| You have described the worst case well. We should fear it. But the best case is worth considering too: Every person who could be a talented crane operator can rent a crane, can borrow the cash to rent the crane, can rent an agent who can help them find crane gigs, can rent a trainer who can make sure they know what they need to and practice, can rent insurance to protect the whole venture from risk.... The ownership society tends towards stagnant labor ecosystems. Because owners want to be able to walk away from their assets and passively collect dividends from them, the social structure around those assets calcifies. A 1000-fold increase in the kinds of things that can be hired would seem to give the actual laborers and managers the power to compete with their capital class “directors”. Even director is probably giving them too much credit because it implies some administrative labor. “Lord” is really the best word I can think of for what capital class people aspire to. In a society where everything can be rented in a fine grained way, the capital class is no longer needed. In a truly robust rental market, margins would tend towards the cost of administration, so even the rentals themselves are only serving to support the wages of the renter-worker and the rental administrator-worker. |