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The Problem With [Philanthropy]

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  • dispatch.odispatch.o Registered User regular
    edited January 2020
    There's a very real interest in keeping the general population minimally informed and afraid/angry. That's not a failing of democracy but it is why people leap to defend wealthy philanthropists. The promise of giving a children's hospital millions of dollars and getting some help for some families is a much easier propaganda sale when no one notices those millions come from profit generated by fighting against taxation that would bring in billions.

    dispatch.o on
  • PaladinPaladin Registered User regular
    Have there been head to head comparisons of the effectiveness of philanthropic vs. government organizations aimed at the same goal? Does the government come out on top generally?

    Marty: The future, it's where you're going?
    Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
  • shrykeshryke Member of the Beast Registered User regular
    edited January 2020
    Winky wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    Lanz wrote: »
    Heffling wrote: »
    Jebus314 wrote: »
    Winky wrote: »
    Jebus314 wrote: »
    Feral wrote: »
    To clarify, my point is not that any of them are necessarily admirable figures, but that if the thread consensus is "no more billionaires," it is entirely possible for billionaires to simply stop being billionaires. They don't have to kill themselves.

    That still leaves open questions about how many billionaires got their status through perfectly legitimate, ethical business. Feeney made his money by helping tobacco and alcohol addicts evade taxes. Huntsman was an LDS official who made his money through nonbiodegradeable styrofoam. And I'm sick and tired of talking about Rowling, so let's not.

    Everybody has skeletons in their closets. Nobody is perfect. But when you're that rich, whatever skeletons you have are multiplied across a much vaster impact. And I think it's a respectable argument to say that we should discourage individuals from getting limitlessly rich for the same reason we should discourage individuals from seeking limitless political power - it amplifies the negative impacts of our human imperfections to an untenable degree.

    This does bring up the question about wealth versus ownership though. Bezos and Gates for example could not give up their wealth without giving up control of the companies they founded. Similarly, any wealth tax of significant size means that they would also be forced to eventually cede control. Is that a good thing? I don't really know. Certainly CEOs like zuckerberg and dorsey make it seem like it would be a great thing, but I'm not convinced it is always in societies best interest to force large companies into some kind of board based control, and it certainly seems like a heavy cost for the individual for nebulous societal gain (the loss being the control of the company not the wealth lost through the wealth tax).

    Again, this is a place where I see employee ownership as the solution. The ones doing the work should be the ones to vote on the direction the company takes, either through direct democracy or, when more practical, electing their own board members. It does not bear out in practice that ownership is better exercised by a single or few powerful individuals, they will be driven to actions that increase profit or growth at the expense of long term stability.

    I don't believe employee ownership is a good solution or a good practice for most companies. Big picture company direction type decisions are difficult and require a unique skill set that most people don't have. It is not something that will be easily crowd sourced, and the most likely result is that companies are poorly managed (by the employees) and everything is less efficient/more expensive than it could be.

    This is exactly the kind of nonsense that CEOs spout to justify why they make five thousand times the average wage at their company. Being an employee of a large corporation, I see that roughly every two years we undergo a major change in direction that is almost always counter to the previous direction. Why? It's not because the old direction was bad, it's because the people on the executive fast track change positions every 18-24 months. For example, two years ago we moved all of our sales to regionalized models (north america, south america, europe, china, southeast asia, etc). Now we're moving to a global sales model.

    People setting the directions of large companies often don't have a clue what they're doing, and are so separated from the average employee that they have no understanding of the consequences of their actions. Look at Jeff Immelt's leadership of GE or the results of many other CEOs who often crash their companies with poor decision making and escape with golden parachutes.

    The success of a company is driven by the individuals in that company and is built on their labor.

    If a democracy can put a man on the moon in the 20th Century CE, I'm pretty sure a democratically run business can handle "big picture company direction decisions"

    Hell you don't even have to step away from a hierarchical command structure, you can just make said hierarchical structure founded in representative democracy that makes the people in charge accountable to the employees as a whole

    Eh. Democracy frequently demonstrates that it's incapable of a lot of good decisions and we are currently seeing a ton of this kind of result in our western democratic systems. Frequently power is turned over to groups that are not democratic exactly because of these issues.

    The criticism of the whole "CEO's will know what's best" thing is true. But it's also true the other way. Businesses in general don't really know wtf they are doing most times and just kinda go through the motions of things they've seen elsewhere, cargo-cult-style. And that's true regardless of the structure.

    I would say the goal is more to invest whoever is actually in charge in the welfare of the company as a whole. Or to divorce people's welfare from the welfare of the place they work. You've got to do one or the other. Or both.

    I would actively argue that a lot of the poor decisions democracies make currently are directly related to wealth inequality and money being used to manipulate voters and legislators towards the ends of powerful individuals.

    That's not to say that a democracy is incapable of making bad decisions on its own, but so many of the bad decisions democracies have been making lately can have a clear line drawn to the campaign donations and messaging platforms of the wealthy pushing political decisions that allow specific individuals to make out like bandits.

    Nah. A lot of it is simply basic failures of the democratic system.

    Personal interests and such, especially magnified by various ways the political system distributes power based on geography or the like. eg - democratic systems cater towards the desires of the people most able to tip the balance of power in one direction or another. Because that's how democratic systems work.

    There is also a great degree of simple lack of expertise and understanding. Popular ideas and true ideas or good ideas are not perfectly overlapping sets.

    Or groups with enough power to get their interests catered to using that power for their own benefit at the expense of the whole.

    These are just some examples of the kind of things you see frequently replicated in other similar systems for the exact same reason. Trying to blame everything on capitalism is just silly and monotonous after awhile. Groups of people are very capable of collectively making stupid decisions or being dysfunctional or being potentially incapable of reform because of the individual interests of specific groups within that system.

    shryke on
  • discriderdiscrider Registered User regular
    Paladin wrote: »
    Have there been head to head comparisons of the effectiveness of philanthropic vs. government organizations aimed at the same goal? Does the government come out on top generally?

    I don't see any reason why, given a set budget and the same aim, either organisation would be any more efficient.

    But the philanthropic organisation relies on the benevolence of the donors for its budget, whereas the government organisation relies on the government to supply its budget, and the latter is often easier to collect and harder to restrict without voter pushback.

    And you don't have government organisations buying Trump portraits at auction, as their aims are far more transparent.

  • jothkijothki Registered User regular
    One advantage that private organizations have over government ones is that it's rarer for them to be controlled by people who were put there entirely to sabotage them.

  • discriderdiscrider Registered User regular
    That's sort of a moot point though, if the true aim of the organisation is tax evasion or beneficial media coverage.

  • PhyphorPhyphor Building Planet Busters Tasting FruitRegistered User regular
    Lanz wrote: »
    Heffling wrote: »
    Jebus314 wrote: »
    Winky wrote: »
    Jebus314 wrote: »
    Feral wrote: »
    To clarify, my point is not that any of them are necessarily admirable figures, but that if the thread consensus is "no more billionaires," it is entirely possible for billionaires to simply stop being billionaires. They don't have to kill themselves.

    That still leaves open questions about how many billionaires got their status through perfectly legitimate, ethical business. Feeney made his money by helping tobacco and alcohol addicts evade taxes. Huntsman was an LDS official who made his money through nonbiodegradeable styrofoam. And I'm sick and tired of talking about Rowling, so let's not.

    Everybody has skeletons in their closets. Nobody is perfect. But when you're that rich, whatever skeletons you have are multiplied across a much vaster impact. And I think it's a respectable argument to say that we should discourage individuals from getting limitlessly rich for the same reason we should discourage individuals from seeking limitless political power - it amplifies the negative impacts of our human imperfections to an untenable degree.

    This does bring up the question about wealth versus ownership though. Bezos and Gates for example could not give up their wealth without giving up control of the companies they founded. Similarly, any wealth tax of significant size means that they would also be forced to eventually cede control. Is that a good thing? I don't really know. Certainly CEOs like zuckerberg and dorsey make it seem like it would be a great thing, but I'm not convinced it is always in societies best interest to force large companies into some kind of board based control, and it certainly seems like a heavy cost for the individual for nebulous societal gain (the loss being the control of the company not the wealth lost through the wealth tax).

