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.
