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The Yokaren, Mr. Odachi pointed out, were different from other kamikaze, students who had been yanked out of their schools and consigned to death with little preparation or training. Still, the young men in Mr. Odachi’s program were groomed to die in aerial combat even before Japan’s desperate turn to suicide missions.
Cadets were celebrated as cherry blossoms, a flower whose vivid beauty is accentuated by its brief existence. Even the buttons on their uniforms, embossed with the flower, served as a reminder of their imminent death in battle.
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dealing with inequality
Greg notes a piece on universal property - a concept that has worked across ideological lines in places like Alaska.
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Around the same time that Calhoun was penning his Disquisition, across the Atlantic two German émigrés offered a very different notion of class struggle. In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels portrayed the working class as the true creators of wealth, and the owners of capital as parasites. A key plank in their program for building a more egalitarian society was state ownership of “the means of production.” The shortcomings of this recipe became all too clear with the advent of Communist regimes in the 20th century. The belief that state property would in a meaningful sense belong to all was belied by the rise of new elites, whose power like that of capitalists rested on control of property—property nominally belonging to the governments they ran. In Russia, three decades after elite “reformers” in the U.S.S.R. leveraged their political status to reinvent themselves as post-communist oligarchs, wealth is distributed even more unequally than in the United States. And in China inequality has reemerged with a vengeance.
The lesson: Neither private property nor state-owned property is sufficient to guarantee equality and liberty for all. The first can allow economic elites to monopolize wealth and power, the second can allow political elites to do the same. But there is an alternative type of property that can never be concentrated in the hands of an elite. It was pioneered in, of all places, Alaska.
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06:29 in General Commentary | Permalink | Comments (0)