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"Better" is in your opinion. I need answers based on concerns and problems that happens in the real world. A fast-paced world.
Assuming the revenue of the company doesn't have massive growth (which is the normal situation unless a breakthrough happened), we need to hire more people who have the skills needed to keep up with the market. So, assuming we want to keep everyone (including useless people who'd rather have beer instead of reading a book to learn the new stuff), the income of everyone will just go down over time. Eventually, with no one getting fire there won't be enough money to go around to feed them. What am I missing here?
Worker coops are better ethically not just based on opinion. The workers are jointly de facto responsible for using up the inputs to produce the outputs. By the usual ethical principle that legal responsibility should be assigned to the de facto responsible party, the workers should jointly be legally responsible for the produced outputs and liabilities for the used-up inputs.
- Worker coops can fire people.
- Worker coops can charge initial membership fee when a new worker joins.
OK, at least we agree we can fire people. That answers my question. The circumstances aren't important. This idea that people can't be fired is just ridiculous.
Do you think communities will be happy seeing their friends/family being fired, and not understanding why? This actually reminds me of the movie Casino (1995), where Robert De Niro fires that Texan guy for incompetence, and then hell breaks loose due to relatives not understanding how that works. This is human nature. People will always prefer to keep an incompetent relative vs firing them for a good reason, no matter what.
I never said that people couldn't get fired.
The incompetent relative example seems to be a problem with nepotism
Agreed. It's a nepotism problem. I'm just drawing the picture that removing money from the picture basically makes relationships the new currency. It's basically how life used to be a long time ago, and those who were closer to the leader got better jobs with perks. People will always find a way to benefit and will centralize power eventually. I can't say much about hypotheticals and whether your coop will fix that, but in my opinion, history suggests that we'll just end up with a new system of power.
I never said anything about removing money.
What you are talking about is called social capital accumulation, which is a problem in any system.
A justification for worker coops is the moral principle of assigning legal responsibility to the de facto responsible party. In an employer-employee relationship, the employer receives 100% of the legal responsibility despite the employee being inextricably co-responsible. This violates the aforementioned principle
Well, I don't think you can use written laws to fight human plans to centralize power. I guess our current system is proof of that. People will always find a way to centralize that power to benefit themselves and their groups.
But anyway. I guess we're getting into a dead end. This is becoming opinion stuff at this point, whether this will work. I'll have to think more about this stuff.
See you're still trapped within the logic of capitalism which maximizes profits and expansion over other concerns.
So, assuming we want to keep everyone (including useless people who’d rather have beer instead of reading a book to learn the new stuff), the income of everyone will just go down over time. Eventually, with no one getting fire there won’t be enough money to go around to feed them. What am I missing here?
These are all massive assumptions
Sorry but you're evading my questions.
That's OK. I'm not looking to "win" here. Just think about what I said, and next time you have this discussion, have good answers. Maybe you'll change your mind one day and understand why the world we live in is the way we live in. Not that things can't be improve or that we're drowning in corruption. But that's another topic for another day. Have a good one.
Maybe you’ll change your mind one day and understand why the world we live in is the way we live in.
This from the person who is spouting econ 101 nonsense.
You haven't presented a valid argument. 2+2 is simple, but it works. When someone says the 2+2=10^50, and money falls from the sky, and everyone being lazy leads to growth, I'll ask them to justify.
Take a step back and evaluate your ego.
Unfortunately in the case of econ 101, you are taught that 2+2=5 most modern econ is neoclassical, which means operating on pre-marx economics and just ignoring marxist critiques of the political economy.
and money falls from the sky, and everyone being lazy leads to growth, I’ll ask them to justify.
Thats a mighty strawman you invented. Workers are going to do the bare minimum to not get fired when it literally doesn't matter how much they work, their income will be the same. When workers are invested in an organization, they do more work.
Either answer my questions, or go away. This conversation is over.
Your only question is "what am I missing" and the answer is an economics education.
But to address your "concerns" you're operating on the mindset of maximizing profit to compete against other firms maximizing profit, which is only a problem under capitalism (until you reach the monopoly stage)
Nice try evading the question. Try again.
Read the post. Read my question. Tell me what's wrong in my scenario and how it'll work in your "well-educated" mind.
If you understand it, you can explain it to a 5-year old.
Let's see what your next excuse is gonna be.
You literally only have one question, the rest of it is opining.
You're assuming a wage labor model and that people working twice as efficiently and at half intensity would result in decreased production.
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wage labor models aren't universal
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there is no reasoning stated for why production would go down
You're assuming people would have to be fired to maintain competitive growth. This is based on the logic of firms competing to capture market share. There isn't really a rational reason for this to need to happen under systems were the point is to accommodate human need, not to maximize profit.
I haven't said that people have to be fired to maintain competitive growth. I said that assuming a normal/average growth (and let's even make it simpler for you and ignore growth), and assuming a breakthrough requires many new people to hired to work with a new technology, then the people who are there and who aren't interested in learning the new way of doing things, will just become a burden to the company. Let's do the math:
- More people are hired
- Same output is maintained
Let's do the 5th grade math: Same output / More people = less earner per person every time this happens
Meaning: If this trend continuous due to multiple breakthroughs (which isn't crazy, we have seen tons of those in the last 25 years in different sectors), then this company is destined to become bankrupt, especially because people will continuously keep earning less with no lower-bound to that other zero, to the point where it's not enough to make a living.
Nothing you said answers this dilemma. You keep talking about general things and avoid this (very realistic) scenario that keeps happening. How will such a company survive?
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