He (and Fresco) is of course talking hypothetically but as he continues:
"If such a world really is technologically possible, we should cut the socialist dreamers some slack. Their fault lies not with their vision, but with their plans for achieving it."
From what I understand Murphy claim that if such a dream is technologically possible their's is not the correct way. I guess main point is that sooner or later Fresco's idea will require coercion and enter the pitfalls of central calculation issues, where as property rights approach does not.
Property rights certainly requires central calculation and coersion, too.
Look at all the activities undertaken in the name of copyright and patent enforcement. This is "property rights".
Look at cable companies suing cities to not give citizens fast broadband, while they maintain their cartel. This is central enforcement.
A company like Apple can be privately owned. The app store is privately owned. Facebook, Google, Amazon are all privately owned. Disneyworld is privately owned.
The only reason you don't see central enforcement on a huger scale in privately owned fiefdoms is because so far in the real world, people have collectively banded together to have democracies.
Property is a monopoly right to EXCLUDE others from use of a resource. It can range from excluding YOU from changing the color of your FB profile to exclding you from peeing in some woods.
The real relevant thing is how the thing is governed. Democratically (eg employee-run) or command and control (top-down)?
These corporations are technically owned by shareholders in a public stock market. Collective ownership is a major feature of socialism.
Alaska has one of the first basic income checks in the world as the citizens are considered all shareholders in the natural resources of the state.
This "private ownership vs The Government" is a red herring.
Governments exist in all organizations. Rights are those things the organizations recognize as worthy of defending with force, if the peasants are lucky, they codify a consistent policy and enforce them.
Indeed, privatization of public utilities for example have created more government bureaucracy, not less, exactly for these reasons. Market fundamentalists (the anarchist leaning side at least, less the Hayekians and such) seem to believe that institutional structures that emerge from non-coerced (if it were ever black and white) property owning individuals will carry their values in some immutable form and corruption only ever arises when agents "become social". I find this an extremely naive view of human group behavior. The entire underlaying theory seems to be based upon 19th century hard-reductionism (sadly still the norm in the economics profession) and really needs a post-complexity, post-behavorial update. As it stands it is firmly entrenced in the realm of ideology, I wouldn't even consider it soft science.
> Property rights certainly requires central calculation and coersion, too.
Property rights also have dubious origins, and the concept deserves to be questioned, along the lines of asking what right does one man have to appropriate a certain piece of land and defend it with violence? And what of the concept of rights in general?
If one wants an alternative view of the concept of property versus possession, it's worth reading Proudhon's What Is Property?, which is a thrilling and informative read of the anarchist view, despite being a 19th century work.
"If such a world really is technologically possible, we should cut the socialist dreamers some slack. Their fault lies not with their vision, but with their plans for achieving it."
From what I understand Murphy claim that if such a dream is technologically possible their's is not the correct way. I guess main point is that sooner or later Fresco's idea will require coercion and enter the pitfalls of central calculation issues, where as property rights approach does not.