{"id":1573,"date":"2016-06-10T09:56:07","date_gmt":"2016-06-10T13:56:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/gloryseed\/?p=1573"},"modified":"2016-06-10T10:02:34","modified_gmt":"2016-06-10T14:02:34","slug":"serfdom-is-freedom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/gloryseed\/2016\/06\/serfdom-is-freedom\/","title":{"rendered":"Serfdom Is Freedom!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Serfdom\"<\/a>
https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Serfdom<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

When smart people get behind a bad idea you should wonder if you\u2019re being scammed.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

That\u2019s what I\u2019m wondering about when it comes to the latest thing millennials have gotten excited about, something called, \u201cThe Sharing Economy\u201d<\/em>. (Sounds benign, doesn\u2019t it? Who could be against sharing?)<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the gist of it: ownership, bad; use, good.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ownership is wasteful, and that\u2019s bad for the environment, we\u2019re told. But use<\/span> is what we\u2019re really after anyway. So why own a car when there\u2019s Uber? Just use that Uber app and you\u2019ve got your ride. No storage problem, no maintenance to worry about, no insurance to pay. All you want is a ride, right? Let other people worry about that other stuff. And when self-driving cars come along, it won\u2019t even be a person\u2019s problem. The machines will do it all. (You can read more about it here<\/a>, and here<\/a>, and here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

As you can see, this is all made possible by technology.<\/p>\n

The folks in Silicon Valley invent a lot of stuff. But the really powerful stuff they make is not the technology, it\u2019s the ideas that go along with the technology. Those ideas are sold for free, but they\u2019re really designed to get us to buy other stuff for money.<\/p>\n

What this has got me wondering is whether or not some folks from the Ministry of Truth<\/a> have gone over to the private sector.<\/p>\n

There are some sly moves here.<\/strong><\/p>\n

First, it is assumed that ownership is just consumption.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is largely due to the fact that hardly anyone can imagine that ownership could be anything but consumption. And this is because most people don\u2019t own productive property. They merely own personal property. And personal property depreciates, or is made obsolete by newer, sleeker stuff.<\/p>\n

So, since it is just going to end up in a landfill anyway, why not let someone else be burdened with ownership? You, because you\u2019re such a savvy, hip, millennial can let someone else do the dirty work. You can just rent! You remain unburdened and to top it off, you get to pat yourself on the back because you\u2019re so environmentally conscious!<\/p>\n

You\u2019re also a patsy.<\/p>\n

What gets hidden in this is productive property<\/span>. It doesn\u2019t occur to the savvy millennial that the reason people own productive property is to make money. Someone owned the manor that the serfs worked, you may recall. (If you were educated in a public school, here\u2019s a link to a page that will explain what a serf was<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the second thing this business model obscures: ownership of productive property is a school of virtue.<\/span><\/p>\n

The founders of our country were not the benighted villains they have been written off as. One of their best ideas was making ownership of property a precondition for the right to vote.<\/p>\n

Today that seems so unjust, even absurd. How could they be so stupid?<\/p>\n

Well, maybe, just maybe, they had a good reason.<\/p>\n

They didn\u2019t have personal property in mind, the sort that depreciates rapidly and ends up in a land fill. What they meant by property is the sort of thing Uber owns\u2013productive property.<\/p>\n

But unlike Uber, they didn\u2019t hide ownership, or want it to be concentrated in the hands of a corporate elite. They believed the broad distribution of productive property\u2013farmland, small businesses, even tools\u2013would make people prudent and responsible. And these virtues would be conducive to good government.<\/p>\n

Paradoxically it also made people both self-sufficient and public-spirited. People relied on their skills, and their genuine business savvy, while at the same time being dependent upon the people they sold their goods to.<\/p>\n

The Proletariat doesn\u2019t own, it rents<\/strong><\/p>\n

You know, Marx didn\u2019t coin the word, \u201cproletariat\u201d. It comes down to us from the Roman census. The Proletariat in the census were freemen without property. They were as low as you could go without being a slave. They were the plebs, the mob.<\/p>\n

And the mob always votes for Cesar, or Bernie.<\/p>\n

This is because plebs have no other recourse. They need someone to take care of them because they can\u2019t take care of themselves.<\/p>\n

The concentration of productive property in the hands of the few can happen in a variety of ways. One of those ways is an economic crisis. I\u2019m afraid that our enthusiasm for the biblical Joseph blinds us to the fact that Joseph helped Pharaoh acquire all the productive property in Egypt. He was a really decent guy on a personal level, but he was also a statist.<\/p>\n

(There are people today who would like to do what Joseph did, for much the same reason. You may recall, Joseph\u2019s family eventually ended up in slavery.)<\/p>\n

If we\u2019re going to see virtue, and genuine public-spirit, come back, we shouldn\u2019t sell our freedom for conveniences that will make us slaves. We should burden ourselves with productive property, because by carrying burdens we will grow strong.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When smart people get behind a bad idea you should wonder if you\u2019re being scammed. That\u2019s what I\u2019m wondering about when it comes to the latest thing millennials have gotten excited about, something called, \u201cThe Sharing Economy\u201d. (Sounds benign, doesn\u2019t it? Who could be against sharing?) Here\u2019s the gist of it: ownership, bad; use, good. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2522,"featured_media":1577,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,11,187,162,108,40],"tags":[10,280,170],"class_list":["post-1573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cultural-apologetics","category-household-economy","category-politics","category-productive-property","category-self-sufficiency","category-virtue","tag-productive-property","tag-sharing-economy","tag-virtue"],"yoast_head":"\nSerfdom Is Freedom!<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"When smart people get behind a bad idea you should wonder if you're being scammed. 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