"But it's not. That's a separate topic, however, and our exchange is too voluminous already :-)"

...You agreed to that definition 2 posts up:

I said: "In a non-democratic system of governance, the state is not, in my view, a public enterprise accountable to the public"

You said: "I agree, with the proviso that I believe the same thing is true for contemporary democracies as well."

"It would be if "ownership" really meant ownership and "rewarded for ... efforts" really meant that. But your reply in the other sub-thread suggests that "ownership" is a misleading term here and you're basically talking about a vote and a license to work. See that other sub-thread for details."

All you offered in the other thread was that ownership wasn't what I said it was; you gave no details as to what else it might be.

"This sounds like a mystical incantation: things will just automagically happen because... well... I dunno... they will just happen. Markets are not magical, they work through well-understood mechanisms that boil down to, crudely, price and greed. I still don't see how these mechanisms would work in your utopia. You seem to think that the way it should happen is through rationally convincing people to commit their labor to a project. That might work for small-scale gardening or, say, art. I strongly doubt it would work for e.g. mining or public toilet cleaning. And what happens when you were unable to convince the sufficient number of people to produce enough fertilizer and there is not enough food to go round?"

I don't know why you don't see that what I'm proposing and the current reality is the same thing, in terms of how the market operates. If some person or group of people proposes a vision of the Public Good which is too resource-intensive, i.e. pricey, to be carried out for all the people who would be involved in its production, it won't happen because most people would not willfully deprive themselves of what they feel is the price of their labor.

Though there's probably a large number of people who'd love to take a trip to space next year, it won't happen because we (that is to say, people who live in a system which operates according to market principles) don't currently have a way to organize enough resources to make it happen without also having to sacrifice a lot of other things people consider to be important, even though the demand is there. And your fertilizer/food argument is another example of an obvious non-possibility. It doesn't usually take much to convince people that they need food if they don't want to die. If they're unwilling to do whatever necessary to make sure they have enough food to survive, which again, seems not to be much of a problem now, then they'll die. I don't know of many (or any) famines caused by apathy.

Your "price and greed" are more technically known as supply (price of production) and demand (use value or, if you like, desire or greed). I feel I've been pretty consistent in framing my proposition in those terms.

"Oh, there are a LOT of redneck white males and they reproduce quite successfully. As its members die off, the group just hires their children, cousins, nephews, etc."

No, no; you don't understand. We're not talking about a community of rednecks; we're talking, in your specific example, of a group redneck white males who form a group solely because its membership is exclusive to people who fit those three criteria; no women are in this group because they are not included in what this group thinks is the Public Good. Hell, it doesn't need to be that specific.

Even if we talk about a group of white people, joined together for the purpose of promoting Whiteness, the population of such a group will eventually require more resources than were available in the original plot of land this group settled on. They will then have to branch out and interface with groups who don't believe in promoting Whiteness or that the Public Good is just for white people. That will eventually lead this Whiteness group in one of two directions: conflict, stagnation, and decline, or dissolution. This should sound like an entirely plausible situation, and resolution thereof, to anyone with a knowledge of 19th/20th century European imperialism.

"The problem is, there is a lot of demand for the lifestyle of a rich and idle leisure class, there is not a lot of demand for the lifestyle of doing hard, dirty, and dangerous things that the society needs done to keep its head above the water."

Which is why private property ownership is problematic. It allows concentration of power such that a few can enjoy the lifestyle of the wealthy class by virtue of nothing other than ownership of private property. Without that concentration of power allowed by private property, there would be no such thing as a rich and idle leisure class because the leisure class represents a sub-optimally efficient distribution of resources (you must be aware of the marginal propensity to save/spend)--in clumps here and absence there. People may desire to have that kind of lifestyle, but if the price of satisfying the demand for it, in an equitable fashion, is too high, and there's no individual resource clumps to pay for it, it won't happen, just like we don't have any group saying it's going to send a million people into space next year.