[dbingham]

> It's hard to have big business without big government.

The internet provides the perfect counter example to this. It was (and remains) nearly entirely unregulated. And yet Google and Facebook are monsters with immense anti-competitive power.

The evidence really does not support the idea that big business is entirely the result of big government. Quite the opposite in fact. The last time we had this much concentration of economic power was the gilded age, an age of relatively small government. We had a period of lower wealth/power concentration in the 50s and 60s, but that was linked to strong anti-trust laws (administered by government) and 90% top marginal tax laws. Since then, neoliberal ideology has been used to chip away at the restraints on big business in government and now we currently have the worst of both worlds -- corrupt government beholden to vast concentration of economic power generated by big business.

Personally, I am of the opinion that the only way to avoid this is to look at the core of the systematic issue -- allowing equity financing concentrates wealth. Concentrating wealth concentrates power and naturally causes consolidation and centralization. In a world with equity financing, the only way to keep business small and competitive is with strong anti-trust laws and highly progressive taxation.

I think we could have a world of small government and small business, but only if we universally replace the Stock Corporation with the Worker Cooperative. That, of course, is a novel idea and requires a lot more support than I can put in HN post. Maybe some day I'll get to a point where I can stop developing full time to support myself and write that book...

[Danihan]

What a great post. I'm not sure Worker Coops are a novel idea though.

You know any old LLC can be structured as a co-op with a bit of effort.

[dbingham]

Worker co-ops in and of themselves aren't a novel idea. Universally replacing the stock corporation (thus doing away with the mechanism of equity financing) in favor of worker co-ops is an idea that seems to be largely absent from our public debate. There are definitely people exploring it, The Next System Project [1], Democracy Collaborative [2], and Foundation for a New Economics [3] have all toyed with it to varying degrees.

But I don't know that I've really seen anyone make a strong case for it (in a way digestible to the layment). Richard Wolff wrote about it in Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism but not in a way that was very digestible for the average reader. Gar Alperovitz has also written about it in What Now Must We Do? and America Beyond Capitalism, but in both cases he wasn't specifically making the argument for universally replacing the Stock Corporation with Worker Cooperatives, but more generally increasing the prevalence of cooperatives (worker, member, and multi-stakeholder) and decreasing the power of capital.

I'd really like to write a book, digestible by the average American, making the case for the universal replacement of the stock corporation with the worker cooperative and speculating about what impacts that might have on society (using evidence to support the speculation as much as possible).

[1] https://thenextsystem.org/ [2] https://democracycollaborative.org/ [3] http://neweconomics.org/

[Danihan]

Thanks for the recommendations. I'll check out these books before the year is out and get back to you. The co-op model is something I've personally thought a lot about as well. I actually own a valid testing arena even -- a successful restaurant that I've been wanting to convert into some form of co-op at some point.

Personally, I don't think capitalism is going away any time soon, it's just a question of which version of it will be the most effective. Co-ops would need to be able to compete and win against the current shareholder model, without government intervention, which may not be possible.

Anyway, shoot me an email if you'd like to discuss more in a few months.

[dbingham]

Cheers!

Another good book, more about the practical realities of creating a worker co-op in the current context, is Companies We Keep: Employee Ownership and the Business of Community and Place by John Abrams[1]. It's more a story about his experience founding and running his construction company as a worker cooperative. It would probably be a lot more relevant to pondering whether and how to form a cooperative business in the current world.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Companies-We-Keep-Ownership-Community...