Howdy! I’m new here and was hoping someone might have some insight to a question I’ve been thinking about for a while:
If I saved up my money and bought a tractor, would it be permissible/ethical to charge others to use it when I didn’t need it?
This seems awfully similar to owning the means of production. What if I instead offered to plow their fields for them instead, driving the tractor myself and negotiating fair compensation in exchange?
Sorry if this is basic stuff I’m still learning. 🙏
To me, it sounds like you are describing a situation where because you have some money (to buy a tractor) and other people don’t, you gain access to some of the human labor of your neighbors.
That is somewhat correct. It may not necessarily be the case that the tractor is impossibly out of reach of others. It’s possible that everyone could afford a tractor but did not deem it necessary to make the purchase at the time that I did, spending the money on other equipment instead, like a mill for instance.
It could be that everyone got different tools. It could be that some frittered their resources away like a grasshopper to your virtuous ant. It could be you were just lucky, a windfall inheritance.
The actual history of primitive accumulation is a lot darker.
But however you got that John Deere, should it entitle you to the physical labor of other people? Is that the kind of relationship you want with your neighbors?
Is not the tractor itself is the product of labour? Someone put in the work to build it, and I compensated them with the product of my own labour. I don’t think the people who constructed the tractor were entitled to my labor any more than someone who compensates me for tilling their field is.
Oh I like the way your are thinking…
So you labor, make something, exchange that for money and then buy the tractor. The tractor making people get your money in exchange for their tractor constructing labor. In this regard folks are just exchanging the product of their own labor.
But if you start renting the tractor out is that the same? In some sense the tractor is a substitute for the product of your effort (you traded grain for money for tractor) so if you were to trade the tractor for, say beer, its still just a swap. But if you are renting the tractor, you get something from the renters but you still have the whole tractor back at the end. You got something from them just for having had ownership of the tractor.