The influence of the division of labor on the institu-
tion of private ownership of the means of produc-
tion is almost universally ignored. Typically, people
think of privately owned means of production in terms
that would be appropriate only in a non-division-of-labor
society. That is, they think of them in the same way that
they think of privately owned consumers' goods--namely,
as being of benefit only to their owners. They believe that
before the nonowners can benefit from the means of
production, they must first become owners. ¹

This belief underlies the popularity of all forms of
"redistributionism" and socialism. ² People believe that
so long as wealth remains concentrated in the hands of a
relatively small number of capitalists, the capitalists
alone benefit from it. For the great mass of noncapitalists
to benefit, it is believed, the wealth of the capitalists must
first be taken away and given to the noncapitalists, or be
held by the government and used for the collective good
of all.

Closely related to these ideas, of course, is the be-
lief--held virtually as a self-evident axiom--that capi-
talism is a system which operates only in the interests of
the capitalists, and that the defenders of capitalism must
therefore either be capitalists themselves or be in the pay
of the capitalists, or else simply be perverse enemies of
the great majority of mankind. So deeply rooted are such
convictions that it is often thought to be a sufficient
refutation of the arguments of an advocate of capitalism
to intimate the size of his bank balance or stockholdings. ³

Similarly, in reporting election results, the news media
routinely explain voting patterns on the basis of the
voters' wealth and income status. They take it for granted
that only wealthy, upper-income voters will favor "con-
servative," i.e., procapitalist policies, and that poorer,
lower-income voters will automatically favor "liberal,"
i.e., anticapitalist policies.

Even the alleged friends of capitalism often share the
conviction that private ownership of the means of pro-
duction and capitalism serve only the capitalists: very
often their notion of how to fight the spread of commu-
nism is first to create more capitalists. Only then, they
believe, will there be a sufficient number of people with
an interest in opposing communism.

The first thing that must be realized is that in a division-
of-labor society, all private property that is in the form of
means of production--i.e., of capital--serves everyone,
nonowners as well as owners. In a division-of-labor
society, the means of production are not used in produc-

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