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Re: Economics from the ground up

Keith said Aug 9, 2007, 2:35 PM:

So Janos, to paraphrase, you are suggesting that private ownership of resources may not be beneficial. Correct?

We're already seeing this in the world today. The citizens of Iraq are overwhelmingly against turning their vast oil reserves over to corporations. Venezuela claims to have a populist government made possible by their oil reserves, which are owned by the state. In Mexico and a California municipality recently corporate ownership of water was rejected … and placed back in local governmental control.

So, in keeping with the objective of the pod, the solution to exploitation of resources and people is collective ownership. Many may not want to have government manage this at it would be too much like communism, which has a bad name. What about cooperatives?

You bring up some very good points here.

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Re: Economics from the ground up

janos said Aug 9, 2007, 3:52 PM:

“…private ownership of resources may not be beneficial. Correct?”

Yes, correct. Private ownership of nature-given resources enables one of the two fundamental monopolies to siphon off all surplus wealth into private preserves.

The great failure of socialists was that they were not interested in distinguishing between owning nature and owning the products of human effort. The blanket ideology that “property is theft” was a very harmful oversimplification. “Some property is theft” would have sufficed as a guide to the socialists' version of a just world.

In fact, to condemn equally the capitalist's ownership of a factory, for example, and the landlord's claim of ownership over the plot of land under the factory, was a big strategic as well as legal mistake. This united two “enemies” into one strong force against labour.

State ownership of natural resources is not a safe solution either since present day governments are not much more accountable than private corporations. The best pattern is being followed by the policy in Alaska where a substantial part of the oil revenue is distributed as public dividend. But the policy needs to be extended to all natural resources, especially the rent of urban land.

I am not convinced that mere collective ownership would be safe enough since collectives can be manipulated by ambitious and cunning minorities. Maybe some collaborative investigation of these things should be undertaken. There is plenty of literature available if we know where to look (but not much of relevance is in mainstream economics as far as I am aware).

Re: Economics from the ground up

Keith said Aug 9, 2007, 4:19 PM:

It pleases me to see that we are returning to the ideas and concepts of Native Peoples, specifically of North America. Before we Europeans arrived, private ownership of such things as land, water, minerals, etc., was an alien concept.

Who actually owns the earth?