I’ll admit, that wasn’t a very good way to word it, but what he’s getting at is that you can’t have factories owned equally by everyone. It was touched on before, but the main problem with this idea of everything being owned by everyone equally is that there wouldn’t be anyone to organize anything. Sure companies can have multiple owners owning different size portions…but find me a company where everyone involved (including the workers) owns exactly the same amount as everyone else. It doesn’t work like that. And even if you made it that way, like saying “everyone has equal ownership” overnight…what happens when the guy on the manufacturing floor decides his job is too hard, and he should be a manager in the office upstairs? Who is to say he shouldn’t be? He’s just as much an owner as anyone else.
Oh, so then we’ll just vote on who should do what job. Even putting aside the obvious obstacles that would come with that and assuming a concensus can be reached, how effecient of an arrangement are they going to come to? And let’s even leap farther and assume they come to the most effiecient arrangement possible and everyone is working in the exact position that maximizes productivity…What happens when someone decides he’s working harder than someone else? And what about all the other people who don’t work at the factory? Do they own it too? Or are we just talking about the people who work at the company?
Even if the claim is that “the factories will be owned by the workers who work in them” and we don’t go with the insane notion that everything is owned by everyone, you still run into problems that completely break the whole system.
And the other point that was raised was another important one: Where will new factories come from? If everyone owns everything equally, how the hell is it ever going to be decided what resources should be put to what use? How will anything ever get produced? And let’s suppose someone does bite the bullet and works hard and creates something new from some of the resources…what’s to stop one person from saying the guy “stole” from the collective by doing what he wanted and creating or consuming something for himself? After all, he took and used everyone’s resources as if they were his. What’s to stop someone (or thousands of people) from claiming the fruit of the first man’s labor is theirs? After all, everyone owns everything equally…so whatever that guy made, I have a claim to. And in fact, that guy took those resources without my permission. Those resources are part mine, and I didn’t give him the okay to use them. In fact, a lot of people didn’t. That guy stole from us. He has given up his right to the property. He has no claim to anything he has made with these stolen resources.
The notion that the world could exist without private property is quite possibly the most insane idea ever contrived. And notice how it stays alive…the proponants basically never get past stage 1. In fact, they don’t even get to stage 1…they stop at just the idea “everyone own’s everything equally.” They don’t even consider what that would look like…let alone how to get to that point or how it would operate or progress. Ideas this illogical always begin in the middle. They offer absolutely no explanation of how it would work or how a society could even get to that point.