this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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Honest question, at what point does a workshop transition from ownable to not?
A small garage shop with a workbench and a tool wall is obvious enough, but can you own a separate workshop outside your home? Can it be far down the street, or out in a barn somewhere, or in the outskirts of town among large factories? Can you own a lathe? Can you own a CNC machine?
What tools are ownable and what tools are not? What's the scale-cutoff?
Bandsaws, drill presses, welders, large trucks, small trucks, cranes, sheet metal cutters and benders, pipe benders, etc.
Can you buy material? How much? Should it be limited by something else than your funds?
If you take on jobs that are too much for you to handle on your own, do you have to either make your means of small scale production communal, or give up the job?
Please draw some lines for me here.
The line? When you start selling things to people en mass. One or two custom things you sell occasionally? Workshop. Start setting up production lines and hiring people? Now it's for the people
If you also live in it, it becomes personal property - ie, ownable by you personally.
I mean, that pretty much means it already is factory-like and no, it doesn't become ownable (unless you also live in it). If it involves other people's labor, then all the grey areas vanishes - it becomes communal.
The picture above is not completely accurate - a community might decide, for instance, that all firearms must be communally owned - ie, as in a communal arsenal (essentially a library for guns) - which, let's face it, would probably be necessary anywhere in the US (because it has more guns than people - and far less sense).
I don't like communism then.
Letting the "commune" take over a workshop would immediately break everything.
That's the thing... there won't be police around to protect your private property for you - which means that no-one is going to be forced to labor for your profit. If you have people working in that workshop, nothing will stop them from appropriating it from you and running it as a co-op for the benefit of the community and not you exclusively. This is why the wealthy and the privileged hates socialism.
No, I mean if you and your cousins have unlimited access to the machines, the machines will break.
No, I mean there won’t be police around to protect your private property for you - which means that no-one is going to be forced to labor for your profit.