathy I have towards these ill effects of capitalism would push me as far into socialism as they pushed him. When Bechtel buys the water supply in Bolivia, uses its clout to coerce the government into banning the collection of rainwater, then quadruples the price of water, as a Bolivian there isn't a single bloody alternative to taking up arms and throwing the bastards out of your country. (The neoliberal comment on a similar situation in the Ivory Coast, plumbing new depths of meaning for the word "cynicism", was that the sharp price increase was a good sign that the citizens of Ivory Coast had a healthy and proper respect for the value of water.)
So not only is the present capitalist system responsible for all the injustices to which I alluded earlier, but also in effect for communist uprisings, the death and destruction caused when these become wars, and the further suffering caused when successful uprisings almost inevitably produce their own dictatorships and tinpot elites. Corporate colonialism narrows the options of natives until communism is the best or only way they have to improve their lives, and with an inevitability of which Marx would have been proud, they find their Lenin and revolt. In many cases they're not even ideological communists; but for an armed uprising treading roughshod over sacred capitalist principles to retake anything "for the people", the cynical First World vocabulary has few words available: communists, Marxist rebels, socialists.
The thing is, this outlook isn't even cynical, it's cynicalised. Everyday people, average people, common people, are not by nature cynical. Common sense militates against basically everything that is wrong with the capitalist system. What person, if asked to construct a reasonable way of running things, would think it a good idea to have teams of marketers whose job it is to find new ways of exploiting children in order to sell worthless junk to parents? What person would suggest that it would be helpful if every major company were to have a "CEO" whose salary is equivalent to that of 1000 of his workers (or 20 000 of his Third World labourers) combined, but whose responsibility to the company is so non-existent that they pay him to leave after he takes apart the company to raise the stock price and cashes his options? What person would think to create a system where companies are so mobile that they can tell employees, "Right, you have to uproot your lives and move halfway across the country if you still want your job,", or hold governments hostage by threatening to relocate their operations, in order to win unpopular concessions? Who would insist that people be able to earn outrageous salaries by manipulating money markets without producing anything?
Nobody, that's who. Or perhaps a sociopath. An outsider considering the way we run things would probably conclude that our economy was designed by a sociopath with a twisted sense of humour. But something has alienated the average person so far from their common sense that they rarely think about any of this, and when they do, they usually just feel vague unease, or impotent rage, or despair. Nothing can be done about it, it's just the way things are, there is no alternative. I know I have frequently felt something like this, and I'm willing to bet many of you have as well. We have been cynicalised, not by any one person or group, but by the slow erosion of common sense. And whatever it is has done a damn good number on us.
So what is the real issue?
EVERETT: What about you, Delmar? What're you gonna do with your share a that dough?
DELMAR: Visit those foreclosin' sonofaguns down at the Indianola Savings and Loan and slap that cash down on the barrelhead and buy back the family farm. Hell, you ain't no kind of man if you ain't got land.--O Brother, Where Art Thou?
This morning I had one of those rare but wonderful moments of lucidity, where you wake up and just lie in bed, and something forcefully and simply occurs to you. And the thought that occurred to me today was that these problems seem to be, by and large, the result of two major principles that have been adopted by the West, and which by our time seem to everyone to be unquestionable laws of nature:
1) That the value of land is tradeable in the form of paper money, and may be exchanged with any other kind of money;
2) That it is reasonable for a person to pursue the maximum possible economic gain for himself.
I don't think it will be easy, or perhaps even possible, to reverse number 2) as a means of solving anything. Not because it is immutably true-- it wasn't commonly believed until perhaps a century ago, give or take a few years-- but because to actively reverse it would inevitably require regulating individual action to an unconscionable degree. It is a folkway, and a fairly well entrenched one at that. Certain limits still apply, thanks to basic human nature: the average person certainly does not maximise his economic value, and would refuse to push an old lady off the sidewalk in order to get by more quickly. However, the fact that we acquiesce in permitting other people to do these and much worse, in other countries and even in our own, shows that we tend to accept the principle in general. I'm not proposing that governments determine what level of economic gain a person may pursue, so we'll just have to hope this folkway returns to a more sensible position.
However, I think we can and must do something about number 1). I think this idea had its beginnings in early modern England, when propertied townsmen began to use state power to dismantle feudally structured land holdings. But, as far as I know, it really only took off in the late eighteenth century, at the same time as the Industrial Revolution; I think the first clear example of this was the assignats, paper money valued against confiscated Church property after the French Revolution. But today, the point is that land is viewed as a tradeable asset like any other. You can own land and dispose of it as you wish, just as you can own gold or dollar bills and do the same. I am proposing that this is not a necessary way of treating land; further, that the problems of today's world mean that it is no longer a sane way.
