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Old 09-02-2007, 09:21 AM   #24
Lalwendė
A Mere Boggart
 
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Join Date: Mar 2004
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Lalwendė is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.Lalwendė is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.
Quote:
Originally Posted by William Cloud Hickli View Post

As an aside, everybody's political definitions vary; but I think 'state control of the means of production' is a decent working definition of Socialism, which thereby would certainly include Atlee's nationalisation of mining, steel, autos etc, and a health system where the State actually owns and operates the hospitals, rather than just paying the bills. Besides, Atlee used to close his letters "Workers of the world unite!"
Many of these things had been taken under state control before Attlee! WWII saw to that necessity, so there was really nothing new in the post war situation to critique!

Quote:
Originally Posted by lmp
The "gathering and sharing" in the chapter was used by the corrupt weilders of power as an excuse that the hobbits couldn't very well disagree with on the face of it; which is why they didn't have a ready answer for it until it was too late. The Hobbits are all about community and "gathering and sharing" is a great community ideal. That the weilders of power cheated the ruled by selling to a foreign entity and making a huge profit at the expense of the local ruled, resulting in shabby living conditions, does not in itself undermine the ideal of "gathering and sharing".
Indeed. Nothing wrong in and of itself with 'sharing' amongst the community, but Tolkien does show how an ideal can easily be corrupted. I'm reminded of how multi-national companies will set up shop in some distant corner of the world, promising great riches but in reality enslaving good but poor people to a 'machine' for profit.

Of course, The Shire was already a wonderful, utopian place to begin with - we don't see starving Hobbits - and the real world is quite different.
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