The nutty
philosopher
“Tax breathing, not chocolate cake” ran the headline in the Times (30
May) of an article by a certain Jamie White, who was billed as “a
philosopher”. It didn’t say of what but he seems to be a philosopher of
taxation.
In any event, he advanced the view that the best things to tax are
things people are prepared to pay for irrespective of the price. When
the price of cakes reaches a certain level people will stop buying
them, but whatever level a hypothetical price of air would reach people
would still buy it.
“Privatising the air is the ideal solution”, wrote the philosopher.
“Alas, it is difficult to arrange”.
Alas, be buggered. Fortunately, it is impossible to arrange. Not that
some enterprising capitalist wouldn’t seek to own and sell air if they
could, as in the nightmare situation envisaged by Owen in Robert
Tressell’s classic novel The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists:
“They have monopolized everything that it is possible to monopolize;
they have got the whole earth, the minerals in the earth and the
streams that water the earth. The only reason they have not monopolized
the daylight and the air is that it is not possible to do it. If it
were possible to construct huge gasometers and to draw together and
compress within them the whole of the atmosphere, it would have been
done long ago, and we should have been compelled to work for them in
order to get money to buy air to breathe. And if that seemingly
impossible thing were accomplished tomorrow, you would see thousands of
people dying for want of air - or of the money to buy it - even as now
thousands are dying from want of other necessaries of life. You would
see people going about gasping for breath, and telling each other that
the likes of them could not expect to have air to breathe unless they
had the money to pay for it” (chapter 15).
While only a nutty professor would argue that the private ownership of
air was an “ideal solution”, most people today accept that the private
ownership of the productive resources needed for life - land, water,
minerals and the instruments needed to fashion them into useful things
- is reasonable. Actually, from the of view of meeting human needs, it
is a quite unreasonable solution.
Why should the land, water and the other things that are just as
essential to life as air be privately owned any more than the air we
breathe? Why should a section of society be in a position to hold the
rest of us to ransom and say “unless you work for us (for less than you
produce) you can’t have access to what you need to live?”
Of course they shouldn’t. All the means and instruments of production
should belong in common to the whole community as the only basis on
which they can be used to satisfy the needs of every member of society.
The good news is that White will be regarded as a fruit cake by most
supporters of capitalism too. Even Madame Thatcher baulked at the free
buying and selling of body parts, inconsistent with her own nutty
philosophy as this was.