User Ownership
Model proposed by Patrick Anderson, where investors could choose to apply a Property Left agreement such as the General Public Law to some Physical Sources of production so the ownership of those sources would incrementally and continuously flow to the hands of new Users, i.e. consumers, and not be held by workers or some other random set of investors.
See our entry on the Inter-Owner Trade Agreement.
Description
User Ownership is a special case in economics that has some amazing properties:
- Abundance and real solutions are goal, never thought 'destructive'.
- Scarcity is never sought and those sources are real insurance.
- Unemployment is not a problem, it is the second goal.
- Work is to be eliminated as a hurdle on the road to riches.
- Low prices are always good and tend toward cost.
- Profit is meaningless except as consumer growth.
This is the Mode held in place by the GNU General Public License, and is slated by the Personal Sovereignty Foundation to be generalized into the physical sphere through 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. The Owners are the collective 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.
(*)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