Witless conservatism

Nicholas von Hoffman

Washington The returns from the California plebiscite °n property taxes have obliterated other news. The referendum, which significantly I reduces taxes and local government's power I t° raise them in the future, was being talked About everywhere as the raising of the stand.ard of a taxpayers' rebellion. Reports of sintilar efforts in other states were widely broadcast, and in Washington Bills to cut ( !Vital gains taxes by half and income tax at es by 30 per cent are getting serious con, sideration. • Politicians of both parties tumbled down me marble stairs of their legislative temples "s they wrestled for primacy in denouncing 1119 despised property tax. Their ferocity b'etnforces the witless conservatism in full 1,1%7mi here . just now. Men who should ; OW better have lifted their heads to howl i.with the rest of the pack when they might ' nave pointed out that the problem with the 1)r0Perty tax is the way it is administered.

, Unreal property, stocks and bonds, isn't

• '.axed at all. In addition to these trillion or so joollars which escape entirely, tax collectors 11 many places are both idiotic and corrupt, so that working people pay excessively high SLIMS while the wealthy pay excessively low °nes. But dumping the tax means progressively greater reliance on sales and Meome taxes: that is, placing disincentives Of earner/entrepreneurs in favour of the Possessors of static wealth. America isn't i■ke England: the rich and the upper mid?le class haven't been taxed into extinction. 1.n fact, there has been no important change In the distribution of wealth here since the turn of the century. The de facto abolition

of the property tax will only speed up the centralisation of government which conservatives so abhor. From 1900 until now, the percentage of local revenues derived from the property tax has dropped from about 75 to 30 per cent. It is the Federal government which has taken up that slack and can be expected to do so again when the layoff of civil service workers and the diminution of public services become unbearable.

Since local government is one of the main ways by which superfluous workers are hidden to keep them out of the welfare and jobless statistics, large cuts in their numbers ought not to impair the efficiency of the government bureaux affected, but it won't work that way. Retaliation will be visited on the voters of California by their public servants. Even while they made speeches announcing their compliance with the will of the people, officials were also announcing across-the-board personnel cuts and hiring freezes in order to bring payrolls down to reduced income levels. This is an old American bureaucratic ploy. Random discharge of workers and hiring freezes mean that indispensable positions are left vacant, incapacitating the people who are left on the payroll. In this manner, a ten per cent cut in personnel can bring about a 45 per cent reduction in service.

The anger of increasingly well-organised

taxpayer groups has put the Carter administration, in a trap. The President

started off his year by advocating a big tax cut, then, as the inflation indices grew worse, the Carter people backed off their recommendations. If they turn round on the subject a third time, nobody is going to pay any attention to them.

Moreover, if taxes are lowered, who is going to pay for the new guns the administration wants? Hourly Pentagon bulletins on Russian military supremacy are followed by proposals for yet more new weapons systems, none of which seem to cost less than fifty billion dollars. The most intriguing idea to date is the Air Force request for untold trillions to build a subway in the Great American Desert. The stops on this high technology underground vermiculation are missile silos, because the trains in this metro aren't trains but intercontinental ballistic missiles ceaselessly moving from one silo to another so the Reds can't guess where they are and blow them up. This was too preposterous even for the House Armed Services Committee, so the scheme has been revised to put the missiles on trucks and run them around the desert that way.

The atmosphere has been made more truculent by Mr Carter's unaccountable fixation with the Russo-Cubano cabal in Africa. He never stops talking about it, and the more he does, the more scepticism grows about what part Fidel's minions played in the training and equipping of that indomitable army which threw down its guns and ran into the palm trees at the appearance of a couple of hundred French paratroopers. There has been so much talk about the proof of Cuban culpability that one can imagine the American' Commander-in-Chief in the Oval Office studying snapshots taken by CIA missionaries in Lubumbashi or wherever while an admiral says, 'See the man over there in the left-hand corner, Mr President? No, not that one, that's the basketball coach. Yes, that's right, Sir, this one, the one with the ball. Take a squint at him through this magnifying glass, Mr President. We think he's Cuban. Note the cigar, sir, and the beard, and the fact that it appears to say "made in Havana" on the ball itself. This is the Kolwezi High School Basketball Team, but we have reason to believe it is a clandestine terrorist organisation.'

Making the principal speech at his old college, the Naval Academy, Mr Carter sounded so tough that the news magazines began to write articles about a return to the cold war. Not since Lyndon Johnson had a president talked about the American mission to save the cosmos. Almost as if to refute him, Alexander Solzhenitsyn arrived at Harvard to give the Graduation speech and say he didn't think much of majority rule, election day or the two-party system. Since this monkish starers from the monasteries of the Communist salt mines has been sold here as the personification of human rights, it was irritating to have him be so non-American. The exiled Russian gave the graduates of this university, which is the West Point of multi-national corporate management, to understand the United States has little to contribute spiritually or politically toward the building of the City of God. Even for Americans who might not agree, this Slavic mystic, so out of place addressing the youth cadres of godless capitalism, was a reminder of how ethnocentric official American judgments on other social systems can be.

After putting down everything from American music to American television, Solzhenitsyn returned to his Vermont version of Yasnaya Polyana where his strict privacy is guarded by television cameras, electric locks and other advanced gadgetry he has such public contempt for.

One subject we've not heard our visitor discuss is the Women's Rights question. If he is against them, he may have taken heart from the Illinois legislature's refusal to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. Unless Congress extends the deadline for ratification by the states, it looks as though it will fail. The fight for equality goes on, however. In Fort Lauder dale, Florida, the School Board is thinking about 'de-sexing' the English Language by banning masculine and feminine pronouns and adjectives. He-she would be replaced by `e' and him-his-her would be sacrificed for the more progressive 'ir'. It won't take us long to master these changes, as this example provided by the curriculum experts shows: 'Terry Williams missed ir bus. The janitor finds Terry and takes ir to the guidance office.

Q 'Why did e miss ir bus?'

A `E was afraid to go home.'

Q 'Who was e with?' A `E was by irself.'

For the unmarried who lives alone, a supermarket chain here is selling a two-slice loaf of bread for nineteen cents. Just right for ir when e wants to make irself a sandwich.