Hey kids: Don't be a sucker for socialism

Post Reply New Topic

If you redistributed all of Walmart's 14.4 billion in shareholder profit in fiscal year 2018 to all of its 2.2 million global employees, before taxes every employee would have gotten around 6,500 that year.

There's nothing inherent about having shareholders that makes the company capable of producing this revenue. It merely determines where the profit goes. Before someone goes on about their stock sharing programs, it is quantifiable that literal majorities of Walmart's profits goes to individuals who earned great wealth through generational inheritance and not through personal merit.

The only question is regarding the financing of new ventures, and to be frank with you a lot of companies become successful before they release their IPO.

My proposition is not to equitably distribute profit within a company but to centralize ALL profit of public companies as state revenue to provide immense social services. The state should have objective, expert reviewed algorithmic metrics to assess the value of a company (and its potential for sustainability) and offer compensation to owners who wish to "cash out" from their ventures as opposed to permitting these individuals to sell portions of their venture to private individuals.

"We can't afford it" is an asinine response to socialist proposals. What they really mean is "over my dead body will you rewrite property laws to disenfranchise my trust fund children and force them to fairly compete with the working class children."

As a tangent, I wish a lot of other socialists would stop conflating capitalism with commerce. Being anti-commercial is dumb. Being against oligarchy is not dumb, and they hold power through property laws (which is what capitalism, in its narrowest definition, amounts to: the sacralization of the rights of property and familial entitlement, enabling a very particular form of finance)

Shareholders take risk and losses too.

If profits are socialized so must losses, otherwise, it won't work.

However, workers don't want that. Workers just want upside with no downside risk.

Not to mention, how would they have gotten started without investors? Try opening a big box store without investors. Most people can't afford to do that.
Try making your own brand of smartphone without investors. Most people can't afford to do that.

Without shareholders, manufacturing that requires a large investment would be impossible. Without shareholders, the Industrial Revolution would not have happened.

Yes the state would take on risk. Overall, however, the market tends to rise over time and we are in the midst of an advanced robotics and information technology revolution which may be as significant in terms of producing economic value as the Industrial Revolution. I would expect such assets to carry an immense ROI over the next century.

On the second comment in response to mine, I have no issue with private investment to begin ventures and I also have no issue with private ownership of ventures until the state offers adequate compensation when the founder no longer wishes to manage the entity, including payouts to previous investors, all based upon a standardized, expert reviewed, and public algorithmic system to assess value and sustainability based upon various metrics.

My issue is with massively traded fractions of ownership combined with generational inheritance, a coupling that snowballs ownership of the economy into the hands of tightly knit families. Starting a new business and attracting investors is fine. The motivation to become wealthy would still exist, but the means of this "snowballing" would become severely perturbed. Also, to clarify, I would not offer any compensation to shareholders of current corporations...only to new ventures when they would typically "go public" with an IPO.

I happen to think the severe opposition to these ideas is deeply rooted in evolutionary biology/behavioral psychology. Genetic clusters (families) secure resource abundance at the expense of other genetic clusters. Animals are most likely to make sacrificing behaviors for those most closely related to them, proving the "family bond" as one of the strongest and most primal instincts. When you tell someone "Your abundance shall not unfairly benefit your children at the expense of others" they get absurdly offended no matter how positively their children would actually be affected by egalitarian social welfare. I believe this drive is the primary reason that oligarchic dynasties can successfully persuade the masses to support the upholding of their structural advantage. The manifestation of this drive is the moralization of property and inheritance.

Then the state could become just as bad as a corporation. For the workers being overworked and underpaid by the state will be no better than the being overworked and underpaid by a corporation. In fact it would be even worse because the state would have a monopoly. If a worker is mistreated by a corporation there's at least a chance he can find work in the same field with another employer.

Concerned about corporations buying off the government? In a state owned company, the government and the state are the same entity. That's just asking for corruption.

