What is ownership?

One critic of TZM/TVP on You Tube starts from a premise about handing over the keys of his car to someone else, even though he has worked to own it but this premise is an artifice of the monetary system, which is in the business of getting you to want something and making you work to be able to get it, which requires someone else to pay for the fruits of your labours.


Setting aside the abstract advantages (created by marketing people) of owning something, what is it that this car owner is trying to protect? Assuming he does not use his car 100% of the time, I assume if it were practical he would happy for someone else to use it if they paid him (I know this suits some people). This is efficiency at work - the resource that is the car is providing more utility by being used more of the time. This way we need fewer cars for the same amount of utility (transport). But in this model some people are called upon to own the cars so that others can hire them. Even if the incentive of making money in this way were enough to persuade people, the system still only needs enough cars to provide the required transport, so how would it be decided?

In a free market, these car hire enterprises would compete against each other, but this would mean there being more cars in total than were necessary, or the firms collaborating so that there were no more cars in total than were necessary. This collaborating would take the form of building a complete picture of what car transport is needed, which is precisely the kind of thing that a planned economy does.

Sorry, back to ownership. It is an outgrowth of scarcity. There is no need to own anything that is not scarce, but to achieve this we (a) need to know what is scarce and (b) not deliberately make things scarce that aren't actually.

We know that there are far more cars than are needed (so many are parked), the advertisers are forced to create the idea of a more emotional kind of scarcity, using young, free, attractive people in cars to promote the idea of leisure transport only possible if there's a car always ready for you even if you decide to go out on a whim. This must be in fact a minuscule portion of most of most people's journeys, which are for practical reasons.