    Again, this is a place where I see employee ownership as the solution. The ones doing the work should be the ones to vote on the direction the company takes, either through direct democracy or, when more practical, electing their own board members. It does not bear out in practice that ownership is better exercised by a single or few powerful individuals, they will be driven to actions that increase profit or growth at the expense of long term stability.

    I don't believe employee ownership is a good solution or a good practice for most companies. Big picture company direction type decisions are difficult and require a unique skill set that most people don't have. It is not something that will be easily crowd sourced, and the most likely result is that companies are poorly managed (by the employees) and everything is less efficient/more expensive than it could be.

    This is exactly the kind of nonsense that CEOs spout to justify why they make five thousand times the average wage at their company. Being an employee of a large corporation, I see that roughly every two years we undergo a major change in direction that is almost always counter to the previous direction. Why? It's not because the old direction was bad, it's because the people on the executive fast track change positions every 18-24 months. For example, two years ago we moved all of our sales to regionalized models (north america, south america, europe, china, southeast asia, etc). Now we're moving to a global sales model.

    People setting the directions of large companies often don't have a clue what they're doing, and are so separated from the average employee that they have no understanding of the consequences of their actions. Look at Jeff Immelt's leadership of GE or the results of many other CEOs who often crash their companies with poor decision making and escape with golden parachutes.

    The success of a company is driven by the individuals in that company and is built on their labor.

    If a democracy can put a man on the moon in the 20th Century CE, I'm pretty sure a democratically run business can handle "big picture company direction decisions"

    Hell you don't even have to step away from a hierarchical command structure, you can just make said hierarchical structure founded in representative democracy that makes the people in charge accountable to the employees as a whole

    It did, but then actual democracy was not involved in any step except maybe at the very lowest levels. Kennedy didn't campaign on space exploration and wasn't voted in on it. Neither the white house, nor NASA nor the contracting companies were run as democracies. The space race wasn't a funding priority until the Soviets threatened to do it first, and then congress threw money at NASA

    Also note that immediately after the Moon Speech 58% of Americans opposed it, if it was truly a democratic decision then presumably that would have killed the program before it started

  • CasualCasual Wiggle Wiggle Wiggle Flap Flap Flap Registered User regular
    This thread makes me wonder if anyone could come up with a coherent argument why the income tax bracket for say, over 100 million USD per year should not be 100%? It's an amount of money that is still obscene wealth to the degree 99.99999% of humanity will never know anything like it and it would do a great job of dealing with the issue that the 0.00001% have sole decision making capacity for the majority of humanities resources.

  • Captain InertiaCaptain Inertia Registered User regular
    I think the things that earn someone over $100mm annually are capital gains- nobody has a salary that high

    There’s likely a lot that could be done with capital gains across all income levels...

  • daveNYCdaveNYC Why universe hate Waspinator? Registered User regular
    I think the things that earn someone over $100mm annually are capital gains- nobody has a salary that high

    There’s likely a lot that could be done with capital gains across all income levels...

    Just tax them as regular income.

    Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
  • WinkyWinky rRegistered User regular
    edited January 2020
    shryke wrote: »
    Winky wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    Lanz wrote: »
    Heffling wrote: »
    Jebus314 wrote: »
    Winky wrote: »
    Jebus314 wrote: »
    Feral wrote: »
    To clarify, my point is not that any of them are necessarily admirable figures, but that if the thread consensus is "no more billionaires," it is entirely possible for billionaires to simply stop being billionaires. They don't have to kill themselves.

    That still leaves open questions about how many billionaires got their status through perfectly legitimate, ethical business. Feeney made his money by helping tobacco and alcohol addicts evade taxes. Huntsman was an LDS official who made his money through nonbiodegradeable styrofoam. And I'm sick and tired of talking about Rowling, so let's not.

    Everybody has skeletons in their closets. Nobody is perfect. But when you're that rich, whatever skeletons you have are multiplied across a much vaster impact. And I think it's a respectable argument to say that we should discourage individuals from getting limitlessly rich for the same reason we should discourage individuals from seeking limitless political power - it amplifies the negative impacts of our human imperfections to an untenable degree.

    This does bring up the question about wealth versus ownership though. Bezos and Gates for example could not give up their wealth without giving up control of the companies they founded. Similarly, any wealth tax of significant size means that they would also be forced to eventually cede control. Is that a good thing? I don't really know. Certainly CEOs like zuckerberg and dorsey make it seem like it would be a great thing, but I'm not convinced it is always in societies best interest to force large companies into some kind of board based control, and it certainly seems like a heavy cost for the individual for nebulous societal gain (the loss being the control of the company not the wealth lost through the wealth tax).

    Again, this is a place where I see employee ownership as the solution. The ones doing the work should be the ones to vote on the direction the company takes, either through direct democracy or, when more practical, electing their own board members. It does not bear out in practice that ownership is better exercised by a single or few powerful individuals, they will be driven to actions that increase profit or growth at the expense of long term stability.

    I don't believe employee ownership is a good solution or a good practice for most companies. Big picture company direction type decisions are difficult and require a unique skill set that most people don't have. It is not something that will be easily crowd sourced, and the most likely result is that companies are poorly managed (by the employees) and everything is less efficient/more expensive than it could be.

    This is exactly the kind of nonsense that CEOs spout to justify why they make five thousand times the average wage at their company. Being an employee of a large corporation, I see that roughly every two years we undergo a major change in direction that is almost always counter to the previous direction. Why? It's not because the old direction was bad, it's because the people on the executive fast track change positions every 18-24 months. For example, two years ago we moved all of our sales to regionalized models (north america, south america, europe, china, southeast asia, etc). Now we're moving to a global sales model.

    People setting the directions of large companies often don't have a clue what they're doing, and are so separated from the average employee that they have no understanding of the consequences of their actions. Look at Jeff Immelt's leadership of GE or the results of many other CEOs who often crash their companies with poor decision making and escape with golden parachutes.

    The success of a company is driven by the individuals in that company and is built on their labor.

    If a democracy can put a man on the moon in the 20th Century CE, I'm pretty sure a democratically run business can handle "big picture company direction decisions"

    Hell you don't even have to step away from a hierarchical command structure, you can just make said hierarchical structure founded in representative democracy that makes the people in charge accountable to the employees as a whole

    Eh. Democracy frequently demonstrates that it's incapable of a lot of good decisions and we are currently seeing a ton of this kind of result in our western democratic systems. Frequently power is turned over to groups that are not democratic exactly because of these issues.

    The criticism of the whole "CEO's will know what's best" thing is true. But it's also true the other way. Businesses in general don't really know wtf they are doing most times and just kinda go through the motions of things they've seen elsewhere, cargo-cult-style. And that's true regardless of the structure.

    I would say the goal is more to invest whoever is actually in charge in the welfare of the company as a whole. Or to divorce people's welfare from the welfare of the place they work. You've got to do one or the other. Or both.

    I would actively argue that a lot of the poor decisions democracies make currently are directly related to wealth inequality and money being used to manipulate voters and legislators towards the ends of powerful individuals.

    That's not to say that a democracy is incapable of making bad decisions on its own, but so many of the bad decisions democracies have been making lately can have a clear line drawn to the campaign donations and messaging platforms of the wealthy pushing political decisions that allow specific individuals to make out like bandits.

    Nah. A lot of it is simply basic failures of the democratic system.

    Personal interests and such, especially magnified by various ways the political system distributes power based on geography or the like. eg - democratic systems cater towards the desires of the people most able to tip the balance of power in one direction or another. Because that's how democratic systems work.

    There is also a great degree of simple lack of expertise and understanding. Popular ideas and true ideas or good ideas are not perfectly overlapping sets.

    Or groups with enough power to get their interests catered to using that power for their own benefit at the expense of the whole.

