ELEPHANT TO PLATT:
The point I was making in the throw-away line was that the boundary between
depreciated statism and esteemed state-intervention is a hard one. At the
lowest level, the administration of justice is state-intervention. A
policeman is a form of state-intervention. A murder inquiry is
state-intervention. Public enquiries are, in a way, a branch of the same
administration of justice, but in practice the administration and the
justice that is involved here gives the state a slightly higher degree of
authority over the details and circumstances of citizen's lives, right
through to, in the case of enviromental catastrophe, whether they live or
die, and in the case of enviromental quality, whether they can go for a walk
in the woods.
Indeed the political movements that have argued for greater
state-intervention have generally had, as their rallying call, the
implementation and administration of justice: economic justice, social
justice, enviromental justice, health justice, even in some alarming cases
divine justice.
So, what I suggest is that whether you think of a proposal as constituting
statism or the proper state function of administrating justice depends,
almost completely, on what you think of as just. You, Platt, think of land
ownership as entirely proper and just. Danila does not, largely because of
the social, economic and enviromental injustices that he attributes as
consequences of outright land title. There is the possibility of a serious
argument between your two veiws of justice. But that argument will not
occur if all that either of you exchange is labels like 'statism'. MOQers
should be able to debate social programs without being accused of unamerican
activities.
Pzeph
>
> ELEPHANT
>> A balanced and forgiving summary Platt. Roll on those public enquiries (a
>> form of statism? surely not?).
> DANILA
> Actually, one promising social policy that I would like to suggest is
> abolishing land ownership and substituting a land tax, where the
> society/government owns the land and manipulates its usage by
> the amount of rent it charges the user such as the farmer or
> building owner. (From Danila's post of 30 Dec.)
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