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Poignant post on the state of things
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2024
1451 points (96.7% liked)
A Boring Dystopia
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Yes, a company which shares the results of it's efforts between all involved and not one person or family.
So a company whose ownership is open to the public, with that ownership divided into "shares". And all the "share" holders can cooperate to decide the direction of the company...what would one call this novel form of organizing a venture...a "cooperation"?
Not open to the public. Open to those who actually contribute to it's operations.
And in none of your objections can you justify the CEO pay and the political power they weild. 40x the lowest paid worker, and no more.
Ok so. Shares of ownership are open only to employees. How does this company get external investment? I suppose outside entities are allowed to invest with an expectation of a return on investment?
Stock is used to raise money for investment. When that investment has been covered and profit acheived, the stock should immediately drop in value or be bought back AS OPPOSED to being used for government manipulation and golden parachutes for CEOs who did very little work in making the company successful. If the CEO fails, the company fails. Paying multiple millions to CEOs who were not involved in the building of the company but were only brought in after the company failed is a gross misappropriation of shareholder funds. The new guy should get a salary of not more than 40 times what the lowest employee gets and then get stock options only after the stock and the company has been saved.
What do you mean by this?
Sorry, I swear I'm not doing that Just Asking Questions thing where I keep asking questions until you get tired and leave, I'm legitimately curious. Because the way stock works now is, there's an initial offering of a company's stock, at say $1 a share. Then anyone who has a share can re-sell it to people who think the value of the company is going to go up, say someone who thinks it will be worth $1.50 a share. Anyone who buys shares hopes to re-sell them at a greater value, so as a whole, this market of investors is, in aggregate, demanding ever-increasing value from every share of every company.
There's no one particular target where a company can say "we did it!" and settle the permanent value at like $3 a share or something. So I'm wondering how you would define "profit achieved" in this context, and what should happen to those shares at that point. Does the company buy them back? If the company is buying them back at $3 a share and someone just bought a share for $3.10, why would they sell it back to the company for $3? Will they be forced to sell?
The stock market has repeatedly proven that it is driven by inflated and imaginary "values". Any argument in favor of unregulated stocks falls flat in the face of that evidence. At some point the company has to pick utself up by it's bootstraps and start paying it's own way instead of putting the public at risk over hyped "value". It's an entirely fraudulent system designed to crash on the reg and allow a tiny percentage of people to gather and hoard devalued property.
Stocks were originally about getting businesses started and people employed. They are the opposite of that now. Some stocks are actually managed to make businesses fold and put people put of work. This is the job of hedge fund managers (a business that should not exist) and was the entire point behind the GameStop rally.
Okay, but what sort of regulation? How would stocks work differently than they do now?
The value would reflect ACTUAL productivity and not the amount that CEOs pay themselves.
Watch Tesla slow burn over this exact issue. Hopefully every company engaging in greedflation has the same fate.
How do you determine that value?
Currently the value of a stock is whatever someone is willing to pay for it. Who decides what the value should be, in your scenario? A government department?
If necessary, yes. Otherwise its just fraud. "Whatever someone is willing to pay" doesnr make a thing valuable; it just makes the buyer stupid. If I sell you a rusty old tricycle for $6000 just because you have a psychotic nostalgia for it, the value of old rusty tricycles doesnt become $6000.
Elon bought Xitter at what, $45/share? It was never worth that much...he tried to manipulate the stock value (i. e. commit fraud) and a government official forced him to commit.
That would work maybe...so you'd have a government body to assess companies like houses are currently assessed. Sounds expensive though. We'd need to raise taxes, which is probably a good thing anyway
It wouldn't involve raising taxes as much as it would involve collecting taxes in the first place from billionaire assholes hiding their wealth. This is a recent problem and is easily fixed.
And also, btw: abolish corporations.
Leftist version of "I hate Obamacare, but don't touch my ACA!" rofl
My question to you then would be why would you continue to defend an entity that is controlling your government but is entirely immune of any consequences and answerable to no one?
I don't think I want to know what conspiracy hole this weird statement crawled out of
Are you saying that corporations do not buy politicians and use money to coerce legislation in their favor against the wishes of the American people?
Oh, whew. I thought you were about to start talking about the Jews or something.
I'm totally in favor of regulating corporations much more strongly. I just think that as long as we have appropriate regulation, there's no better socioeconomic system we've yet found.
It works great when highly regulated. The "invisible hand" is a myth, and cooperation always acheives more than competition (which wastes resources nonstop).
Fcking lol
Only open to the Workers, not the public, and it's a Worker Co-operative. An existing Socialist organizational structure, not new.
Do you think shareholders want their money going to extravagent buildings, Italian desks, and billions in hoarded cash?
Your view of "shareholders" is that they are just cash cows to be milked and not financial participants. As a shareholder I gained fourteen cents this year; how much did the CEO gain?