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Comment by erlich | Hacker News Reader

Money is paid for the employees backs and the business entity owns all the IP. Employees agree to this and can leave at any moment. They are welcome to start a co-op style company and give that a go. But would a VC want to invest in such a company? Prob not.

People like to pretend we don’t live in a cut throat capitalist system and that it has worked out best.

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Employees did not agree to the systems of corporate governance we have. There is no real choice, and not working means starving. Nobody is pretending we live in a different system, they are trying to change it. The level of defeatism you are showing is unfortunate. “It has worked out best” is a pretty amazing assertion to make.

Removing the profit incentive was pretty disasterous throughout history. I just can’t imagine a group of employees being able to veto strategic decisions can work. The system for this is startups which is working great. If you don’t like something, setup your own company and do things the way you want.

But if employees always demanded things to be run they way they want, then you couldn’t have this level of experimentation and innovation.

I think the obvious fact is that there are not many co op companies because it doesn’t work. It’s like: stop trying to change someone else’s company, and start your own and build it from the ground up with the governance structure you want.

Nobody said anything about removing the profit incentive. Workers having a say can be setup in a lot of way, it does not require direct veto power. There have been and are many successful coops. The argument is these are not somebody else’s company, it is the workers company because they built it. That’s a lot of straw men you are arguing against.

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