Daniel Greenfield article: The
Ownership Society vs the Ownerless Society

The Ownership Society vs the Ownerless Society

Posted: 19 Apr 2010 07:41 PM PDT

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.

Still as the left institutionalized,
it understood that to win, it had to gradually convince the "middle class"
that what they had was worthless, and that security could only come from
collective ownership. The ObamaCare debate is a classic example of the
left preying on middle class fears about security (with a subtle dose of
guilt about the less well off to make the case seem like a moral one) and
promising them "ownerlessness" as the preferred alternative to
self-reliance.

Unlike his mentor, the not particularly reverend,
Jeremiah Wright-- Barack Hussein Obama avoided harsh direct attacks on
"middle-classness". His community organizer background had taught him to
convince people that his approach would empower them, rather than admit
that he was trying to deprive them of opportunities and tear them down. So
he focused instead on the unpredictability of self-reliance, and the
benefits of an ownerless system in which everyone can "drive the car".
While his tame media blasted existing health care as worthless (think of
how much gas costs, and all those repairs) and touted the wonders of a
system in which everyone would have all the health care they wanted
(except Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays). This was in tune with the same
two pronged approach of arguing that an ownership society is worthless and
an ownerless society provides infinite benefits through "pooled
resources".

But to the disappointment of the man in the shiny hat,
people still felt safer being able to drive their own cars, because as
part of an ownership society, they understood that security comes from
ownership, not from collectivism. America was built on security through
ownership and on success through economic mobility. And so most people
would rather own, than have access to a shared pool of resources. Obama
still got his way, but he didn't do it by making his case to the people,
but by ramming it through his politicians. That forced him to rule through
tyranny, rather than propaganda. And people in an ownership society don't
like tyranny, because they have a Constitution that says they own the
system. Not that the system owns them.

That of course is the hidden
clause in the ownerless society, that it is not about owning, but about
being owned. That participating in the system means that you are now owned
by the system, which can dictate to you as it wishes. You can either own
the system or the system owns you. The Founders understood that. So does
the modern day left, working at cross-purposes with them. Because while
the Founders wanted Americans to own their system of government, the left
wants their system to own all Americans. And the entire world
beyond.

That is why the left fears the Ownership Society, for the
same reason that all tyrants fear freedom. The Ownership Society is the
only tool that genuinely changes the balance of power, because it gives
people the freedom to take control of their lives and change their
circumstances. The tyranny of the left is built on convincing people that
they have no freedom and no hope, that they can never be owners and that
ownership is too dangerous and too much of a burden anyway. That they
should just embrace the collective and gain security through by submitting
to the system that decides what resources they have access to and when
they have access to it.

Where the Ownership Society empowered
people through economic mobility, the Ownerless society removes economic
mobility through regulation, and replaces it with resource control that
determines who gets what. This modern form of feudalism creates a new
class of lords and a new class of peasants, and while both may use high
end technology, the nature of the system is directed from the top down,
and freedom vanishes like water into an open drain, leaving only lives
directed by a vast inflexible bureaucracy. In the Ownership Society, power
can be traded and achieved through economic activity. In the Ownerless
Society, it can only be achieved by being the regulator, rather than the
regulated. By joining the Party, the Union and staying on the right side
of those who make the rules for everyone else to keep.

The Ownerless Society is tyranny in the name of the common
good, but in reality like every tyranny, it exists only for the benefit of
a few, at the expense of the many. But its seduction is based on the
promise of everything for everyone, when it's really more like, nothing
for no one. And so one must ask whether the common good is really served
by a population of owners or a population of the ownerless. Whether
prosperity, medicine, shelter and food are more abundant in ownership or
ownerless societies. A quick look around the world answers that question.
The degree of economic mobility in a society is tied in with its standard
of living. While the Have Nots are actually much more abundant in
societies that rely on collectivist strategies, on the tribe and the
tyrant.

Obama is the left's latest shot across the bow of the
world's greatest free market economy, here to market socialism with a
human face. To make the idea of a vast bureaucracy running your life seem
soft and pleasant again. To sell the middle class on the false notion that
the People's Collective Motor Pool is better than owning your own car and
having to fix it and gas it up all the time. But the left has been great
the marketing the packaging, but terrible at actually selling the product
inside. Obama is the packaging, but his socialist policies are the product
inside. Unsurprisingly, Obama has remained marginally more popular than
his product. But that just testifies to the degree of socialism's
unpopularity for owners.

The left has done its best to position
this as a battle between the owners and the ownerless, which is why they
lost the ideological war. Again. Most Americans want to be the owners, not
the ownerless. They believe in aspiration through economic mobility,
rather than in hitting the lowest economic common denominator in the name
of rigidly regulated equality. While unions and minimum wages, and
economic regulation have become a staple of public life, Americans are
still not ready to commit exclusively to the ownerless society. And that
is our best hope for freedom yet.