The Ownership Society vs the Ownerless Society

A gem from Sultan Knish:

How do you trick someone into giving you something they have? First you offer them something worthless, while convincing them that it's actually much better than what they have. Second, you convince them that what they do have is worthless. This is a typical approach used by both con artists and governments.

So one day you're driving down the street, and you run out of gas. And that's where a fellow in a shiny hat comes up to you, and asks why you're bothering to drive cars, and spend money on gas and repairs, when for just 25 dollars a month, you can give up your old clunker and be enrolled in a People's Collective Motor Pool, which will always be available when you want it, and extend the benefits of transportation to those who don't own cars.

Of course the 25 dollars a month quickly turns into 50 and then a 100 dollars, and there are never enough available cars in the pool, the waiting period to actually get to where you want is many times what it used to be when you owned your own car-- and the only people benefiting from the system are the ones who run the People's Collective Motor Pool, where a statue of the fellow in the shiny hat stands in the parking lot, lauding him for the wonderful contribution to mankind he made to mankind by convincing everyone to give up their cars.

This is how the game is played. To turn an "Ownership Society" into an "Ownerless Society", you have to convince people that they'll be much better off having their possessions in a common pool, then actually owning anything themselves. This is tricky, because Wealth Redistribution is hard to sell to people who are owners.

Remember the Beatles song, "Taxman" that's played every April in the US? It was written by George Harrison, when he realized that he could be an owner, but was being robbed by the government instead. "'Taxman' was when I first realised that even though we had started earning money, we were actually giving most of it away in taxes. It was and still is typical." Becoming an owner has turned many a liberal, to thinking right wing thoughts. Getting mugged by the realization that the system is designed to deprive you of the proceeds of your work will do that to you.

Once you can afford a car, the People's Collective Motor Pool doesn't look very attractive anymore. Which is why the left has had a lot more trouble selling the "Ownerless Society" in prosperous Western countries than they did in Russia or Third World backwaters. While Karl Marx had anticipated a Western European revolution, Communists did their best business in countries with a small or virtually no middle class, ruled over by tyrants and oligarchies that deprived ordinary people of economic mobility.

That is why America, a nation built on the possibilities of economic mobility, was always their greatest challenge and threat. Because while workers in the Third World might have no real hope or aspirations beyond a revolution that promises to put them in charge (or emigrating to America), American workers always had the promise of economic mobility. The kind of mobility that could make a Carnegie into an economic titan. In the countries where Communism thrived, work meant senseless and meaningless labor, while success meant bribing or stealing your way to the top. In America, work actually could translate into success. Which meant that Communism's promises of collective prosperity had nothing to offer.

And so despite its "working class" posing, the left long ago discovered that there was no real future in organizing workers. It was to be only a sideline at best. Instead it had to organize the middle class. This was a daunting proposition because while the middle class was the source of revolution, left wing dogma depended on using "oppressed workers" to conduct overthrows. The bourgeois were anathema to it. They were the definition of the "ownership society", the people who believed in prosperity through hard work and owning their own cars. Sure their disaffected children were useful for handing out leaflets and planting bombs, but only because they were motivated by that same hatred of the middle class.

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