[dbingham]

> This already exists, they are called cooperatives, many of them actually work pretty great. Try to guess what happens when they grow and they need to hire employees...

They continue to operate. Mondragon has 80,000 worker owners. And yes, it has a challenge in recent years where the worker owners have created a class of non-owner employee. But it got pretty big before that started happening, and there's no reason to believe it wouldn't continue to function just fine if that wasn't an option.

There are many other worker cooperatives functioning very well at scale with zero non-owner employees. My proposal is essentially that we make this the requirement. That any business formed must be formed as a democratically run worker cooperative. This is perfectly actionable. Governments define the legal structures under which businesses may form today, and continue to regulate those structures. Right now, those structure enable the investor ownership relationship, and most worker cooperatives have to use those structures and bend them to allow the worker ownership relationship. It's a relatively straight forward legal matter (with wide ranging consequences) to change that structure.

> No banks, no loans, no credit cards. No way to protect against inflation with financial instruments as basic as a target-date fund.

Like I said, this is a thought experiment. Not fleshed out. And it's not the same as the proposal I outlined above for a worker cooperative based democratic socialism. I don't think you actually read my post, I suspect you just skimmed it and then reacted to certain sentences.

[qsort]

> My proposal is essentially that we make this the requirement

So basically we are abolishing the ability for any business to hire employees? This would be terrible, especially for the poor. Owner and employee are different risk profiles, it's neither useful nor beneficial to impose by law that nobody can be an employee any longer, especially for those who can't afford the risk.

It's also very easy to route around that obstacle if it were made law: just fire everyone and hire them back as contractors, oh, no, sorry, democratically run worker cooperative employing one worker.

You are completely throwing away many layers of protections that are afforded to workers in a system of regulated employment relations.

> Like I said, this is a thought experiment.

It's a thought experiment predicated on paying an enormous social cost that nobody is willing to pay, to get to a point where nobody wants to be. If the first step of your plan directly implies getting rid of all credit, then I frankly don't think it's really a good plan.

[dbingham]

> Owner and employee are different risk profiles, it's neither useful nor beneficial to impose by law that nobody can be an employee any longer, especially for those who can't afford the risk.

The owner doesn't carry the risk - the business does. That's the whole point of a limited liability corporation. And there's no reason those liability protections couldn't be strengthened further.

Plus, this is seriously underestimating the risk a poor employee takes. Someone living pay to pay check who has no information about the state of the business and stands to lose everything if they get fired risks a lot more than a business owner who has all the information about the state of the business and can keep a comfortable cushion for themselves to fall back on should the business fail (and can choose the moment at which to end the business to be sure they don't eat into that cushion).

Who's taking more risk here? The employee, not the business owner.

> It's also very easy to route around that obstacle if it were made law: just fire everyone and hire them back as contractors, oh, no, sorry, democratically run worker cooperative employing one worker.

You could pretty easily tweak contract law to get rid of this workaround. Even so, this isn't an easy workaround. No business of reasonable size can afford to fire all of its employees. And if those employees are co-owners of the business no single employee has the power to fire all the others.

> You are completely throwing away many layers of protections that are afforded to workers in a system of regulated employment relations.

And replacing them with power. They don't need those protections when they are in control. They can devise their own rules.

> It's a thought experiment predicated on paying an enormous social cost that nobody is willing to pay, to get to a point where nobody wants to be. If the first step of your plan directly implies getting rid of all credit, then I frankly don't think it's really a good plan.

My proposal is a separate thing from the thought experiment. The thought experiment is an example of the sort of innovative thinking we should be engaging in to come up with new alternatives, but for the most part - aren't on a large scale.

My proposal is a fleshed out proposal that I could work. Sure there are pieces of it that still need to be further fleshed out - like exactly how the transition would work. But I you can I must hang out with different crowds if you don't think anybody wants to get to a place with less inequality and where the average person has a hell of a lot more control over their day to day life.

[qsort]

> Someone living pay to pay check

Someone living pay to paycheck can not afford to be an owner in the first place. The structure being LLC or whatever makes no difference: the vast majority of business enterprises just fail.

You are effectively forcing everyone to be a business owner even when they might have no will, interest or ability to be one, something that disproportionately damages those who would putatively be helped by this system.

> You could pretty easily tweak contract law to get rid of this workaround.

Yes you can. You can do that in my world, where regulated employment, you know, exists, and you can easily show how an operation like that is fraudolent.

> And replacing them with power. They don't need those protections when they are in control. They can devise their own rules.

How would they be in control? Magic? The invisible hand? How would a law mandating that everyone be an owner, assuming for the sake of argument something like that is possible and enforceable, make a minimum wage worker in control of his own destiny?

It doesn't work, it's a pipe dream, and it's ironically the same argument used by hyper libertarian right-wing types.

> if you don't think anybody wants to get to a place with less inequality

Pointless rethoric. Literally everyone wants that, like everyone wants an extra million in their bank account.

I'm disagreeing that what you're proposing will get us there.