User Ownership

Model proposed by Patrick Anderson, where by the entities producing physical resources would be in the hand of the Users, i.e. consumers, and not property owners or the workers.

See our entry on the Inter-Owner Trade Agreement.

Description

Producers are sometimes Owners, sometimes hired Workers, and sometimes Users.

If you mean "Owners" then of course they are already in control.

If you mean "Workers" then you create the Mode that Marx dreamt of, and which might be temporarily slightly better than what we experience now.

If you mean Users, then you create the Mode that Richard Stallman invented through the GNU General Public License, and is slated to be generalized into the physical sphere through the GNU General Public Law.

As an example, when you pay for the costs of copying an apple, which would you say is better:

1. An arbitrary, non-working group of Owners control the care (they may spray the orchard with dangerous chemicals) of those Sources, and can charge a price above cost to Profit limited only by other competing Owners.

2. Marxism - where the Owners are the Workers that plant, water, maintain and harvest the fruit. They control the Sources similarly to the Owners in #1, but at least they can pay themselves a higher Wage. The consumer still has little control, is not allowed to do any of the work himself, and is still at the mercy of those who Own.

3. The perfect Mode where the collective Owners are the Consumers themselves. They can make the copies themselves (tend their portion of the orchard in the manner they see fit - and within the constraint of realistic divisibility), or they may hire others to work for them, but either way we (the users/consumers) are in complete control. Such a mode also causes Price to be the same as Cost, as Profit has no meaning when the consumer Owns the Sources - or in other words, if the Consumer did pay profit it, he would be paying himself.

Since option 3 is not achievable in a perfect or static manner (especially during the initial growth period) because the consumer may not yet Own the Sources that were used during the round of production that created that exact object, but this Mode can always be "approached" by Owners who choose to apply an inter-owner contract that requires any profit paid by consumers be an investment in more sources, or toward paying-off some current investments, and that that those shares become the semi-divisible property of that very same consumer."

Discussion

Patrick Anderson:

It is the difficulty in organizing large collective investments that keeps Users (Consumers) from Owning the Physical Sources of Production that would allow us to then have “at cost” access and full control of the Objects of that Production.

The idea is: An initial group of potential Users joint purchase some physical Sources and voluntarily put that property under a contract that requires Owners treat all Profit each object trade be an investment for that new user into User Ownership of more physical Sources in that same corporation.

This causes growth to wax and wane according to the demand of those consumers.

• User demand includes covering the costs of the last round of production.
• User demand also contains the desire to grow represented as profit.
• User unmand is the user's desire to shrink or sell by not paying costs.

==== Prove or Disprove: User Ownership is optimal economic efficient

1. One source owner, one object consumer

2. One source owner, multi object consumer.

3. Multi source owner, one object consumer.

4. Multi source owner, multi object consumer.

More Information

Please see http://EcoComics.org for a more thorough analysis

"The Comical Ecology Of Political Economy - or how the poor fund the war" at http://EcoComics.org/ecocom.html