Comment by kerkeslager | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kerkeslager | Hacker News Reader

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> To take over the market companies need to attract customers - i.e. make their lives better. Usually there are more consumers than employees - so I think that measure works quite well with optimising for humans. Profit is a side effect of taking over the market.

Quantity of people benefitted isn't the only measure: magnitude of benefit is also relevant. The customer at a 7Eleven benefits in that they get to... what, buy snacks conveniently? Versus the worker who receives their entire livelihood and benefits, it becomes obvious that workers are the primary beneficiaries of a company.

> But actually to have any employees companies need to optimize for workers lives anyway.

This is quite obviously false. All companies have to do is present a united front on keeping pay low and benefits nonexistent to prevent workers from having better options. I.e. USA 2024.

> And it seems that cooperatives are not any better in this area - otherwise everybody would work for cooperatives.

Why is that exactly?

>All companies have to do is present a united front on keeping pay low and benefits nonexistent to prevent workers from having better options. I.e. USA 2024.

Can we leave the cynical antiwork comments out? They aren't helpful. This is obviously not the case for a majority of companies and anecdotes don't help.

Everyone is for the highest pay possible until they run their own company and have to provide payroll.

> Can we leave the cynical antiwork comments out? They aren't helpful. This is obviously not the case for a majority of companies and anecdotes don't help.

Major companies are regularly prosecuted for conspiracy to suppress wages. It if weren't for government intervention your wages would be much lower and there wouldn't be anything you can do about it.

This blind faith that billion dollar corporations would behave ethically is highly inappropriate

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-jo...

Most companies aren't "major companies". I'm for busting up the big monopolies, but I'm not for throwing the baby out with the bath water and imposing communist reforms on all businesses, most of which are small and generally well behaved, just because some big ones with pathological behavior exist.

There's A LOT of daylight between liberal capitalism and communist socialism.

The social democracies, a middle path, as the Nordic countries have experimented with, seem to have done quite well. And there's now strong evidence that our system (neoliberalism) has stunted economic growth.

Regardless...

I support simple social reforms, like sovereign wealth funds (Alaska, Norway) and universal healthcare, greatly reducing the tension between labor and capital. Then these labor, employment, and ownership reforms wouldn't be so fraught.

This discussion is about the proposal to, by law, force all businesses to be workers cooperatives. That's not the liberal capitalism found in Nordic countries, it's communism.

Communism does not have businesses, worker owned or otherwise. It does not even have currency and money at all.

Early form of capitalism didn't have limited liability companies. Just because you have to use Unlimited Liability Partnerships, for example, that does not mean it's not capitalism.

Once we move beyond capitalism, there are other words too, like mercantilism, imperialism, Neo-feudalism (arguably what we are getting to), schumpeterianism, etc. Expand your vocabulary.

>Communism does not have businesses, worker owned or otherwise. It does not even have currency and money at all.

Huh? You seem to know absolutely nothing about how the Soviet Union worked. They certainly did have money and companies. (And don't give me that BS about the CCCP not being "true communists" -- No True Scotsman fallacy)

Why would a communist society need money in the first place? Isn't everyone given some fixed ration of goods? Or that he can take what he needs?

A "true" communist society like you're talking about has never existed, outside of possibly Israeli kibbutzes and also tribal hunter-gatherer societies before civilization was invented.

In real communist societies like the Soviet Union (which are more accurately labeled "authoritarian socialism"), they need money to control allocation of goods, just like any other modern society. How exactly do you decide how many rolls of toilet paper to give to people? Some people need more than others, so either you have a giant government bureaucracy just to police how much toilet paper people use, how much of every possible type of food to eat, etc., or you just give people money and set prices for stuff, and let them figure it out themselves. These societies were centrally planned, but at some point it's simply impractical to plan everything.

> You seem to know absolutely nothing about how the Soviet Union worked

I think it’s you who doesn’t. Notice USSR stands for Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It was not a Union of Communist Republics. Have you stopped to think, why is that?

Leaders of USSR were communists, as in they believed in Communism. However, according to them, the country was socialist and they were working towards the goal of achieving Communism. That goal would be achieved eventually, when society or economy or technology was ready. But no official or leader of the Soviet Union would claim that they have already achieved communism.

So you can use USSR to claim that putting communist leaders in charge is a bad idea, but you cannot claim that USSR was an example of communism because not even people running it at the time claimed that it was.

And yes, the eventual goal was to get rid of the concept of money. You can read any of the soviet sci-fi, like Bull's Hour, and see how they imagined it would work.

Again, No True Scotsman.

That's not what I'm arguing for. I'm just shooting down fascile anti-worker rhetoric.

So if you acknowledge that pathological behaviors exist, what's the problem with regulating against those pathological behaviors? Given you seem to think most companies are small and well-behaved, it won't affect those companies.

I support regulating businesses and never suggested otherwise!

Well, you went straight to bringing up communism at the first hint of criticizing businesses, so...

Regulation only shifts corruption, it doesn't stop or prevent it. There is plenty of corruption in and around government including the judicial system.

> Regulation only shifts corruption, it doesn't stop or prevent it.

This is so obviously, trivially false, I doubt even you believe it.

Should we remove the prohibition on murder?

So you don't believe that murder happens?

Obviously murder happens.

Does regulation only shift murder, not stop or prevent it?

As it turns out, the Federal Reserve chairman happens to be on record as wanting to suppress wages because he blames high wages for inflation[0]. In other words, the current dumpster fire of an economy was the intended goal of the Federal Reserve's interest rate increases.

[0]: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/30/feds-powell-inflati...

> Everyone is for the highest pay possible until they run their own company and have to provide payroll.

And even then, there are lots of companies who want to provide the highest pay possible. I have always strived for this in my companies, anyway.

> This is obviously not the case for a majority of companies and anecdotes don't help.

That isn't obvious at all. The US has the one of the highest pay gaps of any developed nation. Our largest companies with the richest executives have employees on food stamps. I'm not being cynical, I'm talking about reality, and I'm not going to shut up about it just so you can maintain your comfortable naivete on this issue.

> Everyone is for the highest pay possible until they run their own company and have to provide payroll.

If you can't pay your workers a living wage your business has failed in the only way I care about.

> The US has the highest pay gap of any nation.

This doesn't contradict your point, but fwiw the pay gap of quite a few other nations come before the US. In terms of RP, the US ranks about 35th, behind many African and Asian nations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...

You left a key word out in the quote. Nobody wants to compete with Saudi Arabia when it comes to equality.

In fairness to fragmede, I was editing my post when they responded.

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