    These are just some examples of the kind of things you see frequently replicated in other similar systems for the exact same reason. Trying to blame everything on capitalism is just silly and monotonous after awhile. Groups of people are very capable of collectively making stupid decisions or being dysfunctional or being potentially incapable of reform because of the individual interests of specific groups within that system.

    So you're saying that democracies make bad decisions when the balance of power is tilted towards particular individuals or interest groups that have outsized power relative to the people the government represents, or when the majority of voters are undereducated on the particular issues they're voting on...

    In what way is massive wealth inequality not wildly exacerbating these problems? Even fully organic moral panics are deeply exacerbated by mass media that capitalizes on people being riled up.

    What you're saying is that the see-saw of democratic power always has the capacity to tip to the wrong side no matter what conditions it's under, which I absolutely agree with. But capitalism is a one-ton weight sitting on one end. It necessarily destabilizes the entire system.

    Winky on
  • dispatch.odispatch.o Registered User regular
    edited January 2020
    Democracies that exist alongside corrupt capitalism and don't function because the hyper wealthy spend infinite resources breaking them don't work?

    Shocker.

    Philanthropy is the Public Relations arm of exercising power through wealth. Wealth that exists because of a previous power imbalance.

    Fun cycle.

    Edit: No one "earns" $100,000,000 a year.

    dispatch.o on
  • PolaritiePolaritie Sleepy Registered User regular
    daveNYC wrote: »
    I think the things that earn someone over $100mm annually are capital gains- nobody has a salary that high

    There’s likely a lot that could be done with capital gains across all income levels...

    Just tax them as regular income.

    And bring back the post-war tax brackets. 92% over 300m is what I think that works out to after inflation.

    Steam: Polaritie
    3DS: 0473-8507-2652
    Switch: SW-5185-4991-5118
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  • WinkyWinky rRegistered User regular
    edited January 2020
    Edit: wrong thread

    Winky on
  • HefflingHeffling No Pic EverRegistered User regular
    Winky wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    Lanz wrote: »
    Heffling wrote: »
    Jebus314 wrote: »
    Winky wrote: »
    Jebus314 wrote: »
    Feral wrote: »
    To clarify, my point is not that any of them are necessarily admirable figures, but that if the thread consensus is "no more billionaires," it is entirely possible for billionaires to simply stop being billionaires. They don't have to kill themselves.

    That still leaves open questions about how many billionaires got their status through perfectly legitimate, ethical business. Feeney made his money by helping tobacco and alcohol addicts evade taxes. Huntsman was an LDS official who made his money through nonbiodegradeable styrofoam. And I'm sick and tired of talking about Rowling, so let's not.

    Everybody has skeletons in their closets. Nobody is perfect. But when you're that rich, whatever skeletons you have are multiplied across a much vaster impact. And I think it's a respectable argument to say that we should discourage individuals from getting limitlessly rich for the same reason we should discourage individuals from seeking limitless political power - it amplifies the negative impacts of our human imperfections to an untenable degree.

    This does bring up the question about wealth versus ownership though. Bezos and Gates for example could not give up their wealth without giving up control of the companies they founded. Similarly, any wealth tax of significant size means that they would also be forced to eventually cede control. Is that a good thing? I don't really know. Certainly CEOs like zuckerberg and dorsey make it seem like it would be a great thing, but I'm not convinced it is always in societies best interest to force large companies into some kind of board based control, and it certainly seems like a heavy cost for the individual for nebulous societal gain (the loss being the control of the company not the wealth lost through the wealth tax).

    Again, this is a place where I see employee ownership as the solution. The ones doing the work should be the ones to vote on the direction the company takes, either through direct democracy or, when more practical, electing their own board members. It does not bear out in practice that ownership is better exercised by a single or few powerful individuals, they will be driven to actions that increase profit or growth at the expense of long term stability.

    I don't believe employee ownership is a good solution or a good practice for most companies. Big picture company direction type decisions are difficult and require a unique skill set that most people don't have. It is not something that will be easily crowd sourced, and the most likely result is that companies are poorly managed (by the employees) and everything is less efficient/more expensive than it could be.

    This is exactly the kind of nonsense that CEOs spout to justify why they make five thousand times the average wage at their company. Being an employee of a large corporation, I see that roughly every two years we undergo a major change in direction that is almost always counter to the previous direction. Why? It's not because the old direction was bad, it's because the people on the executive fast track change positions every 18-24 months. For example, two years ago we moved all of our sales to regionalized models (north america, south america, europe, china, southeast asia, etc). Now we're moving to a global sales model.

    People setting the directions of large companies often don't have a clue what they're doing, and are so separated from the average employee that they have no understanding of the consequences of their actions. Look at Jeff Immelt's leadership of GE or the results of many other CEOs who often crash their companies with poor decision making and escape with golden parachutes.

    The success of a company is driven by the individuals in that company and is built on their labor.

    If a democracy can put a man on the moon in the 20th Century CE, I'm pretty sure a democratically run business can handle "big picture company direction decisions"

    Hell you don't even have to step away from a hierarchical command structure, you can just make said hierarchical structure founded in representative democracy that makes the people in charge accountable to the employees as a whole

    Eh. Democracy frequently demonstrates that it's incapable of a lot of good decisions and we are currently seeing a ton of this kind of result in our western democratic systems. Frequently power is turned over to groups that are not democratic exactly because of these issues.

    The criticism of the whole "CEO's will know what's best" thing is true. But it's also true the other way. Businesses in general don't really know wtf they are doing most times and just kinda go through the motions of things they've seen elsewhere, cargo-cult-style. And that's true regardless of the structure.

    I would say the goal is more to invest whoever is actually in charge in the welfare of the company as a whole. Or to divorce people's welfare from the welfare of the place they work. You've got to do one or the other. Or both.

    I would actively argue that a lot of the poor decisions democracies make currently are directly related to wealth inequality and money being used to manipulate voters and legislators towards the ends of powerful individuals.

    That's not to say that a democracy is incapable of making bad decisions on its own, but so many of the bad decisions democracies have been making lately can have a clear line drawn to the campaign donations and messaging platforms of the wealthy pushing political decisions that allow specific individuals to make out like bandits.

    I fully agree. Our Democracy is founded on a "one man, one vote" policy, but vast amounts of wealth are able to subvert this policy. Studies have shown that in House of Representative elections, the candidate that is able to spend more money wins greater than 90% of the time. In modeling democracy, we often make assumptions like "informed voters" or "voting for your self interests", and yet we're finding these assumptions to be wildly incorrect.

    And this doesn't even include the influence that the super wealthy have over public policy, disregarding their influence over the electoral system. Through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill Gates has essentially rewritten public education in the US with complete disregard to the "will of the people".

    If instead of letting Bill Gates dodge taxes via his charitable work, we instead taxed him based on his wealth, we could fund all of the programs he endorses and more. We should look to the government to support the needs of the people, and not the largess of billionaires. A largess that, in the vast majority of cases, does not exist.

  • CelestialBadgerCelestialBadger Registered User regular
    If we taxed Bill Gates more heavily he could still do all the charitable work he does already, he just might have to accept his fortune reducing over the last third of his life rather than increasing. Which shouldn't be a problem for him from a lifestyle point of view, he'll still be able to afford his mansion, yacht and private jet.

    Bill Gates does do some stuff that would be hard for governments to do such as vaccination programs in the Third World. Those are the kind of things that conservatives in government tend to cut.

  • WinkyWinky rRegistered User regular
    jothki wrote: »
    One advantage that private organizations have over government ones is that it's rarer for them to be controlled by people who were put there entirely to sabotage them.

    Worth noting that the reason those people are there to sabotage them in the first place is to serve the interest of private organizations or individuals.

    A lot of these issues with government that people point to are issues with the private sector that bleed into the public one, specifically because we have allowed the private sector to become so much more powerful than the public one.

