|
Comments
on slavery and being the citizen of a collectivist state
Apparently in some United Nations Declaration of Human Rights it
is stated that no person should be the slave of another person. But
how does citizenship of a collectivist state differ from slavery?
You are to have the social position and salary that the state
allocates to you, you have no freedom of decision in relation to
your own physiology and virtually all aspects of your affairs, and
your attempts to increase your freedom of action by making money in
any legal way will be heavily taxed so that the collectivist state,
or its agents, can make such use as they see fit of the money which
has been confiscated from you. The use which they see fit to make of
your money is supposed, by definition, to be 'beneficial' to those
who are chosen for collective attention.
Taxation of serfs by individual landowners (and body-owners)
would nowadays be regarded as immoral and oppressive. What makes
taxation by the collective slave-master less immoral? Just that no
individual benefits, I suppose. No one gets any freedom out of it
that he can use at his own discretion. Even the agents of the
collective are not very highly paid (although excessively for the
market value of what they do); they are rewarded only with the
freedom to derive gratification from their power over the lives of
others.
In a recent television version of Onegin, based on Pushkin's
novel, a girl in a land-owning family says, 'It isn't right that one
human being should be the property of another, just because of an
accident of birth.'
It may not seem 'right', but there is nothing remarkable about
it. I just happened to have been born in Britain, so I am the
property of the British government, to whatever extent it sees fit
to prescribe, and of recent decades it has seen fit to prescribe any
number of restrictions on the rights of its citizens to make
decisions about their own affairs, even within the most restricted
territory.
It is frequently represented as oppressive that workers on the
territory of a landowner were expected to pay him a tax of part of
the crops which they produced for themselves. How is that more
horrific than being forced to pay taxes to the government on
practically anything that one earns or acquires in any way towards
the improvement of one's position, and hence towards being able to
do anything that one considers oneself to be worthwhile?
No doubt it will be objected that a tax paid to a landowner is
only advantageous to an individual, or a small group of individuals,
whereas one should be only too pleased to pay heavy taxes to the
government, a large collective entity, which will distribute them in
a way which a large collection of people considers to be
'beneficial' to an even larger population of people, i.e. the total
population of the country as a minimum, and sometimes sections of
the global population as well.
Actually, of the two, I would prefer to pay taxes to a landowner,
because at least somebody would be getting something he wanted out
of it. It is difficult to see whether the 'advantages' conferred on
those members of the population who really want such advantages, and
would pay for them with their own money, if they had it, are not
outweighed by the disadvantages conferred on other people, and
sometimes the same people, against their will, because someone else
considers it to be 'in their interests' to be disadvantaged in those
ways.
I realise that I have this unusual preference because I like to
think of people being able to get what they want to have, whereas
most people only like the idea of people being prevented from having
anything they want. As this is the majority view, it is bound to be
the major determinant of what goes on in a democratic society.
|
