- Joined
- Jul 1, 2011
- Messages
- 92,124
- Reaction score
- 91,247
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Independent
If you don't know what it is, how do you know it's only worked in small tribes? What I advocate is an end to permanent property. As permanently owning something is equivalent to holding all future tenancies in it, and collectivism doesn't necessarily abolish tenancy, clearly no motivation is lost by merely abolishing permanent property. To go back to Gump, if he'd rented the shrimp boat, he would not have unjustly benefitted from the storm, because the rent on it would have gone up as a result of the decrease in the quantity of shrimp boats; on the other hand, the hapless intelligent shrimp boat-owners would not have unduly suffered, for they would have, likewise, invested only the last rent payment. In short, collectivism is a meritocratic distribution, and capitalism is an ever-increasingly random distribution.
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.
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.