  • HefflingHeffling No Pic EverRegistered User regular
    I want to address this point by point, because like ElJeffe, I agree that there are significant problems with your position. I disagree with every one of the statements below.
    Winky wrote: »
    The problem with centralized power runs much deeper than this. Almost by definition to have power is to have the ability to limit the self-determination of other individuals.

    You've made an assumption that self-determination is the most beneficial path for the individual, and I would argue it is not so in all, or possibly even most cases. Governments, for example, will not function without power over their citizens. Because if they have no power, then they are not a government, and the result is instead anarchy. And governments will compel things to occur that are beneficial to the group but not the specific individual. For example, building a road that don't service your driveway, but does service your community. However, taken in aggregate, these actions will benefit both you as an individual and the community. For example, a network of roads which allows you to drive from your house quickly to the hospital when required.

    The government also limits harmful actions by individuals, e.g. crimes. You don't wake up every morning fearing you might be murdered today because the government compels you and everyone else not to commit murder.
    Winky wrote: »
    Money is a method of controlling the behavior of others.

    Money is a single unit value we assign to materials and/or time spent, and is meant to be an intermediary to allow for the smooth functioning of things like trade. Like any single unit value representing a complex system, it can be perverted. But money isn't a "method of controlling the behavior of others." There is nothing that you compels you as an individual to participate in the exchange of money for goods and services, and there are people in the US who disavow entirely the use of money and instead live off the land and barter for the things they cannot make themselves. That's not to say it is easy, but it is possible to live a life free from money. It is up the the individual to make that choice.

    Money itself is just a unit of value. A dollar represents X amount of time from one profession, Y amount of time from another profession, or Z amount of material goods. It means I can buy an apple for $0.50 or a large industrial valve for $10,000, and could exchange 20,000 of my apples for one industrial valve without having to find an industrial valve manufacturer that wants 20,000 apples.

    Money can certainly be abused to control others, as is often done with the poor and minorities. But the problem in these cases isn't money, it's the society that represses them. And there are other systemic issues that need to be addressed as well, such as biased laws, a biased police and legal system, racism, etc. Money is just a tool.
    Winky wrote: »
    There is a strong moral argument that the power of any one individual should be limited to the lowest possible level that still allows society to effectively function.

    Please clarify the moral argument. What is the "lowest level" and what is considered to be "effective functioning"? Which is more important, operating at the "lowest level" or having the most "effective(ly) functioning" society?
    Winky wrote: »
    The ability to coerce someone else into doing something against their will is wrong, we should arrange society such that no power is ever granted that is not given up with the full knowledge and consent of all those who give it up.

    What if someone wants to commit murder? I am ok with society infringing on their desire to commit murder, even without their consent, because it impinges on my desire to not be murdered. Society only works because we can compel people to do things against their will. Paying taxes, contributing to the communal good, etc. Neither full knowledge nor consent is required. Consent is implied via the social contract in your participation with society, but many individuals may participate in society without realizing they have consented. And full knowledge is all but impossible, given the complexities of our legal system and fluid nature of societal interactions.

  • StarZapperStarZapper Vermont, Bizzaro world.Registered User regular
    So I work for a Foodbank in the states, and I know personally alot of the issues revolved around philanthropy. I can say this, despite all the good we do every day, 100% of it would be unnecessary if our government actually had a more robust anti hunger and poverty support. It's really horrible how pathetic our social safety net is here.

  • HefflingHeffling No Pic EverRegistered User regular
    If we taxed Bill Gates more heavily he could still do all the charitable work he does already, he just might have to accept his fortune reducing over the last third of his life rather than increasing. Which shouldn't be a problem for him from a lifestyle point of view, he'll still be able to afford his mansion, yacht and private jet.

    Bill Gates does do some stuff that would be hard for governments to do such as vaccination programs in the Third World. Those are the kind of things that conservatives in government tend to cut.

    A lot of times the conservative justification for cutting these programs has been to balance the budget. Having this very large additional tax revenue would eliminate this justification and allow our government to proceed with programs meant to make our global community better. And, we could always participate more in multinational efforts such as through the U.N. that work towards these goals.

    We should be able to rely on the government to support the needs of the people, not the largess of billionaires.

  • WinkyWinky rRegistered User regular
    We should really get into this in another thread, because there is a lot to unpack there and it's worth discussing at length. I am, as you say, an anarchist (of the leftist variety), and have been planning to make a thread to discuss anarchism for a long time.

  • shrykeshryke Member of the Beast Registered User regular
    edited January 2020
    Winky wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    Winky wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    Lanz wrote: »
    Heffling wrote: »
    Jebus314 wrote: »
    Winky wrote: »
    Jebus314 wrote: »
    Feral wrote: »
    To clarify, my point is not that any of them are necessarily admirable figures, but that if the thread consensus is "no more billionaires," it is entirely possible for billionaires to simply stop being billionaires. They don't have to kill themselves.

    That still leaves open questions about how many billionaires got their status through perfectly legitimate, ethical business. Feeney made his money by helping tobacco and alcohol addicts evade taxes. Huntsman was an LDS official who made his money through nonbiodegradeable styrofoam. And I'm sick and tired of talking about Rowling, so let's not.

    Everybody has skeletons in their closets. Nobody is perfect. But when you're that rich, whatever skeletons you have are multiplied across a much vaster impact. And I think it's a respectable argument to say that we should discourage individuals from getting limitlessly rich for the same reason we should discourage individuals from seeking limitless political power - it amplifies the negative impacts of our human imperfections to an untenable degree.

    This does bring up the question about wealth versus ownership though. Bezos and Gates for example could not give up their wealth without giving up control of the companies they founded. Similarly, any wealth tax of significant size means that they would also be forced to eventually cede control. Is that a good thing? I don't really know. Certainly CEOs like zuckerberg and dorsey make it seem like it would be a great thing, but I'm not convinced it is always in societies best interest to force large companies into some kind of board based control, and it certainly seems like a heavy cost for the individual for nebulous societal gain (the loss being the control of the company not the wealth lost through the wealth tax).

    Again, this is a place where I see employee ownership as the solution. The ones doing the work should be the ones to vote on the direction the company takes, either through direct democracy or, when more practical, electing their own board members. It does not bear out in practice that ownership is better exercised by a single or few powerful individuals, they will be driven to actions that increase profit or growth at the expense of long term stability.

    I don't believe employee ownership is a good solution or a good practice for most companies. Big picture company direction type decisions are difficult and require a unique skill set that most people don't have. It is not something that will be easily crowd sourced, and the most likely result is that companies are poorly managed (by the employees) and everything is less efficient/more expensive than it could be.

    This is exactly the kind of nonsense that CEOs spout to justify why they make five thousand times the average wage at their company. Being an employee of a large corporation, I see that roughly every two years we undergo a major change in direction that is almost always counter to the previous direction. Why? It's not because the old direction was bad, it's because the people on the executive fast track change positions every 18-24 months. For example, two years ago we moved all of our sales to regionalized models (north america, south america, europe, china, southeast asia, etc). Now we're moving to a global sales model.

    People setting the directions of large companies often don't have a clue what they're doing, and are so separated from the average employee that they have no understanding of the consequences of their actions. Look at Jeff Immelt's leadership of GE or the results of many other CEOs who often crash their companies with poor decision making and escape with golden parachutes.

    The success of a company is driven by the individuals in that company and is built on their labor.

    If a democracy can put a man on the moon in the 20th Century CE, I'm pretty sure a democratically run business can handle "big picture company direction decisions"

    Hell you don't even have to step away from a hierarchical command structure, you can just make said hierarchical structure founded in representative democracy that makes the people in charge accountable to the employees as a whole

    Eh. Democracy frequently demonstrates that it's incapable of a lot of good decisions and we are currently seeing a ton of this kind of result in our western democratic systems. Frequently power is turned over to groups that are not democratic exactly because of these issues.

    The criticism of the whole "CEO's will know what's best" thing is true. But it's also true the other way. Businesses in general don't really know wtf they are doing most times and just kinda go through the motions of things they've seen elsewhere, cargo-cult-style. And that's true regardless of the structure.

