I wonder what would happen if we tried a system that didn’t allow private ownership of companies?
Oh we have, you say? Many times? Famines, poor economies, mass genocide, dictators? Well, surely none of those experiments were _real_ communism. We better try it another dozen times just to be sure.
How much ownership of the means of production did a slave of the USSR or PRC own?
Who “owned” the property in these cases?
No one is left arguing for Socialism as a centrally planned entirely state controlled economy, just tweaks to our current system to add additional interventions to combat markets' natural propensity to consolidate wealth. Making it so that only employees are shareholders isn't some crazy radical thing, the current system is to levy heavy taxes to recirculate wealth back down from the top. But come on capitalist, do you really think that centrally planned government spending is the best way to do that?
Have you given any thought what that would look like in practice? If you and me started WidgetCorp and needed $5 Million to buy a WidgetMaker, where would we get the money?
10 richest men in the world owned more than the combined wealth of the bottom 3.1 billion people
That means that in order to utilize that “wealth” it needs to be liquidated and no longer accreting value
The people who own that have no interest in liquidating that capital for anything that doesn’t personally benefit them. Since a company is a zero sum pie for total ownership whomever controls the distribution of equity controls the pie - unless you’re in a coop or a strong union, your ownership is simply at the will of the richest person in the company
If it’s the case that you need capital to make more, then by the power law the only people who can “create wealth” already have it and have no intention of using it for public good
So then how do non owners start something? They convince the ruling economic lords that they will do better with their money to give them more back
You can’t get money unless a ruling lord guarantees a rate of return. How’s that possibly a good system?
Seems a lot like greed based vanity dictatorships
This is objectively wrong. The great majority of owned wealth is capital, and capital is operated. Most of Buffett's net worth is in businesses which he owns: those businesses operate at a profit, creative value for the world at large, some of which accrues to Mr. Buffett. Which he promptly reinvests in more (hopefully) productive businesses.
Please cite your argument that the world is better because the workers of the companies are not controlling the value they create
Is your argument thusly: “because buffet can maintain control, he should because so far he has benefited his shareholders”
I made no such argument.
What I said is that this:
> That means that in order to utilize that “wealth” it needs to be liquidated and no longer accreting value
Is objectively wrong. Most wealth is actively utilized as investment in productive businesses. Perhaps this is easier to see with the example of Jeff Bezos: most of his wealth is ownership of Amazon, which is a productive and profitable business. It doesn't need to be "liquidated" to be utilized, it's being utilized at rest. This is true for Warren Buffett as well, but I already went over that.
(I'm using the numbers for AT&T) Say you work for a big company so at your salary it translates to 0.0004% ownership. Just as before fiduciary duty and all that the company as a whole has the solemn duty to make it's owners as much money as possible and you make record profits to the tune of $72B. Great job really fantastic. Now instead of a $4B stock buyback it's a dividend paid to the owners (which is you) and you just made a cool $1.6 mil. Sure as hell beats that 2% bonus.
You can't sell ownership as a way of raising money anymore and you have to get loans or issue corporate bonds like all those plebeian small businesses do but the value of your work is returned right back to you as an employee/owner. And you're the board -- let's go (representative) democracy at the workplace! It's gonna make it really hard to push through truly unpopular decisions.
This kind of thing isn't without downsides or a magic solution to all of our problems, but like, employee ownership of business / labor owning the means of production that doesn't require state controlled industry, gulags, or whatever, and roughly lines up with current corporate governance.
The worker board will also have the same perverse incentives current boards do to a lesser degree. Why wouldn't they make terrible decisions in the name of short-term shareholder value? What is the crucial difference between a company who sells shares on the public market (where anyone could get a profit share) and a worker cooperative (where employees [re-]invest their wages to get a profit share)?
These two things can't really jive in the same world. There can't be a bunch of investors willing to blow huge sums of money on a business with no revenue in exchange for equity in pursuit of above average returns but no investors willing to buy corporate bonds or a new to be determined IOU structure from a business with no revenue in pursuit of above average returns. The only necessary condition in my view for this kind of investment to not shaft workers in the long run is that the amount paid to fulfill the IOU can't be indefinite or unbounded.