The Left Wants Your Business, Your Children, and Your Freedom
It was never REALLY about worker-owned factories.
I have written about this before, but repetition is the mother of pedagogy.
The early left—from which all subsequent leftist iterations have sprung—wanted the workers to own the means of production. They wanted to redistribute the property of the bourgeoisie to the proletariat. Though they have since abandoned the workers as their group of primary concern, the left’s main objective is still redistributive. Most of what they will end up demanding, in terms of policy prescriptions, will boil down to taking property from some (by force) and giving it to others.
Today, it’s not just obvious forms of redistribution, like the ‘reparations’ California is planning to extract from people who never owned slaves to give to people who never were slaves. They also redistribute scarce resources such as trophies for victories in sports competitions. Since there are not many of those to go around, left-wing men are identifying as women to gain access to a new supply. That it comes at the expense of women who have worked their whole lives to set new athletic records is of no concern—there’s redistributin’ to be done, and virtue-signaling for the rest of them.
Humans have two strategies for getting the things they want: making them or taking them. Leftism is all about taking them.
In a free society, the left can have a worker-owned business any time they like. No one is stopping them. Yet have you noticed that they almost never try that?
Leftist:
The capitalists are exploiting the workers! We demand justice.
Normal human:
No problem. Workers can get together anytime they like, pool resources, and start a worker-owned factory.
Leftist:
That sounds like a lot of trouble. We’d much rather just seize yours.
That’s what it comes down to. They could have had what they claimed they wanted at any time: factories without ‘exploitation.’ But that’s not really what they wanted. What they wanted—what they always want—is to take other people’s stuff.
Early this morning, driving home from dropping my wife at the airport, I heard David Friedman discuss this concept in The Machinery of Freedom. (I love audiobooks.) What I enjoyed was not the basic concept itself, which has been discussed many times, but the fact that he gets specific about how easy it would be for “the workers” not only to start one factory, but to take over all the capitalist enterprises of an entire nation:
They claim that the ownership of the means of production by capitalists instead of by workers is inherently unjust.
I think they are wrong. Even if they are right, there is no need for them to fight me or anyone else; there is a much easier way to achieve their objective. If a society in which firms are owned by their workers is far more attractive than one in which they are owned by stockholders, let the workers buy the firms. If the workers cannot be convinced to spend their money, it is unlikely that they will be willing to spend their blood.
How much would it cost workers to purchase their firms? The total value of the shares of all stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1965 was $537 billion. The total wages and salaries of all private employees that year was $288.5 billion. State and federal income taxes totalled $75.2 billion. If the workers had chosen to live at the consumption standard of hippies, saving half their after-tax incomes, they could have gotten a majority share in every firm in two and a half years and bought the capitalists out, lock, stock, and barrel, in five. That is a substantial cost, but surely it is cheaper than organizing a revolution. Also less of a gamble. And, unlike a revolution, it does not have to be done all at once. The employees of one firm can buy it this decade, then use their profits to help fellow workers buy theirs later.
When you buy stock, you pay not only for the capital assets of the firm—buildings, machines, inventory, and the like —but also for its experience, reputation, and organization. If workers really can run firms better, these are unnecessary; all they need are the physical assets. Those assets—the net working capital of all corporations in the United States in 1965—totalled $171.7 billion. The workers could buy that much and go into business for themselves with 14 months' worth of savings.
I do not expect any of this to happen. If workers wanted to be capitalists badly enough to pay that sort of price, many would have done so already.
Nicely done, Mr. Friedman.
Building successful enterprises requires ideas, dedication, investment, sacrifice, low time preferences, and risk. Why put in all that effort when you can just take from someone who already did?
Notice that the left is also entirely free to create communes where they live how they want. But that’s not good enough for them either. They need to force entire countries to become the commune they say they want. Why?
In part, this problem is caused by the way humanity has long looked at governance: as a one-size-fits-all phenomenon in which monarchs or democratic majorities force everyone to live in a particular way. Because of that, everyone becomes heavily invested in making it so that their way of life is forced on everyone, so that a different way isn’t forced on them. That is not just the left’s fault; it’s something we must all get away from, if we ever want to move past the urge to force others to live in particular ways.
But then, there is also the fact that, somewhere, deep down, the leftist knows that their commune cannot work without people who have the ideas, dedication, and low time preferences, and who put in the work, make the sacrifices, and the risks. And apparently, that ain’t them—otherwise they would have done it already.
Finally, along these same lines, note that leftists could raise their children the way they want. They could read filthy books to them, take them to drag shows, trans them at age 2, and whatever else they want. I am not saying that those things are okay; indeed, some of them are direct violations of the children’s rights, even when done by the parents. My point is this: They are not content with doing it to their children; they must also do it to yours.
Do you see a pattern here?
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