    I would say the goal is more to invest whoever is actually in charge in the welfare of the company as a whole. Or to divorce people's welfare from the welfare of the place they work. You've got to do one or the other. Or both.

    I would actively argue that a lot of the poor decisions democracies make currently are directly related to wealth inequality and money being used to manipulate voters and legislators towards the ends of powerful individuals.

    That's not to say that a democracy is incapable of making bad decisions on its own, but so many of the bad decisions democracies have been making lately can have a clear line drawn to the campaign donations and messaging platforms of the wealthy pushing political decisions that allow specific individuals to make out like bandits.

    Nah. A lot of it is simply basic failures of the democratic system.

    Personal interests and such, especially magnified by various ways the political system distributes power based on geography or the like. eg - democratic systems cater towards the desires of the people most able to tip the balance of power in one direction or another. Because that's how democratic systems work.

    There is also a great degree of simple lack of expertise and understanding. Popular ideas and true ideas or good ideas are not perfectly overlapping sets.

    Or groups with enough power to get their interests catered to using that power for their own benefit at the expense of the whole.

    These are just some examples of the kind of things you see frequently replicated in other similar systems for the exact same reason. Trying to blame everything on capitalism is just silly and monotonous after awhile. Groups of people are very capable of collectively making stupid decisions or being dysfunctional or being potentially incapable of reform because of the individual interests of specific groups within that system.

    So you're saying that democracies make bad decisions when the balance of power is tilted towards particular individuals or interest groups that have outsized power relative to the people the government represents, or when the majority of voters are undereducated on the particular issues they're voting on...

    In what way is massive wealth inequality not wildly exacerbating these problems? Even fully organic moral panics are deeply exacerbated by mass media that capitalizes on people being riled up.

    What you're saying is that the see-saw of democratic power always has the capacity to tip to the wrong side no matter what conditions it's under, which I absolutely agree with. But capitalism is a one-ton weight sitting on one end. It necessarily destabilizes the entire system.

    You said that "a lot of the poor decisions democracies make currently are directly related to wealth inequality and money being used to manipulate voters and legislators towards the ends of powerful individuals". I'm saying this is not true because a ton of things that fail in these kind of systems are not related specifically to wealth inequality and manifest themselves in tons of other ways.

    Like shit, literally probably the most important thing effecting a lot of democracies right now is the random vagaries of historical geography.

    Democratic-systems make bad decisions for tons of reasons. (Which shouldn't be surprising since democratic systems are not designed to produce better decisions then other systems.) It's not just about the balance of power being tilted toward particular individuals or interest groups. Often doing so is actually the solution to the problem.

    shryke on
  • WinkyWinky rRegistered User regular
    shryke wrote: »
    Winky wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    Winky wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    Lanz wrote: »
    Heffling wrote: »
    Jebus314 wrote: »
    Winky wrote: »
    Jebus314 wrote: »
    Feral wrote: »
    To clarify, my point is not that any of them are necessarily admirable figures, but that if the thread consensus is "no more billionaires," it is entirely possible for billionaires to simply stop being billionaires. They don't have to kill themselves.

    That still leaves open questions about how many billionaires got their status through perfectly legitimate, ethical business. Feeney made his money by helping tobacco and alcohol addicts evade taxes. Huntsman was an LDS official who made his money through nonbiodegradeable styrofoam. And I'm sick and tired of talking about Rowling, so let's not.

    Everybody has skeletons in their closets. Nobody is perfect. But when you're that rich, whatever skeletons you have are multiplied across a much vaster impact. And I think it's a respectable argument to say that we should discourage individuals from getting limitlessly rich for the same reason we should discourage individuals from seeking limitless political power - it amplifies the negative impacts of our human imperfections to an untenable degree.

    This does bring up the question about wealth versus ownership though. Bezos and Gates for example could not give up their wealth without giving up control of the companies they founded. Similarly, any wealth tax of significant size means that they would also be forced to eventually cede control. Is that a good thing? I don't really know. Certainly CEOs like zuckerberg and dorsey make it seem like it would be a great thing, but I'm not convinced it is always in societies best interest to force large companies into some kind of board based control, and it certainly seems like a heavy cost for the individual for nebulous societal gain (the loss being the control of the company not the wealth lost through the wealth tax).

    Again, this is a place where I see employee ownership as the solution. The ones doing the work should be the ones to vote on the direction the company takes, either through direct democracy or, when more practical, electing their own board members. It does not bear out in practice that ownership is better exercised by a single or few powerful individuals, they will be driven to actions that increase profit or growth at the expense of long term stability.

    I don't believe employee ownership is a good solution or a good practice for most companies. Big picture company direction type decisions are difficult and require a unique skill set that most people don't have. It is not something that will be easily crowd sourced, and the most likely result is that companies are poorly managed (by the employees) and everything is less efficient/more expensive than it could be.

    This is exactly the kind of nonsense that CEOs spout to justify why they make five thousand times the average wage at their company. Being an employee of a large corporation, I see that roughly every two years we undergo a major change in direction that is almost always counter to the previous direction. Why? It's not because the old direction was bad, it's because the people on the executive fast track change positions every 18-24 months. For example, two years ago we moved all of our sales to regionalized models (north america, south america, europe, china, southeast asia, etc). Now we're moving to a global sales model.

    People setting the directions of large companies often don't have a clue what they're doing, and are so separated from the average employee that they have no understanding of the consequences of their actions. Look at Jeff Immelt's leadership of GE or the results of many other CEOs who often crash their companies with poor decision making and escape with golden parachutes.

    The success of a company is driven by the individuals in that company and is built on their labor.

    If a democracy can put a man on the moon in the 20th Century CE, I'm pretty sure a democratically run business can handle "big picture company direction decisions"

    Hell you don't even have to step away from a hierarchical command structure, you can just make said hierarchical structure founded in representative democracy that makes the people in charge accountable to the employees as a whole

    Eh. Democracy frequently demonstrates that it's incapable of a lot of good decisions and we are currently seeing a ton of this kind of result in our western democratic systems. Frequently power is turned over to groups that are not democratic exactly because of these issues.

    The criticism of the whole "CEO's will know what's best" thing is true. But it's also true the other way. Businesses in general don't really know wtf they are doing most times and just kinda go through the motions of things they've seen elsewhere, cargo-cult-style. And that's true regardless of the structure.

    I would say the goal is more to invest whoever is actually in charge in the welfare of the company as a whole. Or to divorce people's welfare from the welfare of the place they work. You've got to do one or the other. Or both.

    I would actively argue that a lot of the poor decisions democracies make currently are directly related to wealth inequality and money being used to manipulate voters and legislators towards the ends of powerful individuals.

    That's not to say that a democracy is incapable of making bad decisions on its own, but so many of the bad decisions democracies have been making lately can have a clear line drawn to the campaign donations and messaging platforms of the wealthy pushing political decisions that allow specific individuals to make out like bandits.

    Nah. A lot of it is simply basic failures of the democratic system.

    Personal interests and such, especially magnified by various ways the political system distributes power based on geography or the like. eg - democratic systems cater towards the desires of the people most able to tip the balance of power in one direction or another. Because that's how democratic systems work.

    There is also a great degree of simple lack of expertise and understanding. Popular ideas and true ideas or good ideas are not perfectly overlapping sets.

    Or groups with enough power to get their interests catered to using that power for their own benefit at the expense of the whole.

    These are just some examples of the kind of things you see frequently replicated in other similar systems for the exact same reason. Trying to blame everything on capitalism is just silly and monotonous after awhile. Groups of people are very capable of collectively making stupid decisions or being dysfunctional or being potentially incapable of reform because of the individual interests of specific groups within that system.

    So you're saying that democracies make bad decisions when the balance of power is tilted towards particular individuals or interest groups that have outsized power relative to the people the government represents, or when the majority of voters are undereducated on the particular issues they're voting on...

    In what way is massive wealth inequality not wildly exacerbating these problems? Even fully organic moral panics are deeply exacerbated by mass media that capitalizes on people being riled up.

