No one except cranks
| AN OUTSIDERS VIEW |
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| Ken Fuller |
“No one — that is, no one except cranks — has seriously suggested that taxes should be abolished so that everyone can keep his money and pay only for the goods he uses: food, clothes, shelter, roads, power, police, telephones, bridges, medical care, etc. — for the very reason that no one is wealthy enough to afford all these goods and conveniences individually. Socially and economically speaking, collectively — pooling resources in the everyday sense — is man’s fate. In society, every man is his brother’s keeper.”
It is 37 years since those words were written (the author will be revealed later) and the economic culture has, regrettably, moved on. Less than six years after the above passage appeared in print, the UK electorate installed Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street, and the following year Ronald Reagan was elected to the White House. What a way to start the 1980s! “There is no such thing as society,” Thatcher was to quip in 1987 and, although this was not true when she said it, by the time she left office British society was certainly on the rocks.
Thatcher and Reagan commenced an orgy of privatization, savaging the trade union movement in their respective countries in the process. Later, it was revealed that Thatcher’s fight to the death with the National Union of Mineworkers was part of a strategy — her axe-man Nicholas Ridley had a list of targets, headed by the NUM. In the USA, Reagan began by confronting the air-traffic controllers’ union..... MORE
Source: The Daily Tribune
URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20101102com5.html
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