Land is singularly not a transferable asset. As Mark Twain remarked, they're not making any more of it. There is simply nothing with which human beings can replace land. You can't live on money, you can't drink stock portfolios, you can't grow wheat in a bank account, and you can't fish in oil barrels. I have to revise my opening statement: for the average person, land is not a transferable asset. If you own enough of it, it can be, but we've reached a point where some people having that much land is not consistent with everybody having enough land to live.
Part of my point is that it is essentially weird for, say, an American company with a deed to some arable land in India to have a greater claim to that land than Indian people who live nearby and could farm it. It seems to me that the notion of property, applied to land, breaks down at a certain degree of separation between the proprietor and the property. The bottom line is that it is purely artificial that a man in an office in New York can "own" land halfway across the world, or even in his own country. I'm aware that this kind of thing was given a basis by John Locke, but frankly I don't find it very convincing; it's more rationalisation than reasoning.
My gut feeling is that beyond a certain amount of land that I could personally use, exploit, and enjoy, there is no reason to permit me to reserve a right to additional land. Further, given the power of principle 2), there is a very good reason to prevent me from reserving that right: I feel little or no compulsion to preserve land that I don't have to live on or depend on, and it's probably in my short-term economic interest to strip mine it, or to cut down all its trees, or to hunt its animals to extinction, or build a big nasty factory on it. Land that somebody else could use to live on is thus wasted, and when this is done on a large scale it has effects which are permanent, or long outlast the conditions in which I make my economic decision. For example, short-sighted urban sprawl where I live, around Toronto, has caused what is, for our purposes, the permanent destruction of vast areas of prime agricultural land. We're talking some of the richest soil in the country, great swathes of it, paved over with roads and covered with subdivisions of gigantic houses that will fall apart in twenty years. Heck, as if to make my point even more clearly, they actually skim off all the topsoil before building houses, and sell it-- literally converting land into money. Now, if we had to start growing vegetables, we'd be dealing with poor soil, poisoned with deck treatments and God knows what else, and much less of it than there could be.
To me, this is almost criminally stupid. We've built up this gigantic, impressive economic system that allows most people to live without needing to use land for anything. Everyone I know could conceivably do their job and live in cells in their office building, not that they would enjoy it (although I'm sure they could get used to it). As such, nobody, and certainly not those with wealth, needs to give a flying fig about what happens to land. As long as they can buy food at the grocery store, live in a house, and perhaps have a park to play in, they will be reasonably content. But, of course, the system that allows them to do this is the same one that causes all the misery, injustice, oppression, and suffering which I made a faint attempt to catalogue above.
And that's not all. The bigger and the more specialised this economic system gets, the more it needs to sustain it, and the harder the fall will be, if ever it come. If the food supply were to be suddenly cut off-- if a massive oil shortage were to make it too expensive to transport food, for instance-- literally millions of suburbanites would starve to death. Recent forecasts of an impending Prairie dustbowl to make the Depression look moist cause me real concern now, because I've realised that we all depend on other people, mostly corporations, to grow our food for us. If Saskatchewan wheat isn't there for me to eat anymore, what can I do? It becomes easier and easier, as time goes by, for the substitutes for land to be swept out from under us, and the potential effects of such an event grow greater and greater.
What to do about it?
Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.--G. K. Chesterton
So what am I proposing, if anything? It may seem that I'm getting ready to declare Marxism the answer after all, with all of this talk of alienation from the means of production. But I don't think that's the answer, because common ownership of all land could just as easily result in individuals being alienated from their land. Perhaps even more easily, because without the notion of property, the planning council could simply move people around and dispose of their land as it saw fit. Rather, I think it necessary for the government to ardently defend everybody's property rights to a certain amount of land that they can use, and refuse to recognise rights to any more. In Canada, we could easily allow every family to own a house or apartment, an agricultural plot to support themselves, and a rural cottage property. People could also incorporate, and operate a larger property for economic gain-- an apartment building, a large rural agricultural holding, a factory, etc.-- but no more than one, and in no more than one such corporation. Corporate or personal ownership of more than these amounts-- chain stores, franchises, superfarms, massive estates-- would be illegal.
I think this would not be without its problems, but would be a far better and more sustainable system to implement than the current one. I suppose some other financial changes would have to be made-- the country's economists could make themselves useful and figure out exactly what-- perhaps making usury illegal and preventing people from holding multiple bank accounts. Obviously the stock markets as we know them would disappear, and guilds of industry would probably be necessary. I haven't personally thought all of these other implications out, at this point I'm just taking them from standard distributist thought, but they would have to be analysed, naturally. The system would somewhat reduce the need for taxation, because most existing social support mechanisms would no longer be necessary in a large way.
I'm not holding my breath waiting for this to happen. My hope is that Canada will see another Trudeau who would do for this vision what Trudeau did for his vision of multiculturalism, and that other countries would follow suit. There would be resistance at first, of course, especially from big business, but I think the average person would be genuinely enthusiastic about the basic idea, once they realised what it meant.
Anyhow, just a thought.
And needless to say few nations have followed along Canada's multicultural route, so why expect more sucess with the economic one? 