Forget about regulation to protect workers or the environment. The state isn't going to legislate against their own company. You think advertising is bad? It's even worse when it's also propaganda.

I'll agree that corporations can get pretty corrupt but I don't understand how people can think a state owned company will somehow be immune from corruption. Do you think your government is corrupt? Yes? Then why do you want them running a company?

I'm not at all suggesting the state manage private enterprise, merely that it claim ownership of the profits which normally proceed to shareholders.

Regarding being overworked and underpaid, these profits would be used to sustain programs like UBI, free tuition, and universal healthcare, among other services. This will become increasingly desirable as manufacturing and "low skill information tech workers" become obsolete to superior technology and the primary employment remaining in society is "creative skilled work" and the social/creative labor of the underclasses.

In such a society (one with my proposals), those who do not desire to work would be able to survive without fear of starvation, homelessness, or the passing of destitution to their descendants. Those who would desire to work would enjoy a labor market in which demand for labor is high because the unmotivated citizens have retreated to subsistence. In other words, companies would have to offer superior compensation with favorable benefits to attract and retain employees.

So....you still have competitive market dynamics. Yes the state has an interest in maximizing profits (and why is this a bad thing?), but the profit incentive drives economic activity towards the benefit of society as opposed to the children of wealthy dynasties who inherit their ownership. Also it is the companies themselves which advertise, just as they do now. The shareholders of Wal-Mart don't privately display ads for Walmart on their own dime; why would the state?

You would have corruption regarding the spending of that acquired revenue, just as we have issues with that presently. It is nevertheless a superior dilemma to the productive value of the economy proceeding to those entitled to it by birth status, which is a small percentage. Yes...the rich were born in to it and they collectively control the economy, before you try to counter my point about dynastic oligarchy by an appeal to meritocracy. It doesn't exist and that can be demonstrated by data if you demand it.

What I am proposing is in every fashion superior to the majority of citizens.

It's a pretty convoluted way to try and deal with inherited money. Why not just apply a 100% inheritance tax on everyone?

I would prefer a total and complete lack of inheritance, but one must cope with the realities of moving towards another system. I would just start by making the estate/inheritance taxes 100% after certain limits in asset value. In other words, I'd still allow middle class levels of inheritance, albeit begrudgingly. I'd want to slowly chip that away over time.

If you are commenting on my issues with massively traded fractions of ownership, which I am not sure that you are commenting on although will presume that you are, it has to do with repivoting the profit drive in the economy (which I would desire to preserve in the realm of commerce) towards egalitarian benefit. In other words, I desire that capital to secure for the masses basic living, health, and education, and I am not comfortable with preserving generational disparities in these, although I am comfortable with individual disparities due to merit/achievement of talented individuals.

I say let the Rockefellers and Carnegies of the world do what they do within the boundaries of a reasonably regulated marketplace. The son of Rockefeller ought to make no claim to his father's work, and this is because on a structural level it causes these generational disparities I keep mentioning.

Wouldn't it be better to forbid overworking and underpaying people in the first place rather than use their exploitation to fund your projects.

I agree that the price of education has become inflated and it would benefit us greatly to have the price of education heavily subsidised. But the moment you make something free, people stop valuing it.

There's a charity that collects old bicycles and sends them to the most impoverished parts of Africa. There they are sold to the needy for the price of one dollar each, a price even the poorest can afford. Why not give them away for free? Because if they were free people will take them, ride them a few miles, abandon them in some field and then ask few a new one the next morning.

Yet after paying only one dollar, they cherish their bicycles. It's the same with education. If students paid a mere 20% of the real cost of their education, they would cherish it and study something useful for their career. Yet if you make it free, you encourage students to treat college as an adult daycare centre as they major in fields they have no intention of working in.

Provide students with free accommodation as well and you can expect thousands of homeless to sign up, claiming to be aspiring students when really they just want room and bed. Colleges aren't suited to be used as homeless shelters.

With not even an exception made for family heirlooms?