    What you're saying is that the see-saw of democratic power always has the capacity to tip to the wrong side no matter what conditions it's under, which I absolutely agree with. But capitalism is a one-ton weight sitting on one end. It necessarily destabilizes the entire system.

    You said that "a lot of the poor decisions democracies make currently are directly related to wealth inequality and money being used to manipulate voters and legislators towards the ends of powerful individuals". I'm saying this is not true because a ton of things that fail in these kind of systems are not related specifically to wealth inequality and manifest themselves in tons of other ways.

    Like shit, literally probably the most important thing effecting a lot of democracies right now is the random vagaries of historical geography.

    Democratic-systems make bad decisions for tons of reasons. (Which shouldn't be surprising since democratic systems are not designed to produce better decisions then other systems.) It's not just about the balance of power being tilted toward particular individuals or interest groups. Often doing so is actually the solution to the problem.

    The random vagaries of historical geography generally have such a strong influence for explicitly economic reasons. If you look back through most of the political movements throughout history they tend to be thin films over a fundamental economic problem. Our politics are moved by wealth.

  • shrykeshryke Member of the Beast Registered User regular
    Winky wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    Winky wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    Winky wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    Lanz wrote: »
    Heffling wrote: »
    Jebus314 wrote: »
    Winky wrote: »
    Jebus314 wrote: »
    Feral wrote: »
    To clarify, my point is not that any of them are necessarily admirable figures, but that if the thread consensus is "no more billionaires," it is entirely possible for billionaires to simply stop being billionaires. They don't have to kill themselves.

    That still leaves open questions about how many billionaires got their status through perfectly legitimate, ethical business. Feeney made his money by helping tobacco and alcohol addicts evade taxes. Huntsman was an LDS official who made his money through nonbiodegradeable styrofoam. And I'm sick and tired of talking about Rowling, so let's not.

    Everybody has skeletons in their closets. Nobody is perfect. But when you're that rich, whatever skeletons you have are multiplied across a much vaster impact. And I think it's a respectable argument to say that we should discourage individuals from getting limitlessly rich for the same reason we should discourage individuals from seeking limitless political power - it amplifies the negative impacts of our human imperfections to an untenable degree.

    This does bring up the question about wealth versus ownership though. Bezos and Gates for example could not give up their wealth without giving up control of the companies they founded. Similarly, any wealth tax of significant size means that they would also be forced to eventually cede control. Is that a good thing? I don't really know. Certainly CEOs like zuckerberg and dorsey make it seem like it would be a great thing, but I'm not convinced it is always in societies best interest to force large companies into some kind of board based control, and it certainly seems like a heavy cost for the individual for nebulous societal gain (the loss being the control of the company not the wealth lost through the wealth tax).

    Again, this is a place where I see employee ownership as the solution. The ones doing the work should be the ones to vote on the direction the company takes, either through direct democracy or, when more practical, electing their own board members. It does not bear out in practice that ownership is better exercised by a single or few powerful individuals, they will be driven to actions that increase profit or growth at the expense of long term stability.

    I don't believe employee ownership is a good solution or a good practice for most companies. Big picture company direction type decisions are difficult and require a unique skill set that most people don't have. It is not something that will be easily crowd sourced, and the most likely result is that companies are poorly managed (by the employees) and everything is less efficient/more expensive than it could be.

    This is exactly the kind of nonsense that CEOs spout to justify why they make five thousand times the average wage at their company. Being an employee of a large corporation, I see that roughly every two years we undergo a major change in direction that is almost always counter to the previous direction. Why? It's not because the old direction was bad, it's because the people on the executive fast track change positions every 18-24 months. For example, two years ago we moved all of our sales to regionalized models (north america, south america, europe, china, southeast asia, etc). Now we're moving to a global sales model.

    People setting the directions of large companies often don't have a clue what they're doing, and are so separated from the average employee that they have no understanding of the consequences of their actions. Look at Jeff Immelt's leadership of GE or the results of many other CEOs who often crash their companies with poor decision making and escape with golden parachutes.

    The success of a company is driven by the individuals in that company and is built on their labor.

    If a democracy can put a man on the moon in the 20th Century CE, I'm pretty sure a democratically run business can handle "big picture company direction decisions"

    Hell you don't even have to step away from a hierarchical command structure, you can just make said hierarchical structure founded in representative democracy that makes the people in charge accountable to the employees as a whole

    Eh. Democracy frequently demonstrates that it's incapable of a lot of good decisions and we are currently seeing a ton of this kind of result in our western democratic systems. Frequently power is turned over to groups that are not democratic exactly because of these issues.

    The criticism of the whole "CEO's will know what's best" thing is true. But it's also true the other way. Businesses in general don't really know wtf they are doing most times and just kinda go through the motions of things they've seen elsewhere, cargo-cult-style. And that's true regardless of the structure.

    I would say the goal is more to invest whoever is actually in charge in the welfare of the company as a whole. Or to divorce people's welfare from the welfare of the place they work. You've got to do one or the other. Or both.

    I would actively argue that a lot of the poor decisions democracies make currently are directly related to wealth inequality and money being used to manipulate voters and legislators towards the ends of powerful individuals.

    That's not to say that a democracy is incapable of making bad decisions on its own, but so many of the bad decisions democracies have been making lately can have a clear line drawn to the campaign donations and messaging platforms of the wealthy pushing political decisions that allow specific individuals to make out like bandits.

    Nah. A lot of it is simply basic failures of the democratic system.

    Personal interests and such, especially magnified by various ways the political system distributes power based on geography or the like. eg - democratic systems cater towards the desires of the people most able to tip the balance of power in one direction or another. Because that's how democratic systems work.

    There is also a great degree of simple lack of expertise and understanding. Popular ideas and true ideas or good ideas are not perfectly overlapping sets.

    Or groups with enough power to get their interests catered to using that power for their own benefit at the expense of the whole.

    These are just some examples of the kind of things you see frequently replicated in other similar systems for the exact same reason. Trying to blame everything on capitalism is just silly and monotonous after awhile. Groups of people are very capable of collectively making stupid decisions or being dysfunctional or being potentially incapable of reform because of the individual interests of specific groups within that system.

    So you're saying that democracies make bad decisions when the balance of power is tilted towards particular individuals or interest groups that have outsized power relative to the people the government represents, or when the majority of voters are undereducated on the particular issues they're voting on...

    In what way is massive wealth inequality not wildly exacerbating these problems? Even fully organic moral panics are deeply exacerbated by mass media that capitalizes on people being riled up.

    What you're saying is that the see-saw of democratic power always has the capacity to tip to the wrong side no matter what conditions it's under, which I absolutely agree with. But capitalism is a one-ton weight sitting on one end. It necessarily destabilizes the entire system.

    You said that "a lot of the poor decisions democracies make currently are directly related to wealth inequality and money being used to manipulate voters and legislators towards the ends of powerful individuals". I'm saying this is not true because a ton of things that fail in these kind of systems are not related specifically to wealth inequality and manifest themselves in tons of other ways.

    Like shit, literally probably the most important thing effecting a lot of democracies right now is the random vagaries of historical geography.

    Democratic-systems make bad decisions for tons of reasons. (Which shouldn't be surprising since democratic systems are not designed to produce better decisions then other systems.) It's not just about the balance of power being tilted toward particular individuals or interest groups. Often doing so is actually the solution to the problem.

    The random vagaries of historical geography generally have such a strong influence for explicitly economic reasons. If you look back through most of the political movements throughout history they tend to be thin films over a fundamental economic problem. Our politics are moved by wealth.

