| > 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. |
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.