|
And here's one more part of this: a great letter by a Southern pro-slavery philosopher, about 1830's, was written to a capitalist abolitionist Northern philosopher. And the pro-slavery owner said, Look, we would be very happy to give up all our slaves if we had the same conditions you have up there. Because slave ownership is only the optimal economic choice under very specific land-ownership conditions.If you have not very many people on a lot of land, the only way you can get them to work for you is at the point of a gun. Because access to land means self-sufficiency. If, on the other hand, you have a lot of people, and you've got land title all tied up, they have no choice but to work for you for whatever pittance. So, frankly, I'd rather have it like you do, because you don't have to pay for them when they get sick. You don't have to pay for their food when they're infants. You don't have to pay for them in their old age. So, frankly, you can offer them whatever pittance you want, and if they don't take it, you'll hire somebody else. It made a lot of sense to me. Access to land is everything. And, by the way, land ownership doesn't exist. I don't own this land here. What actually happens is, my mom owns a piece of paper that we all agree means that she owns this land. But she doesn't own any land, Warehauser doesn't any land. Sierra Pacific doesn't own any land, the US government doesn't own any land. They have pieces of paper that we all agree mean that they own the land. But what there is, is there's land, and there's starving people, and there's people who are paying money to live on land that other people have pieces of paper that say that they own, but it's all a shared hallucination. http://www.davidsheen.com/firstearth/interviews/jensen.htm |