Darwin has vaguely described a position regarding the way markets should work. Echoing a Marxists position, he argues that if

Everyone actually owns the things they make before selling them [that] would probably lead to a more satisfying work experience.

It’s very difficult to understand what the term ‘own’ means when applied to the bulk of the jobs needed by a country. For a sub group of jobs it makes sense that several classes of workers own that which they produce. But for a larger portion of the population its makes no sense to talk about ‘owning’ what they produce. Therefore, it’s unclear what benefit this would confer to those workers.

For example, when I was working at Omaha Steaks I had one task and one task only. My job, for nine hours a day, was to move 2 and a half ounce cuts of steak from a metal pan and place it into a plastic tray. In what sense could my job satisfaction have gone up by me owning the act of transferring meat from one location to another. Another example was when I was working in a distribution plant and moved pallets of shelving material from the dock onto shelves using a 2 ton forklift. How does someone like Darwin arrange this system so that I ‘own’ the placement of pallets onto shelves?

The answer seems rather obvious to me. You don’t. There are countless tasks one can’t own. In fact, I would argue that the vast majority of work in this world can’t simply be made so that the laborer ‘owns’ it. Now you can make an argument that the worker owns his labor, and indeed we see this, the most salient example being unions, however, the bulk of the work that needs to be done in no meaningful sense of the word can be ‘owned’.

In history we see the merchant and artisan guilds in which one can say these workers owned the workshops that produced their wares. But they were a small group of people that catered to the wealthy and politically connected. Remember that the painter’s workshop was primarily financed by the Church which,thanks to tithes could support artist workshops. The vast majority of the people lacked the means to acquire those things produced by these guilds.

Furthermore, even during that time most people did not ‘own’ what they produced. If they were serfs, then they simply didn’t own anything they produced. It was only at the discretion of the Lord that the peasant was allowed to take home a portion of the fruits of their labor.

When Henry Ford developed mass production he simply transformed one system of production into another system of production. Most of the workers needed for mass production came from the country, in which they worked other’s land. In this sense they went form not owning the corn they were growing to now owning the cars they were producing.

While mass production failed to bring ownership to those that produce things, it definitely decreased the value of those things that were produced. Mass production can not remedy the problem that most people can’t own what they produce but allows peope to afford what they produce. But not only that, they can afford much much more than what they produce. In sum, mass production fails to find ways to enable people to ‘own’ what they produce but reduces the value of those products such that workers can actually own the things they produce and more.

At the end of the day, work has to be done, and the vast majority of its unpleasant. Designing the system so that people ‘own’ what they produce makes no sense for many jobs, but also works against capitalism’s efficiency. Personally I dismiss this silly naïve idea that the panacea to unpleasant work is ‘ownership’. Instead I aim for the professions left in this system that require unique and novel problem solving. Even if I fail to land one of these jobs, I prefer to be a cog in the current system with a higher standard of living than owning the act of placing chunks of steak in plastic trays. Whatever the hell that means.

Over at Cato-at-Liberty, David Boaz notices:

Sens. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) and Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) have amended a Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill to allow up to 20 additional takeoffs and landings a day.

“It’s about connecting West and East Coast economic centers,” said R.C. Hammond, spokesman for Smith, elaborating on the senator’s motivation for the amendment.

To which he writes:

Just what is it that businesspeople from Seattle and Portland would come to Washington for? They’d go to New York and Atlanta to make business deals. But they’d come to Washington to lobby for subsidies, or for regulations on their competitors, or to try to get a piece of the $2.9 trillion federal budget. But not to do actual wealth-creating business in the marketplace.

No argument here.

Wow Blizzard is finally making a sequel to Starcraft. It looks fucking awesome. When this comes out, sign me up for a copy.

I should note that if I wasn’t going to do science for a career I would be as a 3d animator either for Blizzard or Pixar. They do the best work in their respective fields.

How do you like May’s look?

This much.

this extreme left interviewer. Towards the end the reporter claims to be neutral when doing his journalistic working including this interview. People on the right don’t care that most of the MSM sources lean to the left, they do care that such institutes claim to operate under an air of neutrality. This jackass was anything but neutral and Bolton handed him his ass easily.

Over Hot Air they write:

The highlight is when the guy asks him if America’s role as world leader is a “busted flush” in light of Iraq. Bolton’s response: “The people who expressed the point of view that you just expressed, I think, were largely anti-American beforehand anyway.” To which this simpering tool replies, with all apparent sincerity, “People like George Soros?”

That was probably the funniest part of the interview. Using George Soros as an example of someone that was politically neutral until the administration’s policy in Iraq pushed him over the edge is grade A comedy.

Is so funny I started crying it was so damn funny.

Link here.

My brother Mitch drew this picture of a Stegosaurus and I used a raster program and a tablet, which now that Im using more often totally rules, to color it in.

UPDATE: That was probably the most poorly structured sentence I have ever written.

Check out this Drawing of a motorcycle I did for Smith and Engels. This thing must of taken at least 4 hours.

Hey Dad do you know what kind of bike this is?

Freaking Hillarous, via Instapundit:

“(Other) modelers have populated their oceans with three or four kinds of plants, said Mick Follows, a researcher in MIT’s Program in Atmospheres, Oceans and Climate. “We’ve represented a much more diverse community, and allowed it to have interactions that regulate it more naturally.”

Phytoplankton populations are constantly changing, which makes them difficult to predict. So the MIT researchers developed an algorithm using evolutionary principles to more accurately represent the microscopic plants. A more precise count is important because phytoplankton process carbon dioxide — a significant contributor to global warming.

Extremely intelligent experts using their extensive knowledge of tea leaves have divined the evolutionary pressures that will accurately predict the mutations that phytoplankton will undergo over the next trillion years. All their intellectual heft is now being used to calculate our new found certainty about phytoplankton transformation to determine the precise impact on global climate over the next 23 billion years down to the eighth decimal point.