ScrimbloBimblo
The Loveable Scrunko
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User ID: 2483
ScrimbloBimblo
The Loveable Scrunko
9mo ago
"Owned by everyone who works there" is probably not the best way I could have phrased it. What I'm picturing looks something like this, quoted from another comment:
Suppose you live in a town of 10000 people and you and 30 buddies believe that your town would be better off with a power plant.
In a Captialist economy, you'd all go to a wealthy investor and try to convince him of your hypothetical plant's ability to make him a lot of money if he invests in it. If you succeed, he'd fund your plant in exchange for most of the profits. This could be described as an investor-owned business.
In a Socialized economy, you'd all go to the town council to convince them that the plant would be a net positive for the town. The council would hold a vote of the entire town. If the vote passed, the town would fund your plant in exchange for a cut of the profits, which would be distributed to the people, either directly or through infrastructure. This would be a collective-owned (government-owned) business.
The advantage of this over an investor-owned business is that it scales better with automation. Suppose that the plant initially hires 50 people from the town. Then suppose, as is common, that improvements in technology enable the plant to be only manned by 10 people. Then suppose that all other businesses in the town do the same thing.
Under Capitalism, this would be good for the wealthy investor, and very bad for the town, as now most of the workers have been laid off and no longer benefit from the plant.
Whereas under Socialism, automation would be good for the town. Since everyone shares in the profits of the plant, everyone would benefit from improvements to the plant's productivity.
They can also do more good than harm in a different environment.
I can agree with this, but I would have difficulty calling an organization not optimized for profit a "corporation". This may be getting into no-true-scotsman territory though.
The most productive countries in the world are countries that try to set up an environment that enables companies to produce surplus.
I don't think productivity is an inherent good if the average person doesn't benefit from it. Take South Korea. Sure they're better than North Korea, but they still have the highest suicide rate in the first world, despite being one of its most productive nations.
Are you willing to claim that corporations as they exist in America do more harm than good?
I'm honestly not sure, but regardless of my answer, I think they do a lot of harm, the majority of which isn't strictly necessary for the good. It's like if I were in the trolley problem (5 on the first track, 1 on the second) and I flipped the switch, but then stabbed two people on the trolley. Sure I'm technically coming out ahead, but I'm still probably not the best person to be driving the trolley.
Do you think an economy could support anything resembling a modern standard of living without them?
Since you can imagine an organization acting differently in a different environment, it can't be too much of a stretch to imagine them continuing to be productive with a different organizational structure.
Are you willing to sacrifice 80% of GDP to get rid of corporations?
No, but I'm willing to sacrifice, say, 20% of GDP to convert them to worker-owned collectives. It doesn't matter to me if the pie is getting bigger if the average person's slice is getting smaller.
ScrimbloBimblo
The Loveable Scrunko
9mo ago
Let’s assume you are right. Let’s assume management offers very little value but sucks up a bunch of the profit.
I don't necessarily think they offer little value, just that their pay is often wildly disproportionate to that value. The point isn't to put all managers out to sea, but to ensure that they aren't leveraging a position of power to profit from the work of others.
ScrimbloBimblo
The Loveable Scrunko
9mo ago
Or do you value fairness as but one of many competing values?
I mean yes, but I would say this is true for most values of anyone, as almost any single value, when taken to the logical extreme, would be horrifying unless you're a paperclipper.
ScrimbloBimblo
The Loveable Scrunko
9mo ago
This seems accurate, especially seeing as how the 70s are when this movement seemed to start its decline.
ScrimbloBimblo
The Loveable Scrunko
9mo ago
Fairness is admittedly not a major concern of mine.
In some ways, we may be at a bit of an impasse here as this comes down to terminal values, which by definition can't really be argued. Like many people, I believe that fairness is an implicit good. I can't argue for this any more than I can argue that happiness is good and suffering is bad. It's one of those things you either believe or you don't. It's not my only terminal value, or even my top value, but it's still on the list. This isn't to say that it's impossible to have a nation that's fair and shitty, just that, all else being (no pun intended) equal, it's better to be fair than unfair.
You seem fine destroying all private incentives to create factories. Is this intentional?
Yes. This is practically the definition of Socialism. We do not want private entities to have the amount of money that would be required to do fund like this. "No one man should have all that power" and all that.
Food has gotten cheaper as well.
Maybe in the last 70 years, but in the last 15 years, it has pretty definitively gotten more expensive. Anecdotally, my grocery bill has nearly doubled (adjusting for inflation) in the last decade, and everything I've found in a quick google search has supported this conclusion.
One of the believed causes of the cost increase for healthcare and education is also the increased cost of labor inputs for those activities.