    No, they can have a strong influence because (just to use a pertinent example to most people on this forum), the Senate gives 2 seats to every state. This is not a function of economic inequality. The world is not made of nails dude. Democratic systems are perfectly capable of being fucked up by the people in them, absent monetary influences. (other random example - Condo Boards or the equivalent)

  • WinkyWinky rRegistered User regular
    edited January 2020
    shryke wrote: »
    Winky wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    Winky wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    Winky wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    Lanz wrote: »
    Heffling wrote: »
    Jebus314 wrote: »
    Winky wrote: »
    Jebus314 wrote: »
    Feral wrote: »
    To clarify, my point is not that any of them are necessarily admirable figures, but that if the thread consensus is "no more billionaires," it is entirely possible for billionaires to simply stop being billionaires. They don't have to kill themselves.

    That still leaves open questions about how many billionaires got their status through perfectly legitimate, ethical business. Feeney made his money by helping tobacco and alcohol addicts evade taxes. Huntsman was an LDS official who made his money through nonbiodegradeable styrofoam. And I'm sick and tired of talking about Rowling, so let's not.

    Everybody has skeletons in their closets. Nobody is perfect. But when you're that rich, whatever skeletons you have are multiplied across a much vaster impact. And I think it's a respectable argument to say that we should discourage individuals from getting limitlessly rich for the same reason we should discourage individuals from seeking limitless political power - it amplifies the negative impacts of our human imperfections to an untenable degree.

    This does bring up the question about wealth versus ownership though. Bezos and Gates for example could not give up their wealth without giving up control of the companies they founded. Similarly, any wealth tax of significant size means that they would also be forced to eventually cede control. Is that a good thing? I don't really know. Certainly CEOs like zuckerberg and dorsey make it seem like it would be a great thing, but I'm not convinced it is always in societies best interest to force large companies into some kind of board based control, and it certainly seems like a heavy cost for the individual for nebulous societal gain (the loss being the control of the company not the wealth lost through the wealth tax).

    Again, this is a place where I see employee ownership as the solution. The ones doing the work should be the ones to vote on the direction the company takes, either through direct democracy or, when more practical, electing their own board members. It does not bear out in practice that ownership is better exercised by a single or few powerful individuals, they will be driven to actions that increase profit or growth at the expense of long term stability.

    I don't believe employee ownership is a good solution or a good practice for most companies. Big picture company direction type decisions are difficult and require a unique skill set that most people don't have. It is not something that will be easily crowd sourced, and the most likely result is that companies are poorly managed (by the employees) and everything is less efficient/more expensive than it could be.

    This is exactly the kind of nonsense that CEOs spout to justify why they make five thousand times the average wage at their company. Being an employee of a large corporation, I see that roughly every two years we undergo a major change in direction that is almost always counter to the previous direction. Why? It's not because the old direction was bad, it's because the people on the executive fast track change positions every 18-24 months. For example, two years ago we moved all of our sales to regionalized models (north america, south america, europe, china, southeast asia, etc). Now we're moving to a global sales model.

    People setting the directions of large companies often don't have a clue what they're doing, and are so separated from the average employee that they have no understanding of the consequences of their actions. Look at Jeff Immelt's leadership of GE or the results of many other CEOs who often crash their companies with poor decision making and escape with golden parachutes.

    The success of a company is driven by the individuals in that company and is built on their labor.

    If a democracy can put a man on the moon in the 20th Century CE, I'm pretty sure a democratically run business can handle "big picture company direction decisions"

    Hell you don't even have to step away from a hierarchical command structure, you can just make said hierarchical structure founded in representative democracy that makes the people in charge accountable to the employees as a whole

    Eh. Democracy frequently demonstrates that it's incapable of a lot of good decisions and we are currently seeing a ton of this kind of result in our western democratic systems. Frequently power is turned over to groups that are not democratic exactly because of these issues.

    The criticism of the whole "CEO's will know what's best" thing is true. But it's also true the other way. Businesses in general don't really know wtf they are doing most times and just kinda go through the motions of things they've seen elsewhere, cargo-cult-style. And that's true regardless of the structure.

    I would say the goal is more to invest whoever is actually in charge in the welfare of the company as a whole. Or to divorce people's welfare from the welfare of the place they work. You've got to do one or the other. Or both.

    I would actively argue that a lot of the poor decisions democracies make currently are directly related to wealth inequality and money being used to manipulate voters and legislators towards the ends of powerful individuals.

    That's not to say that a democracy is incapable of making bad decisions on its own, but so many of the bad decisions democracies have been making lately can have a clear line drawn to the campaign donations and messaging platforms of the wealthy pushing political decisions that allow specific individuals to make out like bandits.

    Nah. A lot of it is simply basic failures of the democratic system.

    Personal interests and such, especially magnified by various ways the political system distributes power based on geography or the like. eg - democratic systems cater towards the desires of the people most able to tip the balance of power in one direction or another. Because that's how democratic systems work.

    There is also a great degree of simple lack of expertise and understanding. Popular ideas and true ideas or good ideas are not perfectly overlapping sets.

    Or groups with enough power to get their interests catered to using that power for their own benefit at the expense of the whole.

    These are just some examples of the kind of things you see frequently replicated in other similar systems for the exact same reason. Trying to blame everything on capitalism is just silly and monotonous after awhile. Groups of people are very capable of collectively making stupid decisions or being dysfunctional or being potentially incapable of reform because of the individual interests of specific groups within that system.

    So you're saying that democracies make bad decisions when the balance of power is tilted towards particular individuals or interest groups that have outsized power relative to the people the government represents, or when the majority of voters are undereducated on the particular issues they're voting on...

    In what way is massive wealth inequality not wildly exacerbating these problems? Even fully organic moral panics are deeply exacerbated by mass media that capitalizes on people being riled up.

    What you're saying is that the see-saw of democratic power always has the capacity to tip to the wrong side no matter what conditions it's under, which I absolutely agree with. But capitalism is a one-ton weight sitting on one end. It necessarily destabilizes the entire system.

    You said that "a lot of the poor decisions democracies make currently are directly related to wealth inequality and money being used to manipulate voters and legislators towards the ends of powerful individuals". I'm saying this is not true because a ton of things that fail in these kind of systems are not related specifically to wealth inequality and manifest themselves in tons of other ways.

    Like shit, literally probably the most important thing effecting a lot of democracies right now is the random vagaries of historical geography.

    Democratic-systems make bad decisions for tons of reasons. (Which shouldn't be surprising since democratic systems are not designed to produce better decisions then other systems.) It's not just about the balance of power being tilted toward particular individuals or interest groups. Often doing so is actually the solution to the problem.

    The random vagaries of historical geography generally have such a strong influence for explicitly economic reasons. If you look back through most of the political movements throughout history they tend to be thin films over a fundamental economic problem. Our politics are moved by wealth.

    No, they can have a strong influence because (just to use a pertinent example to most people on this forum), the Senate gives 2 seats to every state. This is not a function of economic inequality. The world is not made of nails dude. Democratic systems are perfectly capable of being fucked up by the people in them, absent monetary influences. (other random example - Condo Boards or the equivalent)

    Condo boards exist because people are concerned with their property value. It's not a coincidence at all that the places where such homeowners associations are most powerful and horrible to deal with are in places with the highest property values (try renovating your house in Sausalito, I dare you). Notice how you don't have many renters setting up such organizations.

    Also, regarding the Senate, it was specifically created as a mirror to the House of Lords, which would have wealthier, more powerful individuals who were "above the common rabble", which is why it was deliberately not built to reflect the common populace as opposed to elite members of the states it represents, and it reflects that notion to this day:
    In 2015, the most recent year for which Quartz could access this information, the median member of the US Congress was worth at least $1.1 million. That is more than 12 times greater than the net wealth of the median US household. And that doesn’t tell the whole story, since the chambers of congress are not equal in wealth terms. The median net worth of a senator was $3.2 million, versus $900,000 for members of the House of Representatives.
    https://qz.com/1190595/the-typical-us-congress-member-is-12-times-richer-than-the-typical-american-household/

    EDIT: At the end of the day, what people really care about is where they're going to get food and shelter. Even things like racism and tribalism are almost necessarily tied to socioeconomic incentives and competition.

