Thesis Number: #7 (Page 7 of 8)

Learn, or Lament?

Ancient societies worshipped females as goddesses. Today, women would not expect that level of commitment from men. In fact, men, as well as women, suffer because of the perverse arrangements enforced by the Tax State. This state of dependency renders everyone vulnerable to the will of others. When people are victimised within communities that are traumatised, even the dispossessed can be tempted to gang-up and exploit others (Harrison 2012). No institution can be free of corruption; that includes the Christian Church in a country like Ireland (Raftery 2011), and Moslem countries where discrimination against women may include their being banned from driving cars and denied the education available to men.

• Democracy is not a sufficient condition for protecting women. Nor are fine words in a written constitution sufficient, as the shameful case of India illustrates on a tragic scale (Box 6).
• A similar shame disgraces Europe, where the traffic of women across the continent is big business. In 2012 the UN’s special rapporteur on violence against women (Rashida Manjoo) concluded, after a visit to Italy, that “Most manifestations of violence are under-reported in the context of a family-oriented and patriarchal society” (Davies 2013).

The general state of dependency would be erased by the transformation of the public’s finances, which, inter alia, would necessarily entail a reform to the monetary system (the inter-generational debt burden would be consigned to the past).

By drawing revenue from rents, it would be possible to abolish taxes on wages and salaries. Conventional taxes are the primary reason why millions of people are priced out of work. Social bonds would be adjusted organically in response to the freedom to earn one’s living. Equality would become the norm. Cultural diversity would be celebrated. The Predator Culture (Harrison 2010) would be systematically unwound in response to the natural inclinations of decent people.

A fiscal-led strategy for equalising the economic status of women would simultaneously rebalance the whole of society. From the moral fabric of a population to the routine decision-making of governments, all levels of life would be strengthened by the recognition that each of us (irrespective of gender) has an obligation to match rights with responsibilities.

The woman’s lot of ancient times – the plot of land inherited through the female line – is now an insufficient model for addressing people’s needs. Food-growing land does need to be made more readily accessible to women, if the world is to achieve the zero-hunger goal. But secure access to land needs to be complemented with the fiscal settlement that would emancipate everyone, both male and female, without distinction. Do we owe this to our children?

Footnotes

¹ “Land” is defined by economists to include the services of all of nature’s resources. Thus, the electromagnetic spectrum that is used by cell phones draws on the powers of a layer of “land” that commands an economic rent. Because those rents are now largely privatised, Carlos Slim (Mexico) and Bill Gates (USA) are the two richest men in the world. Hi tech billionaires are being created by default in China, because the communist government is failing to collect spectrum rents for reinvestment in the welfare of the whole population.

² The Wikipedia entry on Coverture informs us that early feminist historian Mary Beard (in her 1946 book Woman as Force in History) held the view that much of the severity of the doctrine of coverture was due to Blackstone and other late systematizers, not due to a common-law tradition.

³ Families that did not “own” land would pay their share into the public pot through commercial rents, which include the rent of land. Economic rent, through the public pricing mechanism, would be conveyed by landlords in both the residential and commercial sectors to the public agencies that deliver the services that make each location valuable, and therefore rentable.