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this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2024
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I don't hate the idea of stocks. You invest in a company that needs capital. You own a little piece and get a dividend based of the profits those companies make.
Its the constant growth model, where the value of the stocks have to constantly grow, the "If you are not growing, you are dying mentality." where the growth of stocks became the value and not the reliability of the dividends they provide.
I hate the idea is stocks. Ownership of companies should be split equally between all employees.
I don't know the full history of corporate shenanigans, but it's my understanding that the beginning of it all was to help form businesses that no individual could afford to start. No single person should reasonably have the funds to build a factory with all of the expensive equipment and parts needed to make cell phones. So you get people together who think cell phones are a good idea, they all pitch in, and now you can afford to build it and they get to share in the profits when it succeeds.
I like the employee-owned idea, but it seems like it would be hard to get off the ground in industries that require huge upfront investments. Imagine you want to build a grocery store, but the land and the building and the initial stock all takes money so you have to ask the cashier for $10,000 up front before you can actually build the thing and later start paying them. I legitimately don't know, are there proposed ways to build these businesses but make them employee-owned?
A group with access to a lot of capital that it makes sense to invest in companies making products... the government?
Financing is one of the major hurdles of employee owned businesses trying to compete against investor owned businesses, so you're right to identify that. I have 4 main solutions to this problem:
Investment isn't the only way to raise capital. There's also loans. In a fully co-op economy, the financial infrastructure for loans would likely be more robust. This is already how a lot of businesses get off the ground.
A company doesn't have to be 100% employee owned for the employees to have a controlling stake. An employee-owned company could decide to sell off 49% of its value to raise capital. They could do this at any time, including during startup.
The average worker would have more money to do as they please. In 2023, American companies earned a profit of $22k per worker. In a co-op economy, that's an average of $22k each worker has control over that they currently don't. Your average worker would be more capable of making the type of investment that you described.
Companies don't necessarily have to start as employee owned. A normal path for an entrepreneur is to start a business, grow it until it's sustainable and later sell it to somebody. Instead of selling it to an investor, they could sell it to their employees. In a co-op economy, this would probably be required in some way or another.
Completely agree. My wildest fantasy would be a phase in of co-ops/employee owned companies. This could be done over a 10 year period with each year requiring 5 more percent of the company value be owned equally by the employees (judged by the employee with the lowest stake). By the end of that decade, employees would own a controlling stake in their employers and would have plenty of time to organize a method of governance.
There's one critical metric that I think would determine how easily a company could make this transition: (total company value)/(2 x total company payroll). A $1M company with a $500k payroll would require each employee to pay an entire year's salary for them to have a controlling stake. That's very achievable over a 10 year period without really even having to give the ownership to the employees. The owners could just sell it off to them.
With this metric in mind, the companies that would transition the best would be ones that pay their employees very well relative to company value. Something like a small welding shop with a high number of skilled employees might be able to do this easily. A tech company with huge valuation relative to the number of employees would be forced to offer aggressive stock buying programs for employees (for every share you buy, the company matches 10 shares for example). This would force companies that don't pay well to either buy back stock, issue new stock, or drastically increase their payroll to make the transition.
I think that limited stocks are OK and appropriate. What I really have a problem with is people betting on failure in the stock market. That should never be allowed.
That can also work with stocks, every employee gets a share. Much easier to set up and manage, compared to making every employee a member of the LLC or a partner.
I always got hung up on that too. It seems to me that the ideal state would be you invest in a company, they make a profit, you get a share of that profit. You can reinvest that in other places, helping more people start their businesses, helping more people find employment and get things done. It's like economic democracy in action, where people get to decide what businesses are needed through investment. No person on Earth should have the funds to just build a chip fabrication plant, as an example, so crowd sourcing the funding like this makes perfect sense to me.
Where it falls down is in short term greed. I don't think that the system was intended or can reasonably sustain all the high-speed trading trying to maximize returns not by helping the company succeed but by leeching off of the investment of others. What should have been a way for people to help build things has become a way for a whole industry to extract more money out of the world.
The problem with your comment is thinking capitalism intended anything. The whole idea of capitalism is that perfectly rational actors with perfect knowledge can find the best price for an item. (There are no perfectly rational actors, and knowledge is deliberately obscured.) It doesn't intend any particular method or outcomes. It is only predicated on the idea that things will just happen to work out.
I agree, investing in a company is fine. It's when you have the ability to trade your investment without any consequence whatsoever that the madness begins. Investment is supposed to be risky for both the company and the investor! But we've managed to externalize that risk into a market in which no single actor can be held responsible when a company is looted and destroyed by greed. Publicly-traded shares are now an entirely tax-free substitute for money - but only for the rich who have turned this system into a game to enrich themselves.
Another issue is that publically traded companies have a legal fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, but there is no legal responsibility to society or ethics. In fact, even laws supposedly designed to constrain businesses only carry fines for the business (and rarelyany responsibilityfor the individuals making the decisions), so it's more of an ante to sit at the big boy's table.
This is how incentives are currently structured to play out. If a company makes some money, it can either re-invest it to grow the business or pay it out as dividends. Dividends are taxed as income while capital gains are taxed much lower. This discrepancy in tax rates is explicitly to promote growth.
This is one area I think the left has missed the forest for the trees with the "tax the rich" slogan. The uber-wealthy aren't uber-wealthy due to high incomes. Steve Jobs famously had a salary of 1$. A higher tax bracket or 2 would barely affect them. You need to tax capital gains as income to actually make a dent. This would also impact a lot of middle-class retirement accounts though so nobody wants to do that. I think a proposal that bolstered social security to make up the difference for retirees should be combined with a proposal to tax all capital gains as income. I haven't done the numbers, but I bet that the extra tax revenue would more than pay for the extra social security spending.
I'm pretty sure I've heard people on the left call for taxing capital gains. As long as it's progressive, like income tax, it shouldn't hurt the average person much.
Unless the tax rate is similar to income tax rates, it still won't change the growth > dividends incentive. And it would still be very unpopular because it would lower retirement incomes or make existing retirement accounts last for shorter lengths. Any proposal to change how capital gains works would have to also address retirees' legitimate concerns in order to be politically viable.
Yeah, that's why I said it should be progressive, like income tax. It would not effect most people at all, but the people making tons of money from capital gains would face a heavy tax burden.