Go To Parent Document
Education & Healthcare
Economic empowerment is useless to anyone who does not know how to use it. Knowledge is a social resource - a collective inheritance enhanced and passed on by each generation. It is the one thing the individual hythe cannot supply. It requires a collective means of provision.

Hythe Provides Everything

In Hythe World, you own absolutely the economic yield of your portion of the planet. There is no capitalist to stand between you and your land, siphoning off the fruits of your labour and leaving you barely enough to live on. All the fruits of your land wrought by your labour are yours. No individual or government can take your land from you for any reason. It is yours for the whole of your working life. The quality of life it affords you depends on how diligently and how virtuously you exploit it.

Nevertheless, possession of land does bring with it certain practical responsibilities and duties. Already mentioned is your duty to provide for the traveller. A place set aside for the traveller to camp overnight while en-route through your land. In a high-tech society, there is also a duty to provide paved roads across your hythe. Perhaps also the duty to provide relay facilities for a public communications network. These are things you provide directly yourself, and for which you are appreciated.

Except Formal Education

However, there is one thing which you cannot provide directly for yourself. That is education. Education is a specialist task. It is a full-time task. It requires dedicated people who are absolved of the burden of having to expend their own time and effort to acquire their needs of life.

For this purpose - and this purpose alone - hythe owners should be taxed. But what kind of tax would be fair? A tax on property would not be fair. A tax on consumption or need would not be fair. Neither would a tax on one's time and effort, namely a tax on labour. The only fair kind of tax is a small portion of the needs of life which the land you possess produces for you.

Pay full heed to the fact that this tax is not on what you produce. It is on what your land gains for you. It is nothing to do with how much time and effort you put in. In today's world, the only people who would be liable to pay this kind of tax would be the capitalists. However, in Hythe World, everybody is a capitalist, in the limited sense that each owns a share of the means of transforming his labour into his needs of life.

The system of education which this tax would support would provide a regular weekly programme at some convenient centre within each local anthropological community. It would also provide an annual residential programme for much greater gatherings at regional or national centres. Its curriculum would embrace and reiterate all the timeless essentials of morality, social relationships, economics and the workings of nature.

And Health Care

A large part - if not the vast majority - of modern sickness is probably caused by the stresses and deprivations imposed on the human frame by capitalist exploitation.

The stress of being driven by the clock.
The obligation to work the same hours at the same level of productivity both summer and winter.
To rise hours before each cold winter dawn,
Travel long distances in the freezing grey leaden twilight,
Arriving at the office with its window looking out at the filthy walls of a city block light well.
Being expected to engage in competitive creative thought throughout the short grey day,
Until the cold winter darkness has long since fallen once again.
Battling home through a sea of irritable commuters,
Exchanging diseases along the way,
Arriving home in the same depressing darkness in which you left,
Leaving you little time to recover before the alarm clock and the electric light prematurely shatter your repose long before the coming dawn.

What better recipe could there possibly be for stress, illness, depression and an early death?

Finally it hits you. The shiver. The dripping nose. The raw throat. The unsuppressable cough. The coldness. The fatigue. The lethargy. The despair. Unrelenting discomfort. And in this sorry state, what does the capitalist world expect you to do? Stay in bed and rest as nature and common sense would suggest? No. It expects you to go to a telephone and make an appointment to see a doctor, then trudge over a mile in the freezing cold to the doctor's surgery to obtain a 'sick note' as evidence that you are indeed ill, then trudge over a mile home again. Otherwise it is assumed that you are a lying malingerer and you lose pay - or even your job. If you are unemployed you lose part of your welfare which is so low that the loss of any part of it means that you and your family cannot eat.

But with your own hythe you are free to follow the seasons. You work hard in spring summer and autumn when the days are long and bright. In the short days of winter, you can rest as nature does and spend time with your family and take time to read, think and plan. If you are ill you can take as much 'time off' as you see fit. You account to nobody but yourself in such matters since you possess and control the means which provide your needs of life. You will have already seen to the provisions of food and fuel for the winter. You do not need to go out in the winter cold. You are free to relax and to recover in your own time in order to regain your full fitness ready for when the warmth returns in the spring.


Start of book. This page's parent. About this book. About its author. ©Dec 1996 Robert J Morton