Monday 9 April 2018

Namerican Ideals

Tolteca expounds the Namerican way:

"'Our feeling is that the state should do as little as possible,' he said, earnest with the ideals of his nation. 'Otherwise it will get too much power, and that's the end of freedom. But then private enterprise must take over; and it must be kept competitive, or it will in turn develop into a tyranny.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Night Face IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 541-660 AT IV, p. 579.

Is state intervention necessary to prevent monopolies? At least some public services, like hospitals and clinics, are scarcely tyrannical and maintain a healthy work force. Are the duplication, waste and chaos of economic competition really the best option? They are certainly preferable to either slavery or serfdom. Even slavery, accumulating wealth for a few, was better than mere subsistence with no wealth for anyone. Some slave-owners developed philosophy, science and the arts instead of just getting fat. We are their heirs. We are also the heirs of the slaves who did the physical work and rebelled with Spartacus.

But these are all stages. Surely technology producing abundant wealth for all will make competition, tyranny and the state redundant?

" 'Why?...A whole galaxy. A whole universe, a technology that could make every last livin' bein' rich - why are we and they locked in this senseless feud?'

" 'Because both our sides have governments...' " (7) (my emphasis)
-copied from Interstellar Wealth.

Poul Anderson's sf asks these questions and his readers disagree about the answers. Meanwhile: onward, Earthlings! Our immediate task is to survive into any kind of future.

10 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Btw, is that you or Ketlan holding the paperback copy of THE NIGHT FACE?

Altho I like Raven better than the rather shallow and blundering Tolteca, I agree with his views of the state. I'm more dubious about him saying a free enterprise economy which is no longer competitive then becomes tyrannical. Private corporations, as such, do not make for very effective STATES. The two types of organization have different ends or goals. Trying to merge both ends up with them not being efficient or effective in either sphere.

Btw, not all hospitals and clinics in the US are owned by the state. Many are still run by non state corporations of various kinds, such as religious bodies. And I think that is good, as an alternative acting as a competitive check on gov't run hospitals.

Yes, a more or less free enterprise economy is best because it WORKS. Nor do I consider alleged waste and duplication when it provides very similar goods and services at varying prices that people are free to choose from as their wishes and means allows. Ford, Honda, and Toyota might, strictly speaking, all make very similar cars, but they generally come with options, designs, choices, etc., that do vary and appeals to many different persons.

I can think of one reason alone why the state will ever "wither away" a la Marx: sheer human QUARRELSOMENESS. People will fight, argue, or commit crimes for any reason. That necessitates some means of preserving order and penalizing crime. And it won't matter how rich or high tech a society might be.

I agree with your last comment!

Sean

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Oh yes, I forgot to point out Spartacus' rebellion FAILED. The Romans crushed it and crucified many of his followers. Slavery would not be abolished by either the Roman Republic or Empire. It would have been better to cite instances where slavery or serfdom was peacefully abolished. A the British Empire did in 1837 or Tsarist Russia in 1862.

Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,
Neither. I got the image from the Internet.
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I did wonder!

Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,
Spartacus' army was defeated but we are the heirs of everyone who labored and struggled.
Paul.

S.M. Stirling said...

North-west Europe was the first large area to actually extinguish the institution of chattel slavery, which before that had been quite ubiquitous throughout the agricultural civilizations (and at least marginally present among hunter-gatherers). It had varied sharply in how important or central it was to social organization, but it had been present nearly everywhere.

That happened in the period between about 800 CD and 1200 CE. At the beginning of that period, slavery and slave trading (often as exports to the Islamic world) had been very common; in 1086 about 15% of the population of England were still slaves, and there were repeated attempts to prohibit the export slave trade.

By about 1200, slavery was extinct in the "core" areas of Western Christendom, and was declining in the southern parts around the Mediterranean, shrinking into a few specialist uses, though it never completely died out there before the 18th century. The "high feudal" societies of north-central France and Anglo-Norman England were at the heart of the trend. It was never a revolution, just a gradual but thorough change.

(Serfdom as practiced in those areas was quite distinct from slavery, unlike the later Russian form.)

This was historically quite important as the North European economies expanded and became more monetized and market-oriented later.

Throughout most history, economic expansion beyond a household level had traditionally depended on bound labor. Late medieval and Renaissance Europe were the first places where wage labor became completely dominant.

As Drescher points out (I highly recommend his books ECONOCIDE, about British abolition, and the more general ABOLITION) it was the countries (and their overseas settlements) where slavery had completely disappeared which were later crucial in driving the abolitionist movements that destroyed colonial slavery of the South Atlantic type, and then went on to get rid of slavery elsewhere.

(The later was done by a combination of propaganda, persuasion, economic coercion, and simply grabbing the recalcitrant by the throat and sticking a gun up their nose or pistol-whipping them.)

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

I realize how little I know. But the advantage of blogging is the combox.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Dear Mr. Stirling,

While I agree with you that many factors led to the decline and abolition of chattel slavery, another could have been included. The Catholic Church disliked slavery, even if it was grudgingly tolerated. The principles enunciated by St. Paul in his Letter of Philemon made it increasingly difficult for convinced Christians to excuse slavery. And even if it had little effect in his time Pope Paul III's condemnation of the enslaving of the American Indians did its bit to make people's consciences itchy!

Sean

S.M. Stirling said...

Sean: quite true. The Church's attitudes towards slavery were ambiguous and contradictory, but in the long run tended to subvert the institution. It was also consistently hostile to the enslavement of fellow-Christians, and to the export of slaves from Europe (which had been quite considerable).

In the 18th and 19th centuries various radical Protestant sects in the English-speaking world were much more militant about it, and crucial to the development of political abolitionism, but this built on that foundation.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Dear Mr. Stirling,

I agree with what you said and should have mentioned the Church's opposition to both the enslaving of Christians and the export of slaves from Europe.

I mentioned Pope Paul III. His encylical condemning the enslaving of the American Indians was titled SUBLIMUS DEUS.

Sean