Don't do too much to empower the middle class. They're only a generation from becoming the torpid landed gentry.

1) In terms of exploiting the productive value of labor, this is already what happens as ownership within the economy has centralized into the most successful (at least in contemporary terms) familial entitles. What projects are created by this system compared to reallocating the productive value of those assets into public spending? Most of it is either hoarded, spent on personal luxury, or leveraged to acquire more ownership. Also the question has to be raised regarding the steadily increasing obsolescence of certain kinds of work. Who exactly would benefit within the economy from an automated logistics capability, which is something that could definitely happen within many of our lifetimes? It would benefit the owners of logistical operations and the shareholders of companies which grow from having access to the logistics, like Amazon. Does private ownership, especially passed primarily through inheritance, make logical sense from a social/economic engineering perspective when immensely productive industries can shed percentages of their workforce with increasing technology? What does such a system evolve into a century and a half from now?

2) You say these things about free college, but one can point to research that demonstrates all sorts of benefits from having this education, regardless of your major. It impacts health awareness, community engagement, and still at least presently provides a higher likelihood of earnings compared to not having a degree or some kind of technical certification, which is also certainly valuable. Having free tuition increases the proportion of individuals who are educated in a society compared to not having free tuition. It impacts most positively pockets of society which are evolving from generational poverty. To play on a famous quote, "One poor and ignorant person is a tragedy. A million is a statistic." Lack of cultural and intellectual sophistication is devastating to a group's competitiveness.

3) An heirloom is personal property, not an asset like bank accounts, stocks, real estate, and other kinds of "capital." When I am proposing a lack of inheritance, I am primarily talking about capital. I did use language that provided confusion on this point, I admit.

4) How does the middle class aspire to nobility without the ability to pass material advantage generationally? One could only pass on cultural advantage, which is perilous due to the inevitable variability in the quality of heirs. To go on an earlier statement I had made, the son of Rockefeller is usually not a Rockefeller, to put it in a certain kind of way.

But they do have that ability. That's the problem. If they didn't have that ability they couldn't aspire to nobility. That's the point.

Geoffrey Chaucer believed in upward mobility for the "middle class." He was a medieval man who wasn't stuck in a medieval mindset.

Trying to fight the nobility by making more of them is like trying to fight fire with propane.

That ability is codified in law and enforced by the government.

Such a state of affairs is not unalterable...

edit: To make sure I'm expressing myself clearly, that last numbered point that you had quoted from me (it was number 4)... I meant it like "If society accomplished what I am proposing, then [insert quote]."

if only the amuuurican way were not to make things as tough as possible on the working class with the express purpose to keep them out of higher classes.

I find it somewhat amusing that the Murican economic model seems to be producing the fruition of communist prognostications faster than Europe, which has reached a "somewhat" stable relationship between capital and labor, although that is becoming perturbed lately. Social democracy is the bulwark against communism in the absence of tremendous, widespread wealth generation in a model like the United States in previous decades. That model has evolved and will likely never return in that fashion.

It turns out that engaging in top down class warfare combined with advanced technology, globalization, and the decentralization of "ideological authority sources" (thanks internet!) has a way of producing a potent antithesis to capitalist oligarchy.

I just hope this antithesis doesn't spiral out of control, as it often can in pivotal shifts of power. I think the kind of proposals I have made in this thread are necessary to perpetuate stable, cooperative, mass society. I sincerely believe the perpetuation of class distinction by means of inherited resource abundance over generations will cause severe interspecies violence as groups diverge in their sense of shared motivation.

What happens in game theory when one no longer fears the aggression of the opponent? One dominates. It is behavior perfectly congruent with nature. I would like to avoid this diverging of human interests and stabilize class relations by equalizing generational material abundance, which by proxy is addressing serious genetic concerns about large underclasses passing on maladaptive vulnerabilities to their environment on to their descendants, rendering them uncompetitive with their socioeconomic opponents.