Who Owns Language?

This post on Miss Snark's weblog points to an interesting discussion on who gets to decide how we all write English.

I fall on the side whose argument for leaving well enough alone stems from etymology. If the English language started spelling "plateau" as platoo, or "pizza" as peetsa then how would we know that the words were stolen from other languages?

That argument aside, it would be a nightmare to retrain everyone. It would be like learning to read a whole new language that you already know. Kids who would be taught in the "new" phonetic (fonetik?) composition would be unable to read much of the English body of work.

I won't call the whole thing stupid, but there's too much of a switching cost to even consider it.