by Jane Jacobs
WARREN: Artists themselves often say that they have been prostituted.
JACOBS: Some do and some don’t, and you are being snobbish without reason, without looking at the particular case.
WARREN: But you’re leaving us Guardians with the army and the police and precious little else. Now you’re trying to take art away from us.
JACOBS: It never did belong to Guardians economically. It was not taking, that’s the difficulty of the whole thing. That’s why artists have to get by as best they can, and it is no more demeaning per se to take money from a businessman than from another kind of patron. It’s what the artist does with his time and his opportunity that is, or is not, debased.
WARREN: What about the preservative function of art, for even when it appears most original and revolutionary, great art embodies and develops a tradition.
JACOBS: Certainly. Someone as highly original as Shakespeare was working within a tradition; the Dutch painters of domestic scenes, streets and markets, were very radical in their day, but they too worked within a tradition, and the same artists also did classical and religious paintings. Art works usually within traditional contexts, and great artists are apt to be people who have discerned new possibilities within the traditions. There is a kind of originality which deliberately wants to jettison all tradition, and it is quite evident in our times, although not as much is jettisoned as is often thought. I think of Virginia Woolf, who was radical in her idea of the novel. At the time this didn’t appeal to many people. But she was working within the tradition of fine literature which she greatly respected and loved, and as time has gone by people have more and more appreciated what she did. So artists can be ahead of their time as we say, yet also within the greater or encompassing tradition.
Now when tradition is jettisoned in anger or vainglory by any of the forms of art, an ironic thing happens—it tends to become dated very quickly. When modern architecture eschewed ornament and put itself on stilts and made itself into boxes and dropped all recognized symbolism, it dated very quickly.
BUYING CIVILIZATION
WARREN: Then put this another way. Coleridge, that penetrating conservative, defended institutions, including apparently pointless ones, that symbolize important things. Take the Canadian Senate. Perhaps it is worth two hundred million a year simply as symbol for the idea of “sober second thought,” even if its meetings are confined to ritual.*9
JACOBS: Let’s stop there a minute. The Senate has another very practical function. There are people who work at politics very hard, or have done so in the past, yet they aren’t in elected jobs. What kind of jobs do you find for such people? They have to make a living. You need institutions to support such people. On a lesser scale, in New York there used to be “pothole inspectors.” They were ward political leaders, they were important and they worked hard, pulled their weight in the political system, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill. How were they going to be supported? They were supported, in that case, by phony jobs. Well, you can’t just leave such people adrift. If you don’t have a Senate, you might make them judges, and that would be worse.
WARREN: Yet we have a long tradition of government monopolies, and monopoly franchises. Are there no natural monopolies? What about railways?
JACOBS: The really important, vital government monopoly is over the use of force. All civilized governments must strive constantly to monopolize vengeance and force. To the extent that they don’t succeed—private murders or extortions, robberies, organized crime, terrorist groups, vigilantes, lynching mobs, or the like—civilization and its securities have broken down. Of course governments can be uncivilized themselves in use of force—that’s all too clear—but that doesn’t negate the need for government monopoly over force in civilized regimes.
But to extend monopoly powers to things like railways or the mail service, which are basically commercial, is pretty ridiculous. You see, it is perfectly clear that the railway competes with airlines, with buses, and with private cars. And so why not with other railways? There is no natural monopoly in transportation.
WARREN: In Thatcher, and Reagan, we had the paradox of politicians coming to power on the promise of less government, more commerce. Yet when you study Thatcher, especially, you realize what a Guardian type she was—“Attila the Hen” they called her. Given this paradox, is it possible for privatization to succeed?
JACOBS: Yes. Privatization doesn’t inevitably fail.
WARREN: Or if it works practically, must it fail politically?
JACOBS: It all depends. You have to think what is being privatized and how. For example, if Ontario Hydro were to stick to distributing electric power, and let go of generating, that would be privatizing the generation of power, and where that distinction has been made, between distribution and generation, it has worked rather well. But you have to know what it is you are privatizing and how you’re doing it.
The Canadian government used to disallow competition to the mail service, but this became impossible to enforce because the mail service became so lousy. Private couriers sprang up, and the government itself was embarrassed at using them when it had urgent things to deliver. It gave up on the monopoly, so you might say the mail service has been partially privatized. Now, you can call making the old Post Office a crown corporation a kind of halfway house of privatization but that is a different thing.
WARREN: And seldom a satisfactory thing. It still isn’t a business, trying to maximize profits. Yet it has lost that spirit which Herodotus attributed to the Persian post-riders: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”
JACOBS: And when they had morale and were younger and didn’t have as much business, the mail services used to be extremely honest. Part of the breakdown of morale, the inefficiency, the lackadaisicalness, is that you can’t trust postal systems anymore; things get stolen all the time.
WARREN: I spoke recently with a retired customs officer who made the same point: that customs officers now routinely bill the government for things that used to come out of their pockets, such as cab fares. They no longer dream of saving taxpayers’ money. He said that the old ethic was conveyed by heredity—the son of a customs officer often became a customs officer. The tradition of public service was bred in the son from childhood.
