Microblog Memes

Hello, different person here. It's understandable that you're confused by this tbh, but there are real proposals.

Broadly, there are two basic suggestions:

1. All businesses would be nationalised. You would develop the machine as part of your job, or sell the rights to the government.
2. There are still independent businesses like now, but they're controlled by the people that work and use them. As a Kingdom is to a Democracy, an Owned Company is to a Participatory Company (Communists call them cooperatives, Corporatists call them corporations). The former country/company is controlled by the people that own it, whereas the latter is controlled by the people that are affected by its decisions (at least in theory). In real life people don't really buy manufacturing machines, they do it through a company. So your sale would be the same, it'd just be to a different kind of company.

It's not one or the other and they're often combined.

It isn't fair for a king to control an army and do what he likes with it, that's dangerous. The army has to be controlled by the people of the nation. But, if you and your friends want to privately own guns, that's fine. So long as you aren't organising into a militia, it does little harm.

Critics say, likewise: if your machine is small, who cares. But if it's sufficiently powerful, if it could concentrate wealth and power in your hands, create mass unemployment (maybe even allow you to wield military): that's harm. A machine like that should be controlled by the people.