Quote from: grondilu on March 09, 2013, 02:45:39 PM

Quote from: MonadTran on March 08, 2013, 07:44:30 AM

Say, some resources, like oil, should belong to everybody, and everyone should have a vote on how to use them. Fine. Suppose you have that vote - you are a shareholder of Worldwide Oil, Inc. Where do you find oil? Where would your company get money to build an oil well? Are you willing to participate in shareholders' meetings? Who's going to pay employees? Are you really interested in working on this? If not, wouldn't it be better for you to sell your share to a person who knows what to do with it, and has the resources necessary to start the business, so that you could buy a share in a well-established company instead? Can shareholders of Worldwide Oil, Inc. decide for a split-up into American Oil, Inc., Asian Oil, Inc., and so on, to make it more manageable? You see where I am getting it. We might end up with something that is almost like what we have now.

Thanks so much for pointing this out. I really wish socialist-minded people could understand that: ownership is not a static process, it's dynamic. If you give something to someone, he might very well not know what to do with it and then he will sell it to someone else. In the end, stuff end up belonging to people who are the most willing to own them: those who are willing to pay, notably. This is true for resources and means of production. Giving them to people on an equal basis would only lead to a unstable economic situation which would rapidly end up back to the current situation again, at the cost of having confiscated stuff initially just to eventually fail to change anything.

I'm a socialist minded person and I agree with what you say. But it's more like Monster Tent said

Quote from: Monster Tent on March 08, 2013, 07:55:45 AM

I think the main problem is companies benefitting from resources and failing to pay the true cost.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

For example producing plastic bottles to sell water the cost of the product doesnt reflect the damage it does to the environment.

I have no problems with a company cutting some wood, transforming it and making awesome products. But I have certain problems with the same company clearing whole forest just because it's more efficient and "I paid for it". Or going into a country, pumping resources and getting out.

Last century, Americans company were coming in Canada, pumping iron and buying mining companies for cheap. With the same iron, they shipped it back into the US, made steel with it and sold it back to us at like 5x times the original price. I know "capitalist/freedom/etc", but this type of business doesn't create any plus-value. You just suck blood from a society and quit when there's nothing left. We were lucky, our government got stronger and somewhat stop that type of business, but other countries like a ton of them in Africa were not so lucky.

The whole pump-and-run that Americans are so good at can make money short-term. But in the long-term, it's only a take-all relationship where there's only one winner. Nationalization of resources doesn't prevent business from getting resources, its mostly to help the local society get a nice part of the profit and help control environmental damage.