Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Rebel Alliance Forums -> Honest Question

Rebel Alliance Forums -> Honest Question: "I happen to be a capitalist but am intrigued at the idea of socialism. It sounds like a great idea but I don’t think it would work as a practical matter unless people’s freedoms were taken away from them - something which I agree with socialists would be a bad thing. I have a series of questions ask that you kindly tell me know if you know of a more appropriate forum to ask this. My question is as follows:

Let’s assume one day that we woke up in a socialist society where all “means of production” were owned/controlled by the people in general. I’m assuming that there is private ownership of property, like homes, stereos, furniture and lawn equipment.

What is to stop the following scenario from happening?

Let’s say that one enterprising woman who happens to own a lawn mower (she bought it originally to mow her own lawn) realizes that there are lots of people who don’t like to mow their lawn -- they’d rather watch football or do something else on a Sunday -- who would be willing to pay her to mow their lawn so they don’t have to. This woman starts mowing lawns (she charges $30 per lawn) and making extra money by working on weekends.

If that would be allowed, then what’s to stop the next scenario from taking place?

This woman is particularly industrious and enterprising and realizes that there are more people who would like her to mow their lawns than she can mow. So she saves up her extra money and buys a second lawn mower. She finds somebody who does not have a lawn mower (they live in an apartment and have no need for one) and says to them, “Hey, if you want to, I’ll let you use my lawn mower to mow peoples’ lawns and we can split the money. You can get $15 and I’ll take $15, because I’m letting you use my lawn mower.” The person accepts and starts mowing people's lawns for $30 and give the woman who owns the lawn mower they're using $15 each time.

If this would be allowed, then what’s to stop the next scenario from taking place?

The woman who owns two lawn mowers starts saving more and more money and buys more and more lawn mowers. She finds more and more people who don’t have lawn mowers themselves (and don’t want to buy them) but are willing to mow a lawn using one of her and split the $30 - the woman who owns the lawn mower getting $15 and the “worker” who actually does the mowing getting $15. Pretty soon she has so many lawn mowers and people mowing lawns giving her half their pay that she decides to stop mowing lawns herself and just take care of the maintenance of the lawn mowers - replacing blades, keeping the engines tuned, etc.

If this would be allowed, then what’s to stop the next scenario from taking place?

Eventually, she has so many lawn mowers, that she decides to rent a warehouse (she can’t keep them all in her garage) and hire someone (who happens to an even better mechanic than she) to maintain them. Now, she doesn’t mow lawns or do the grunt work of maintaining them - she just focuses on making sure everybody has enough work, advertising, and paperwork.

Unless something stops this kind of thing from happening (and the only thing I can think of is some kind of force/violence being used to prevent adults from freely agreeing to do thing for/with each other for something in exchange) I think any socialist society would find small businesses like these sprouting up all over, in all kinds of industries. I think you would just find that some people are either more hard-working, enterprising, or just lucky in some cases and would start to accumulate wealth/ownership of "means of production". These small business would grow bigger and bigger until eventually you would have the same kinds of disparity of income/wealth distribution we find in society today.

I would love to know if I missed something in my prediction and welcome your feedback.

No comments: