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Regarding the start-up story, that is only one kind of enterprise, one with high risk and a long period of preparation before any chance of creating a product,and they're obviously not for everyone. But not all new enterprises are start-ups - if I were to open a shop, for example, I would expect to start turning a profit from day one (disregarding the loan I need to acquire the physical location and merchandise, of course), so the workers in the shop co-op would immediately have a clear revenue stream. > that way the contract naturally changes from slavery to employment agreement. Pure Libertarianism is at least as much an idealistic system as socialism is. I don't think these kinds of clever tricks and relying entirely on markets can produce the desired outcomes, at least not as efficiently as regulations can. Examples in history of the standards many businesses held even for things such as food and medicine before explicit regulations and inspections were mandated would seem to agree with me. >Are there any hostile actions from which only some people deserve to be protected? No, and I wasn't suggesting there should be. Worker-owned co-ops would not even have the power to attack capitalist corporations, but the reverse would definitely happen. Big corporations try to destroy any competition they have by default, and they would certainly focus their efforts against a competitor controlled by a lower class. > and it's better to work with them to bring everyone up, instead of trying to bring them down. Capitalism by definition seeks to bring investors up, and no more than that. Any raising of the rest of the population is entirely accidental, and sometimes explicitly discouraged (for example, no capitalists would like to see growing prosperity among Chinese factory workers, since it would directly eat into their profits). Do note that European/US-style capitalism is definitely preferrable to USSR or Chinese style planned, centralized state capitalism, and even that is in turn preferrable to serfdom or slavery-based economies. |