one of the problems, though, is that when nothing is really owned, the upkeep isn't done. have you ever been a landlord? renters often leave the apartment in worse shape then they found it or at best just don't do any work on it. eliminating property ownership wouldn't solve the problem anyway. it would just mean that everything would be owned by the government, which would mean that it would be owned by the ruling elite. pretty much like it is now, except everyone would be renting their homes instead of owning them.
Most people already rent their homes, from the ruling elite called landlords; thus, even if a lessor state were more necessarily tyrannical than a regulatory/welfare state, and you've made no argument to that effect that rises above the tedious reductio ad Stalinum, we'd be no worse than when we started. But in fact we've already seen the state, in this country, sell property and buy improvements thereto. And though the state in this country is quite corrupt, though it is your theoretically benevolent regulatory/welfare state, we can discern certain forms of exchange (e.g. auction) that even a regulatory/welfare state cannot spoil. As for what motivates the tenant not to ruin the home, the democratic lessor could of course employ any of the means the current, autocratic lessors do: liability, security deposit, screening.
this sort of thing works in small tribes because if you slack off and do nothing, you're immediately accountable to everyone around you. people will generally do the least that they possibly can for the most that they can get out of it. also, people are greedy. when it isn't about money anymore, it becomes about climbing the party ladder and getting goods that way. we're just not advanced yet as a species or as a society for any collectivist or communist system to work on the nation scale. every time they try it, the result is the same. our best bet is to build a conscience into capitalism through regulation, adding a third goal. right now, the goals are profit and growth. the third goal should be providing the highest standard of living for the greatest number of people and helping them to pull themselves up the ladder. some on the left will be pissed that it isn't enough, and others on the right will go into a foaming rage about socialism, but this is probably the best that we can do at this point in human and societal evolution.
Just when I think you're getting the picture, you go back to confusing collectivism with communism and communism with nominally communist states. A state does not earn the title “communist” when it institutes a sufficient amount of communist reform; it is “communist” at once, if that is the ideology of the revolution, regardless of policy, and no amount of communist reform can earn a non-revolutionary state that title.
And of course, in the short term, I'm not advocating communism, at least not communist rationing, by which one can slack off without consequence for one's consumption. Collectivism equally distributes capital, not wages. Thus, while people who currently do not share in the cultural heritage would finally get their due and thus not have to work quite as much (though, even in the case of the basic income, the more egalitarian variant, I see no evidence that its reduction of labor contribution is greater than the elasticity of the essentials you want to subsidize; for example, in the Namibian experiment, it actually increased labor contribution), those who currently draw more than their fair share of rent would be under correspondingly increased pressure to work.
IIRC he earned his fortune investing in Apple Computers because he thought it was a company that grew apples.
Close, but even in film, investors never get lucky. It was Lt. Dan, presumably predicting the iPod.