Oddly enough, I completely agree with your points about healthcare and education. Doctors get paid way too much, which stems from them having an artificially low supply, which stems from them being required to attend 8 years of medical school regardless of specialty, which I think is one of the dumbest laws we have, up there with banning townhomes.
The cost of materials to build a house from the 1900's has decreased significantly.
The cost of materials is not the primary cost of a home, it's the land, which has definitely increased.
If a manager is not paid more then it becomes easy for the employee to simply bribe their managers.
Bribe them to do what? Not manage? If the manager has stake in the company and the worker has stake in the company, then both of their paychecks are determined by how well the company does and neither of them has incentive to make this trade. Now, I suppose they could choose to do so anyway, but an economics discussion seems a bit pointless if we don't assume rational actors.
They find a big empty field that no one owns. And the singer sings for everyone there. There is enough people and enough wealth that the singer is able to do this for a year and eventually earn 1 million dollars. Do you think it is bad that the singer has 1 million dollars?
I'm not sure, and to be honest, that's so far from the base case that I don't really care. Most of the time, the one doing the work and the one profiting the most from it are not the same person. In the vast majority of cases, people don't become successful singers by being good at singing. Sure that's necessary, but lots of people are good at singing. They become successful by getting a record deal, which is to say, convincing a rich person that they can get richer by funding their career. Even the ones who don't do this are either very independently wealthy or have a more informal contract with someone who is.
Generalize this to all industries, and it becomes apparent that almost all of the power is in the hands of a very small proportion of people. I believe this kind of power imbalance is inherently a very bad thing.
What if the town council disagrees with my idea?
Assuming your proposal wasn't blatantly absurd or frivolous, then regardless of their personal feelings, as civil servants, they would still be obligated to put your proposal to the vote of the town.
Am I not allowed to start the business?
If you go to an investor to fund your plant, and you're turned down, is he "not allowing" you to build it? Indirectly, maybe, but that would be a really odd way of phrasing it. Same way with going to the town to fund your plant.
As far as whether or not you're literally "allowed" to build the plant in the town, yes that would probably also be up to the local government, but that's also true under Capitalism, at least in all the nations I'm aware of, and not what I'm talking about. Hell, I live in the US and my municipality votes on that kind of thing all the time.
Who does the hiring at the plant? Me, the "founder" or the town council?
On the day-to-day, I imagine the plant's hiring manager would make that decision. If you're asking who hires them they would likely be appointed by the COO, who would be voted in by the plant's workers every few years. If you're asking who the initial workers would be, that would consist of you and the group of people who decided to start a plant in the first place, along with anyone else from the town you convinced to join. I imagine the more of you there are, the more likely the town would vote to fund you.
ScrimbloBimblo
The Loveable Scrunko
9mo ago
People will just park their money in real estate or other unproductive assets instead of creating the Internet.
That sounds to me like exactly what's already happening right now in basically every first-world nation.
Stripping ownership (ie, taxing assets instead of income) is some mix of really really bad and impossible in practice.
I mean "bad" is subjective, but "impossible" sounds like a pretty extreme overstatement. Some assets may be difficult to tax, but most seem pretty straightforward.
Also, out of curiosity, what are your thoughts on Geoism?
ScrimbloBimblo
The Loveable Scrunko
9mo ago
This seeems like a long way of saying that because someone is wealthy, he shouldn't have to work like the rest of us. I've heard the higher-risk higher-reward argument before and I've never bought it, mostly because taking a large quantity of risks is statistically equivalent to taking no risk. If you bet on one horse, you might go broke, but if you bet on 100 horses, you're virtually guaranteed to win a few. The gambling analogy isn't great because the average expected return is always negative, which isn't the case in investment. This is why virtually every extremely rich person has most of their money in investments, and why even the most risk-averse financial advisors support this.
ScrimbloBimblo
The Loveable Scrunko
9mo ago
Keep in mind, government doesn't necessarily mean the feds, just any institution directly answerable to the people of an area. Also, privately-owned and government-owned business would look similar in the day-to-day running of things; the main differences would be in who profits.
Simplified example:
Suppose you live in a town of 10000 people and you and some buddies believe that your town would be better off with a power plant.
In a Captialist economy, you'd all go to a wealthy investor and try to convince him of your hypothetical plant's ability to make him a lot of money if he invests in it. If you succeed, he'd fund your plant in exchange for most of the profits. This could be described as an investor-owned business.
In a Socialized economy, you'd all go to the town council to convince them that the plant would be a net positive for the town. The council would hold a vote of the entire town. If the vote passed, the town would fund your plant in exchange for most of the profits, which would be distributed to the people, either directly or through infrastructure. This would be a collective-owned (government-owned) business.
