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Comment by tehjoker | Hacker News Reader

the wealthy will just hide their control of society behind shell entities, offshore accounts etc.

you need to place the means of production under democratic control

The means of production is under democratic control. Just try seizing the means to produce something outside of the controlled boundaries as defined by the democracy, like, say, moonshine, and see how far you get.

But democracy is really hard work. The vast majority of people would rather let someone else do it so that they can play with the kids, hang out with friends at the bar, hit the gym, etc. instead. They don't even want to get involved with other democratic concerns, let alone try to watch over capital. And, frankly, who can blame them?

As such, that means that you are still going to need an individual or small group of people to take over the day-to-day control of the means. Congratulations, you just invented "private ownership".

you misunderstand representative democracy. an executive committee can still be recalled by the relevant democratic body and is responsible to them. this is a very very different relationship than simple profit motive and employment.

There is no alien overlord. The democratic body controls all that which involves human activity. Any executive committees, profiteers, or employees are merely an extension allowed by the democracy, that can be reshaped by the whims of the democracy at any point. There is a difference between those things, but only because the democracy does not find a need to have the same level of scrutiny over all things. It turns out democracy is really hard work and there is only so much time in the day. The democratic people by and large would rather do other things with their life than spend it practicing democracy. They don't want direct control over much of anything, hence the extensions that have been offered, to varying degrees of oversight depending on importance to the standing democracy.

They do want the ability to recall people that act against their interest! That's not possible under corporate dictatorship.

Of course it is possible. What would stop it? An alien is not going to fly down from space to put a stop to it. Nothing can stop it other than people, and those people are the democracy. They are not going to stop themselves.

But, it would require putting in the work to make happen. Which they don't want to do. People, and therefore democracies, don't like to put in work unless they absolutely have to. And in this case, why would they have to? There is really no good reason to put in the work. The people that could be recalled are there because the democracy wants them to be. Recalling them for no reason would be kind of silly.

This is a very pessimistic view of human nature and in my view simply wrong. Much of the time people don't want to put in work, but when there is a significant wrong and people are impacted, they will do the work if the avenue is there. If you don't even believe that, then you are throwing out the entire liberal idea of state elections.

> but when there is a significant wrong and people are impacted, they will do the work

Of course. I even said as much in the previous comment. But I also said there is no reason to put in the work. The work needing to be done was given away to other people for good reason and the democracy wants to keep it that way.

If that changes, things will change, but until then...

Placing the means of production under Democratic control is a fantastic way to endure we don't get extreme wealth

At least during my lifetime it seems all the state owned corporations were better when state owned and turned to absolute shit once privatized when you look at service quality.

Complete nonsense.

Writing purely self-referential comments seems like it is a bit of an odd hobby, don't you think?

I witnessed more than five such privatizations in two different countries and they all ended up with the "investors" not even investing the minimum of what would have been necessary to keep the infrastructure operational. A decade later service quality is abysmal, infrastructure so bad that the state has to come in and help.

And these are only examples from postal services and public transport from the european regions I lived in, but I heard/read similar stories from nearly every of the 27 EU countries. The nations that still have exceptional services are the ones that didn't privatize them.

So if what I said is complete nonsense you surely have no problem pointing me to the wonderland where privatization lead to better services, lower prices and better service coverage — but we both know that never was the true interest behind privatizing anyways, don't we ; )

I wouldn't want to live in a while where BT was the only telephone company, BBC was the only TV channel, There was only one nationalised newspaper, where Royal Mail was the only company allowed to deliver parcels.

If you look at the worse services in your country they are usually the worse: from applying for a passport, to filling in pointless forms to high prices. Almost everything is better off in competition than making the natural market illegal.

"It works until you run out of other people's money"

It's a good way to ensure we don't get any wealth.

> you need to place the means of production under democratic control

That's a really good way to starve a couple million people. It's quite good to limit the wealth accumulation as well when people are only receiving rations for working from dawn to dusk.

why on earth would majorities ever support doing that? lol

The cultural revolution is a good place to start.

There's a reason society's economic foundation resembles natural selection

i don't think you understand anything about the cultural revolution or agricultural conditions in china

give them a single crypto account with a max limit of 500 million. No way to utilize another account, it's tied to verified identity using verifiers. Have a tax rate that's calculated daily based on usage and holdings... people with less money have essentially no tax because they probably spend more faster and keep less savings... you'd need separate business account system for payrolls and expenses for large corps.... there's a lot more to this idea, this is just simple overview.

or force transparency on ownership of everything. If something is owned by a nest of shell companies, ownership is transferred to the appropriate sovereign fund and managed for the public good. Combine transparency with the increasing difficulty of holding on to marginal dollars as a de facto way of capping income and wealth.

we could also learn from ideas associated with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_economics. I'm not saying they are all good ideas, but they are worth testing out and looking for historical examples of where they worked or failed.

transparency doesn't mean anything if the information is not actionable. liberals love transparency, but at the end of the day, it just means someone can spit in your face openly and have impunity

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