JACOBS: Well, there are societies where it is customary to give bribes and people bred to public service take in that tradition from childhood. They’ve traditionally breached the Guardian precept to shun trading.
WARREN: But ours wasn’t one of them. Another example came up the other day: a Jamaican lady I know owns a roti shop. She had to pay a bribe to get a liquor license. She thought that sort of thing didn’t happen in Canada.
JACOBS: This is specifically a corruption of the precepts on trading, because a bribe is a trade.
By the way, the catch in that hereditary thing, the customs officer’s son becoming a customs officer, is if you get people doing jobs because it is expected, you get a lot of square pegs in round holes. You get artists who are forced into business.
WARREN: So how do we revive that Guardian code, that sense of honor, when it has fallen through cynicism into disuse?
JACOBS: That is one reason I wrote the book. I think people have gotten very confused about what is proper to do in association with different functions and they need to be un-confused about these things. For heaven’s sake, they need to know when they are doing wrong.
WARREN: Have we not been systematically corrupted by excessive taxation?
JACOBS: Parkinson went into that.*10 In fact, he went so far as to tell what percentages of taxes are small enough that people will pay them as a matter of course. The old feudal authorities that used to tax the commerce that went through their territories normally kept it low enough, he said, to prevent evasion or rebellion. Then it got higher.
WARREN: One imagines a sociology of taxation.
JACOBS: I don’t. Sociology had
a subject, supposedly, which is the science of society. That’s how it justified itself, how it got the -ology on its name. Sociologists never have made a science of their subject, they just do busy work. I’m afraid this will sound conceited, but our present discussion has more to do with the science of society than sociology does.*11
WARREN: Agreed. Sociology is death. So back to taxes.
JACOBS: Parkinson says that when they reach a certain percentage—I forget what—then a lot of people begin cheating. This is, of course, very bad for the general moral tone of a country. And when they get still higher practically everyone cheats or finds loopholes. Oliver Wendell Holmes said that he positively liked paying taxes because he thought he was buying civilization and that is a nice feeling.*12 I used to have that feeling. When Holmes was writing, taxes were relatively low. Who feels that any more? And yet a good part of our taxes do go to buying civilization. But what about all these government-supported commercial megaprojects? They’re pork barrels. I think that the government cons itself into believing that they are productive. And now billions are going into these things and other types of subsidies to commerce.
WARREN: There was a headline in the Star the other day: “NDP’s $1 Billion Job Creation Project Nets 670 Jobs.”
JACOBS: So you aren’t buying civilization, you’re buying nothing but waste and demoralization, which are certainly anti-civilization.
WARREN: But only right-wing governments seem to understand that excessive taxation is demoralizing, in the full sense of that word: that it not only discourages citizens, but undermines their sense of right and wrong.
JACOBS: You were speaking about the Fall of Man earlier. There are certain levels of temptation that hardly anybody can resist, and it is well recognized that to entrap people by putting a temptation in their way is an immoral thing to do. You can look at taxes in that way: they reach a level where you are, in effect, tempting people so badly you are entrapping. And since the Guardians are supposed to look out for the moral and spiritual well-being of the people in their territories, this is an outrageous thing.
WARREN: And once corruption enters the soul it spreads like cancer.
JACOBS: Yes! And this theological notion—that when corruption enters in one place it soon gets into others—is that dynamic I tried to explain in mingling syndromes. Other precepts are automatically corrupted, and still others fall by the wayside in expedience.
WARREN: Economists sometimes argue that one kind of taxation is more progressive than another. Do you have preferences?
JACOBS: In general, taxes levied on the principle of ability to pay based upon size of income are progressive. You certainly don’t want to charge very poor people as much for support of the schools, or whatever the taxes are going to, as you do people who have higher incomes. But taxes have been so manipulated for trying to accomplish so many other purposes than just giving support to public facilities and needs that they are in a terrible mess and have all kinds of injustices attached to them. But that is partly inevitable if the sheer level of taxation increases too much: because then the loopholes come, then the injustices come, then the cheating comes.
WARREN: Any government that wants to reduce taxes will run into the problems Reagan had with Congress. The president thought: If I deny them tax increases, they’ll have to curb their spending. But Congress spent more anyway, then blamed Reagan for the deficit.
JACOBS: Well, it becomes a vicious circle because when the taxes become insupportable you get a point where the yield goes down partly from cheating and partly from practical reasons.
WARREN: Sounds supply-side to me.
JACOBS: Obviously. I was reading the other day about the miners in Siberia. The State takes four-fifths of their output, but the rest they are now free to export. This, it was thought, would increase their production and incomes so that the State would not have to pay so much. But what the mines there have to pay in taxes, in various duties on the portion they export for hard currency, exceeds the amount they can get in hard currency. This is an extreme and ridiculous case of taxes reaching a point of utter insupportability. In Sweden, taxes have gotten so high that one of the great worries of the government is the tremendous amount of barter. People find their own loopholes if the State does not create them.