The advantage of this over an investor-owned business is that it scales better with automation. Suppose that the plant initially hires 50 people from the town. Then suppose, as is common, that improvements in technology enable the plant to be only manned by 10 people. Then suppose that all other businesses in the town do the same thing. Under Capitalism, this would be good for the wealthy investor, and very bad for the town, as now most of the workers have been laid off and no longer benefit from the plant.
Whereas under Socialism, automation would be good for the town. Since everyone shares in the profits of the plant, everyone would benefit from improvements to the plant's productivity.
ScrimbloBimblo
The Loveable Scrunko
9mo ago
I think wealth inheritance often appears unfair when viewed from the children's generation, but fair when viewed from the parents generation.
The parents may consider it good, but I don't think even the most hardcore anarcho-capitalists would argue that it's fair, any more than it's fair that some people are born kings and some are born peasants.
To have someone else then come in and say "no, that's not fair that your kid gets a nice life, they must work and suffer like everyone else". I might feel like "why did I bother to earn all that wealth then?".
I mean yeah that's kinda the idea. If I believe that it's bad for people to accumulate large quantities of wealth, then it follows that I would want to disincentivize that.
I can't tell if you are fine with destroying the concept of private wealth
I mean I wouldn't be much of a Socialist if I didn't believe in getting rid of private property to some extent, but personally, I'm less concerned about the stuff you keep around the house and more the sort of thing that 99% of people would never be able to buy, like factories, refineries, large swaths of land and such.
I'd like some idea of who is supposed to own things instead. And by ownership I mean final or majority say in how an asset is used.
Let's use a refinery as an example. Ideally, the refinery would be owned by the collective of everyone who works there. The decisions would be made by an individual elected by majority vote every few years.
He is being paid for that investment money, not for his productivity.
This just sounds like another way of saying that because he has money, he doesn't have to work like the rest of us. This is what I have a problem with.
There is nothing preventing the workers from owning the business. This is fully legal in the US, and quite a few socialists I have spoken to love to point out various examples of worker owned cooperatives.
I don't disagree with this. Hell, half of what I post online is just variations of this exact statement. I'm very supportive of co-ops and the like. Just because I don't like Capitalism doesn't mean I'm unwilling to work within it. I'm no doomer.
You are not allowed to steal something you didn't create.
I agree. That's why I'm not a huge fan of wealthy people taking things created by workers.
You basically want to reneg on that agreement and change the terms in a way that benefits yourself at their expense.
That seems uncharitable. I want to avoid making this sort of agreement in the first place.
If starting a business and potentially losing lots of money to your competitors sounds scary and risky, then realize that is what your current company's investors already went through.
I've heard the risk argument before and I've never bought it, mostly because taking a large quantity of risks is statistically equivalent to taking no risk. If you bet on one horse, you might go broke, but if you bet on 100 horses, you're virtually guaranteed to win a few. The gambling analogy isn't great because the average expected return is always negative, which isn't the case in investment. This is why virtually every extremely rich person has most of their money in investments, and why even the most risk-averse financial advisors support this.
I've also known plenty of people that don't work in the type of industries where productivity is drastically increasing.
If there's a job that doesn't have its productivity improved by automation, I haven't discovered it yet. Even the softest of social sciences benefit from automating routine paperwork.
The price of the vast majority of goods and services have gone down over the last few decades. The huge exceptions to this are healthcare, education, and housing.
I would add food to your list as well.
In other words, the things we don't need are getting cheaper and the things we do need are getting more expensive. The logical extreme of this sounds like a world where we're all constantly distracting ourselves from the fact that we're unhealthy, sick, and constantly at risk of homelessness, which feels very familiar.
I think in practice you'd find a lot of industries have degrees of subjective value involved.
When I say "difficult to put objective value on", I'm not talking about everything that could possibly be subjectively valued. I'm talking about things that are virtually impossible to value as they have no minimum value, like art.
And do you not think management does anything?
Do I think they do nothing? No. Do I think they do enough to justify making triple what the people working for them make? Also no.
Also, while I've known a few lazy workers, most of them at least did enough work to look productive. I've known drastically more lazy managers who literally sat on their phones all day scrolling twitter.
As a final note, you seem to think I take issue with the existence of transactions, but I have no problem with these. If Peter has a million dollars and Paul has zero, and Peter pays Paul to perform services. I don't care about that transaction. I take issue with the fact that Peter has a million dollars and Paul has zero in the first place.
I find acts/threats of violence abhorrent
I obviously recognize the horrors that can come from violence, and I believe that we should generally try to avoid it when resonable. But it's hard for me to call all violence bad when all civilizations, bad or good, are fundamentally based on the threat of violence. Even pacifists generally have some threshold for which they find violence acceptable. Personally, I would rather have to occasionally be in violent situations than live in poverty. Given that people enlist in the military as infantry by choice, I cannot be alone in this.
