The Socialist Themes In Gandhian Philosophy Essay — страница 7

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products of these multinational corporations that immorally exploit laborers cause environmental and human degradation in hopes that the American government will abolish all disastrous effects of big business. However, Gandhi realized that a government that over limits capitalism and wealth is a dangerous mechanism that can impede individuality. In every real sense a badly paid unskilled worker in a capitalist nation has more freedom to shape his or her life than many employers in socialist Germany. If he or she wants to change their job or the place where they live, if they want to profess certain views or spend their leisure in a particular way, they face no absolute impediments. There are no dangers to bodily security and freedom that confine the laborer by brute force to the

task and environment to which a superior has assigned them. Many have forgotten that the system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom. It is only because the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that we as individuals can decide what to do with ourselves. When all the means of production are vested in a single hand, whether it be nominally that of society as a whole or that of a dictator, whoever exercises this control has complete power over us. In the hands of private individuals, what is called economic power can be an instrument of coercion, but it is never control over the whole life of a person. But when economic power is centralized as an instrument of political power it creates a degree of dependence

scarcely distinguishable from slavery. It has been well said that, in a country where the sole employer is the state, opposition means death by slow starvation.