[p2p-research] Capital Club

[Patrick Anderson]

>  I have the feeling that you are making the mistake to assume that
>  decisions to own something are rational ones. Many people don't buy a
>  car because it's cheaper, more profitable or perceived as such, than
>  renting: they do it to look good and maybe customize the car in such a
>  way that makes them _feel_ unique and great when they're cruising the
>  streets. If car choice decisions were only based on profit, ie
>  rational, measurable criteria, 80% of the models on sale now wouldn't
>  exist before you even started to wander if you want to buy or rent one.

Ok, maybe I should avoid using a car as an example.  I chose it
because so many people buy them even though the initial and recurring
costs are so high.

But your description is not completely wasted.  I also wanted to
mention at some point how consumers gain full control of the outputs
of production (in this case, the main product is "a ride across town")
when they are the owners of the sources of that production.

How about a dishwasher?  Most anyone that chooses to pay for
semi-automatic dish washing rarely does so by renting.  They buy it
outright instead to avoid the extra profit the rental agency would
continue to draw from them even long after the machine had been paid
for in full.  Rent-to-own is somewhere between these.

>
>
>  > Organizing with your neighbors to buy a rug-doctor is cheaper if
>  > there are enough of you to keep that equipment busy, so why don't we
>  > (consumers) do this more often?  Why do we leave that work of
>  > organizing up to a business that intends to charge us price above
>  > cost?
>
>  Maybe because (using the rug-doctor as a real world example):
>
>  - we have no _space_ where to store a Rug Doctor

This is a very good point.  The rental agency probably has space
because they are storing so many other tools, and planned to store
such a machine.

We need to collectively buy and own community centers that we have
*real* ownership in where we can store such things.  I was going to
save this for a later part of the discussion, I'll ask it now:

 Why are we not allowed to store such things in a city-tax-funded
facility?  What makes it so we (the citizens) have almost no control
in government - even at the city level?  I have some partial answers
to this, but would like to leave the question open for now.

>  - we have no skills to fix it when it breaks

Yes, but the rental-agency owner probably doesn't either.  He hires
someone to fix such things, and supplies the tools for that work to
avoid the overcharging a tool-owning mechaninc would impose.  We need
to be able to *work* in our community center too.  Trading labor there
should be one of the main purposes of a community center.

>  - fixing either one of the two problems above would cost enough, in
>   time and/ or money, to make group ownership not convenient.

Yes, because I wasn't describing a holistic solution - where small
groups within an entire community are joint-investing in a wide
variety of Capital and then using Land and Buildings owned by groups
of these groups to store, maintain, and in many cases for room to
operate them.  Imagine a car-repair shop or a woodworking shop where
you could go use the expensive tools "at cost".  Wouldn't it be nice
to have real control, and stop suffering the usury that currently
keeps us from the rich lives we deserve?  We already eventually must
pay all these costs anyway when we pay the merchants that 'supply'
them to us, but we also must pay "price above cost" because we have
not done the organization ourselves.

>  - (semi-serious) we, that is any generic group of neighbors in a
>   generic city, all hate each other and the least interact the better
>   we feel:-)

I think most people actually want to interact with others, but the
physical locations that we have available for such interaction are all
designed for the sole purpose of extracting usury.

We don't have community because we have no *place* for community
because, anytime one of us decides to organize it is pre-ordained that
we will not allow the participants to become real, controlling
shareholders with divisible control and minimal granularity over
decisions.  What I mean by that is that when a sub-group of a group of
owners wants to do something that conflicts with the majority of that
group, that the minority should be able to divide from the majority if
the physical resources in question are realistically divisible.  I'm
not trying to make-up policy here, I'm talking about how private
joint-owners of something such as a rug-doctor or an airplane would
likely want to choose to be able to act.

>
>  what I'm trying to say here is that I also have the feeling that you
>  aren't considering all the rational factors when comparing rental and
>  individual ownership.
>
>  Marco

Thanks for the feedback.  Did I answer your concerns?