What is your basic theory of exploitation? Or how does a corporation exploit its workers?
If I lived in the 1700s, I would probably be a libertarian. Technology hadn't advancad as far, and resources were more scarce, so if almost everyone didn't work hard for long hours, then everyone would starve, and a capitalist economy seems like a decent enough way to incentivize that.
It's difficult for me to say that today. Take my previous job for example. I have to work 40-50 hours per week just to not be homeless, while my boss's boss has to work, on average, about 1 hour per week. He's not particularly intelligent or productive; the only reason he doesn't have to work as much as I do is that he was born rich and I wasn't.
He didn't gain this wealth through hard work or taking risks, he gained it because his father was wealthy, who gained it because his father was weathy, who gained it because one of his ancestors found a silver mine under his property by accendent. I don't believe that he has a right to have double the free time that I do for the rest of his life while I don't just because he's from a weathly family.
Additionally, our company turns a substantial profit. I receive a very small proportion of that profit, and he receives 10 times that, despite the fact that his individual productivity is drastically lower than mine. I don't believe that he has a right to more of the profits than I do, when I am more productive than he is.
The irony is that the main thing preventing workers from just cutting out the middle man and refusing to give the owners their cut is that the state would side with the owners of the means of production, violently if necessary.
I could, in theory, quit and go to a different job, but that, in all likelyhood, would be exactly the same situation. I could start my own competing business, but I would be unlikely to ever be able to compete with my former employer, as they own the means of production, and have an economy of scale, and I would never be able to afford that.
Also, the rise of technology has led the average worker's productivity to skyrocket over the last few decades. Logically, this should lead to them being able to work drastically fewer hours for the same pay, but in reality, the average work week is the same it was 40 years ago, and average pay is about the same with respect to inflation.
As automation gets better and better, it should ideally lead to a society where we have to work less and less, and have more free time, but this is not the case for most people. Since our system is set up such that most people can only support themselves by working 40-50 hours per week, automation becomes a threat to out jobs rather than a benefit, because our system only gives people value insofar as they benefit the people who own the means of production.
What is your preferred alternative?
I'll copy one of my other comments to answer this:
Personally, I believe the (usually local, sometimes state/province, and occasionally federal) government should control many industries, and private industry should be limited to industries that are difficult to put an objective value on, like entertainment. The purpose of this would be to ensure that workers should receive the value of their labor with minimal amounts given to management. Anyone should be able to start a government-owned businesses to allow some choices for consumers while still guaranteeing workers the value of their labor.
Additionally, I believe that the state should ensure that all their citizens receive the essentials, including a place to live, electric/water/internet, safe transportation around their town/city, and high-protein food.
ScrimbloBimblo
The Loveable Scrunko
9mo ago
I don't believe that all of the the people that make up corporations are evil, they follow the same incentives as the rest of the population. But I believe these incentives will lead these corporations to evolutionarily optimize for things other than the good of human beings, and doing this is the closest thing to "evil" that I believe in.
Even if the CEO of a megacorp is a genuinely good person deep down, he is still obligated by his shareholders to maximize short-term profits over literally everything else, including the wellbeing of employess and sometimes even the satisfaction of consumers. Think about how every single large tech company turned on it's userbase the second they realized they could make more money by selling their users' data and intentionally making their own products worse in order to extract the maximum amount of money.
ScrimbloBimblo
The Loveable Scrunko
9mo ago
The populists are on Boomer Facebook.
Are they though? I've spent time on Boomer Facebook, and the people who post there seem overtly in favor of laissez-faire economics. Is there evidence they're becoming more fiscally left?
ScrimbloBimblo
The Loveable Scrunko
9mo ago
I'd never heard of that term before, but yeah, that page is pretty much an exact description of what I'm talking about
Indirectly, sure. A portion of their tax money is going to fund a venture in the hopes that the venture will make money for the town. If that venture fails to do so, they're not getting that money back. That sucks, but in most places I've lived, the chance of earning any profit from your tax revenue is effectively zero, and I'd rather be taking a calculated risk than a guaranteed loss.
If the whole town is insane enough to spend the entire town's budget on a single venture, sure, but there's not much point in discussing economics if we can't assume at least semi-rational actors.
No? Why would they? If I don't invest in Apple, I don't get profits from Apple. That makes no sense.
Then they won't be relevant for some businesses, which is fine. The point of this whole thing is to prevent too much power from being in the hands of a couple of rich investors, not to stop people who don't need investors in the first place. I'm not talking about flower shops and barbers, I'm talking about the kinds of industries you couldn't possibly start without an investor, hence the power plant example.
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