SUCCESS THROUGH FAILURE
WARREN: But you still haven’t told me if there is any form of taxation that you find intrinsically wicked.
JACOBS: A family business may be very small or middle or large size. Unless it is very small, death duties can compel sale of the business to pay the tax. Then the business is likely to pass to a conglomerate or to a very large organization. Thus, those death duties help lead to centralization of economic power. Now, that was probably not the intent at first; by now maybe it is the intent. There are groups that have a vested interest in that happening, in being able to pick up companies in a distressed buyer’s market.
Another thing of this kind: if you contribute money to a registered charity you can take it off your tax. That pretty much compels giving contributions to organizations that have this imprimatur, yet there are lots of organizations that don’t have it; this is a way of centralizing charitable power. Why should just approved charitable organizations have the power to give donors a tax break? Yet if government doesn’t vet the groups, we may be sure charlatans and rascals would make a racket of these tax breaks. This is an example of the complexities, discriminations, and unsalutary side effects, inevitably built into all attempts to use taxation methods for social engineering purposes as distinguished from raising revenue. Guardians have plenty of leeway for social engineering in their use of largesse, the yield from revenues.
WARREN: Toronto has recently had a storm over property taxes, an attempt by the suburban boroughs to impose “Market Value Assessment” over the dead bodies of inner city ratepayers. What’s wrong with it?
JACOBS: Well, certain forms of taxation are inimical to cities, and that is serious because cities are the most fertile ground for new businesses, innovations, all the things you must have if you are not going to stagnate. And the little businesses depend a lot upon each other or they can’t function. This is the great commercial value of cities, that there are places where this can happen. This makes city land valuable, these concentrations and these opportunities, not only the land but the buildings. As soon as you attempt to base a tax on that kind of value, you are doing social engineering so counterproductive that it undercuts the whole advantage of cities.
WARREN: The glib argument in Metro Council was, “We are only adopting a system that many American cities have tried,” and of course any intelligent person who happened to be watching would flinch to think what happened in those cities.
JACOBS: Value-added taxes are also very bad for cities and for innovations. Value-added taxes are a sales tax on every transaction of a business. Now, a large company with many of its services and supplies self-contained doesn’t have to pay its value-added tax until the end of that process. A firm that depends on a lot of outside suppliers has to keep paying the value-added tax at each stage of the transaction. It particularly strikes at the advantages and the necessities of city commerce and production. I think the people who make up these taxation systems don’t understand this at all.
WARREN: I take it this argument applies to the federal government’s much-admired Goods and Services Tax.
JACOBS: Small city businesses are often held in contempt—they aren’t megaprojects, you see—and they’re called “mom-and-pop” stores. A city’s business does not exist on mom-and-pop stores; it floats on a lot of other work underneath.
WARREN: Large organizations like to deal with other large organizations, such as governments. Whereas small businessmen are not equipped for the demands of large bureaucracies. In this case the large bureaucracy expects the mom-and-pop store to meet the same reporting requirements as a multinational.
JACOBS: And that’s an added cost for them. And even if they can meet these bureau
cratic demands, the fact that it has to be done so many times over is a great added cost.
WARREN: So what should we do? Have a tax revolt?
JACOBS: In the end I think we have to depend on more understanding of how these Guardian measures work and, in this case, don’t work. And here we have so many economists and lawyers who ought to understand these things and obviously don’t. Again, you might say that their education has been bad.
A STATE OF FINE CONFUSION
WARREN: Has the way you work changed over the years?
JACOBS: No, it hasn’t changed, and that is one reason why I’m slow. When I start a book I have an idea, but it is not well developed. I don’t know what I’m looking for, and by the end I find that I haven’t written the book I expected because my ideas have changed. If I had known what I was getting into I would never have gotten in. There are so many more ramifications and clues and keys to things that you can’t anticipate. Since I don’t really know what I’m doing when I start, I read as omnivorously as I can, and listen to people, and look at things. It is a state of great confusion. But I’ve learned to trust myself about what is interesting, because so often I’d be interested in something but would consider it beside the point. I would say to myself, “Come on, get back to work,” and throw this thing away, try to put it out of my mind. And then I would find later that I needed exactly that thing. It was germane. I’ve learned to trust myself—if I’m interested in something, to regard it as of potential value.
I just keep on, despite confusion, and I often try writing at an early stage because writing is, for me, a rigorous form of thinking. When you put things down on those blank sheets of paper you find the holes in what you suppose. I do a lot of drafts, and a lot of discarding, and often realize that my organization is wrong, that very important things must be told before what I thought I could begin with. In The Economy of Cities I was going to begin with what turned out to be the fifth chapter. Every time I wrote I would start digressing, and when you digress so much, something is wrong with your organization. What was wrong was that my digressions were essential, but bad initial organization forced their displacement.