The God of the Machine - Tranche 35
Chapter XVII, Excerpt 2 of 3
The Fiction of Public Ownership
Collectivists must feel that their hypothetical society is non-productive, for production creates its own means of production. To obscure this difficulty, they stress distribution and consumption as the crux of their schemes. They must use quantitative measures for goods and time for labor. With state ownership, nothing can be done except by command or permission. Eliminating the moral and physical relations which made those forms workable, they necessarily deny the right of man to his own labor.
Collectivists talk about “the right to work.” In a free society, man has by nature the right to work; nor may anyone stop him from working on his own property. If he must seek employment from others, it is never within the worker’s power to extract his own terms. But it is said that if a man cannot demand employment at a living wage as of right, his natural right to work has been denied. Is there any production economy in which unemployment will not occur with harsher terms attached to it?
The two extremes of property title are government ownership and private property. With group ownership, a man must be a member of the group, else he has no property rights. The real accusation against private capitalism must be that it does slow down occasionally. It does not function with absolute mathematical regularity. The collectivist promises an organization that will never break down. He insists that he has the plan of the perfect, “automatic” machine.
The Fiction of Public Ownership
Collectivists must feel that their hypothetical society is non-productive, for production creates its own means of production. To obscure this difficulty, they stress distribution and consumption as the crux of their schemes. They must use quantitative measures for goods and time for labor. With state ownership, nothing can be done except by command or permission. Eliminating the moral and physical relations which made those forms workable, they necessarily deny the right of man to his own labor.
Collectivists talk about “the right to work.” In a free society, man has by nature the right to work; nor may anyone stop him from working on his own property. If he must seek employment from others, it is never within the worker’s power to extract his own terms. But it is said that if a man cannot demand employment at a living wage as of right, his natural right to work has been denied. Is there any production economy in which unemployment will not occur with harsher terms attached to it?
The two extremes of property title are government ownership and private property. With group ownership, a man must be a member of the group, else he has no property rights. The real accusation against private capitalism must be that it does slow down occasionally. It does not function with absolute mathematical regularity. The collectivist promises an organization that will never break down. He insists that he has the plan of the perfect, “automatic” machine.
It should be emphasized that these extremes are absolute and any attempt to construct an entity that includes Private/Public in its title is a contradiction in terms and has to fail. It always ends up with the public part controlling everything. Corruption ensues and demise shortly follows.
“The collectivist promises an organization that will never break down. He insists that he has the plan of the perfect, “automatic” machine.”
The U S Patent office has a policy viz. that any patent application whose cover claim includes “perpetual motion” per se or by intimation is automatically rejected without comment. The laws of Thermodynamics, you see, are not to be denied.
The Utopian promises of Plato and More are detached from reality and always fail. Perpetual Motion is impossible.
Hasn't this been the most basic cause of destruction of mankind and its governments for Millennia?
Funny and frightening at the same time.
Unfortunately, schools tend to shy away from the teaching of logic. "Feelings" are given too much priority.
Thinking logically is like a exercising a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it gets. When neglected, it atrophies.
1. Some (those who are able to grab a measure of power and influence) are "more equal" than others.
2. The standard of living for those NOT among the elite is brought down to a much lower level for everyone.
AR's "We the Living" paints a very compelling picture of this.
Interestingly, Robert Heinlein discussed universal basic income (he called it "heritage" income) in "For Us, The Living" which he wrote in 1939, though it went unpublished until 2004. (NOT to be confused with "We the Living" by AR).
Based on his other published writings, imo, Heinlein learned from his life experience
and likely realized that that 1939 work had already been superseded by his later works.
His estate published it 16 years after Heinlein died, and just 10 months after his wife Ginny died.
I speculate that demand for anything written by Heinlein was so great that the administrator
couldn't resist publication of it. I know I'd read anything new that was written by Heinlein if
published today.
The second paragraph is less obvious, but equally important. The "right to a living wage" is a guarantee of unemployment. Living wage is an arbitrary concept and productiveness is existential to human survival.
If anyone doubts the impossibility of an automatic machine, look for lights in the apartment buildings in Havana at night.
and this requires the entrepreneurial spark of an individual to ignite an idea or concept and bring it into material reality.
Or North Korea https://www.nationalgeographic.com/pa...
except?