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Comment by zeagle | Hacker News Reader

That sounds a lot like a newspaper subscription. I subscribe to my local (physical) paper once a week for this reason.

Modern-day patronage is kind of different from a subscription. It's a lot like a "pay what you want" subscription model, but people seem a lot more generous when you express it as a "donation with early access to premium articles" rather than payment for goods and services.

That's really fair. I think of my donations and support and usually higher than I would want to subscribe for!

Yeah, as long as you remove the "for-profit" part, it's essentially that. Once it's a for-profit business, it perverses the incentives, and it'll be a race to the bottom or a race to see what subscribers can survive the highest prices, which is exactly what we wanna avoid :)

Non-profits don't really stop any of that. Plenty of non-profits are after perverse incentives to gather as much money as they can to just pay higher ups more money, and use the non-profit status to pay employees less.

Maybe there's a third way. What about a company owned by a "perpetual purpose trust" - i.e. a trust with a defined purpose that is legally binding. It's the only shareholder, so no extracting value and all profits have to comply with the trust's bylaws in how they are used. Patagonia (US company) is one example of this; it's profits are legally bound to go toward environmental causes.

Bosch and Zeiss in Germany are comparable - they are Verantwortungseigentum (Steward-Ownership).

That sounds kind of like a B-Corp, innit?

That's a third-party certification that can be allowed to lapse, not a legal or legally enforceable status.

https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/certification/

This is the business model of The Guardian:

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

> Plenty of non-profits are after perverse incentives to gather as much money as they can to just pay higher ups more money

Where is this specifically, in the US? Usually the laws of the country prevent this, since they're you know... Non-profits... But wouldn't surprise me there are a few leftover countries who refuse to join the modern world.

The US has this problem. There aren't really rules on paying executives as much as you want, or having bonus structures based on fundraising, as long as the board okays it and considers it as contributing to the mission. It is non-profit because it doesn't pay out profits to investors. This is a large way corruption happens in the US, ie a lot of those "X politician foundations" pay modest amounts of money to some cause, but a large percentage of the donations go to the executive as a salary for running the corp, the executive is the politician. Its a big shell game.

Yeah, seemingly a local problem rather than a problem with non-profits, unfortunately :/ Hope things get better over there over time!

What country do you live in and can you link to the laws regulating nonprofit employee pay so that we can compare and use them as a model?

You just find the optimal point for the most people if it's for profit.

I doubt that's true in practice, although I know many capitalists know that to be true in theory.

I think that only holds if company ownership is not close with company leadership. Is a "subscriber owned" newspaper model possible? Like how co-op stores are at least nominally owned by their customers.

I could also imagine a system in which a local newspaper was actually run as a public utility by an independent corporation, but explicitly chartered and subsidized by a town/city/county.

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