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.
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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.
Or North Korea https://www.nationalgeographic.com/pa...
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.