    Winky on
  • CelestialBadgerCelestialBadger Registered User regular
    If the Senate is meant to be the "House of Lords" they should take a leaf out of the Lord's book and drastically increase numbers. There are 795 Lords. The Lords are also no longer permitted to veto bills. Let's do that too!

  • Captain InertiaCaptain Inertia Registered User regular
    If we taxed Bill Gates more heavily he could still do all the charitable work he does already, he just might have to accept his fortune reducing over the last third of his life rather than increasing. Which shouldn't be a problem for him from a lifestyle point of view, he'll still be able to afford his mansion, yacht and private jet.

    Bill Gates does do some stuff that would be hard for governments to do such as vaccination programs in the Third World. Those are the kind of things that conservatives in government tend to cut.

    If you have the political power to tax Gates enough for domestic programs, there likely isn’t a meaningful opposition to funding vaccination programs worldwide.

    Think of why conservatives oppose those programs (taxes and especially paying for programs for “those” people)

  • FeralFeral MEMETICHARIZARD interior crocodile alligator ⇔ ǝɹʇɐǝɥʇ ǝᴉʌoɯ ʇǝloɹʌǝɥɔ ɐ ǝʌᴉɹp ᴉRegistered User regular
    edited January 2020
    Lanz wrote: »
    I think one method for what it would look like is that you would have federal business regulations that stipulate that a business must form a charter that allows for some kind of employee democracy regarding how the businesses is run. I don't want to prescribe any one specific form since I don't think there's necessarily going to be any kind of one size fits all "best democracy" implementation, so it's best to leave that to the employees forming the company to structure that themselves. A fully equal collective that has no hierarchical structure and features equal pay among all employees, like the Dead Cells development studio? Sure!

    Silicon Valley has been experimenting with flat structures for decades. For every team like Motion Twin, there are a Zappos (where flat structure is floundering), or Medium (where it was abandoned), or GitHub (where it imploded due to the organization's inability to police its own members' bad behavior).

    Medium's blog post on why they abandoned it is telling: https://blog.medium.com/management-and-organization-at-medium-2228cc9d93e9
    Our experience was that it was difficult to coordinate efforts at scale. In the purest expression of Holacracy, every team has a goal and works autonomously to deliver the best path to serve that goal. But for larger initiatives, which require coordination across functions, it can be time-consuming and divisive to gain alignment.

    In the US, worker-managed co-ops tend to be small: 300 employees or less. (To be fair, most businesses are small - the number of sole-proprietorship one-person businesses drags the mean way down.) But worker-managed co-ops seem to cap out at a few hundred... or a couple thousand if you're lucky. This co-op-friendly FoCo article focuses on employee ownership, not employee management, but it mentions one of the problems with scale.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/40572926/more-u-s-businesses-are-becoming-worker-co-ops-heres-why
    The factors that determine if a business is eligible for transition to a cooperative vary by circumstance, but there are some rough criteria. Generally, coops tend to form from businesses with a minimum of 20 employees, and no more than a few hundred (though there are exceptions–Cooperative Home Care Associates in New York is the country’s largest worker-owned cooperative and employs nearly 2,000 workers). The relatively manageable size ensures that each employee can purchase a share of the company that’s large enough to be meaningful, but not so expensive as to be prohibitive. Longevity in the community is also a benefit. Businesses like A Child’s Place that have a long tenure in a specific neighborhood and meet a social and emotional need often make the most sense to organize as a cooperative, as employee ownership guarantees that company culture holds steady even in times of transition.

    Maybe that's a feature, not a bug. Maybe it's better for workers in general for firms to be smaller. But I don't think we can conclusively say that.

    There's an essay written by second-wave feminist Joreen Freeman about her experiences with flat organizational structures, specifically in feminist activism, where she identifies (from her own observations) what makes flat organizations work and what doesn't. It's not a scientific study, but I find it convincing (and it is compatible with some of the social science I've read on the subject). It's called The Tyranny of Structurelessness. Here's what makes them work, in her view:
    1) It is task oriented. Its function is very narrow and very specific, like putting on a conference or putting out a newspaper. It is the task that basically structures the group. The task determines what needs to be done and when it needs to be done. It provides a guide by which people can judge their actions and make plans for future activity.

    2) It is relatively small and homogeneous. Homogeneity is necessary to insure that participants have a "common language" for interaction. People from widely different backgrounds may provide richness to a consciousness-raising group where each can learn from the others' experience, but too great a diversity among members of a task-oriented group means only that they continually misunderstand each other. Such diverse people interpret words and actions differently. They have different expectations about each other's behavior and judge the results according to different criteria. If everyone knows everyone else well enough to understand the nuances, these can be accommodated. Usually, they only lead to confusion and endless hours spent straightening out conflicts no one ever thought would arise.

    3) There is a high degree of communication. Information must be passed on to everyone, opinions checked, work divided up, and participation assured in the relevant decisions. This is only possible if the group is small and people practically live together for the most crucial phases of the task. Needless to say, the number of interactions necessary to involve everybody increases geometrically with the number of participants. This inevitably limits group participants to about five, or excludes some from some of the decisions. Successful groups can be as large as 10 or 15, but only when they are in fact composed of several smaller subgroups which perform specific parts of the task, and whose members overlap with each other so that knowledge of what the different subgroups are doing can be passed around easily.

    4) There is a low degree of skill specialization. Not everyone has to be able to do everything, but everything must be able to be done by more than one person. Thus no one is indispensable. To a certain extent, people become interchangeable parts.

    While these conditions can occur serendipitously in small groups, this is not possible in large ones.

    ...
    Lanz wrote: »
    A hierarchical organization wherein employees elect their bosses and a council to chart the course of the company, with term lengths and recall ability? Go for it. At the end of the day, the key is to allow for worker self-determination, and there are multiple forms and levels of democratic methods to achieve that end.

    I'm more sympathetic to this. I'm not a fan of direct democracy at all. I do not believe it is a valid purpose of democracy to execute the will of the people. I am sympathetic to representative democracy - giving the people affected by leadership the ability to choose their leadership.

    But I'd like to contrast two statements against each other:
    Lanz wrote: »
    I don't want to prescribe any one specific form since I don't think there's necessarily going to be any kind of one size fits all "best democracy" implementation, so it's best to leave that to the employees forming the company to structure that themselves.
    Lanz wrote: »
    As for those who won't shift, in the long term, provided you have a state or federal legislation that requires employee ownership of their places of work, I would imagine the same thing happens to any other business that runs afoul of various regulations: fines, loss of licensing from the state corporate commission, etc. Loss of license to operate as a business would probably be better for larger companies that could potentially just weather fine after fine.

    The law, as they say, is a blunt instrument. If you want to use legislation or regulation to enforce democratic corporate structures, you have to be very specific about what that looks like, and accept that the gavel will smack down some businesses that are democratic but don't fit the narrow model defined by law. (Or the law can be vague, and therefore toothless.)

    Also, this reminds me of a conversation I had a while back with a socialist who was a fan of Elinor Ostrom. I think Ostrom's work is fascinating. She also supports a multiplicity of approaches and diversity of bottom-up organizational structures.

    But what if the workers don't want what you're offering?

    In these discussions we often conflate employee-managed businesses with employee-owned businesses. I'm guilty of it, too. I was being sloppy in my language earlier in the thread.

    In the US, we have a number of ways to turn employees into investors, like profit-sharing, or employee stock purchase programs. These may or may not come with the ability to vote on leadership.

    To contrast, we can easily imagine a world in which labor is unionized by default, and union leaders have seats on the board of executives. (Similar to the corporate structure that exists in many EU companies.) In these cases, labor doesn't (necessarily) have an ownership stake (though they might, employee stock purchase programs are incentivized in a lot of EU countries).

    Giving employees a representative in corporate leadership (who can be voted in or out and actually has some authority) makes sense to me.

    But I may or may not want to own a piece of my business. I sometimes get job offers where I get a slightly lower regular salary in exchange for stock ownership or profit sharing and I will usually (though not always) turn them down. Why? Because I want my compensation to be stable. In almost every case, I'd rather be laid off (and collect unemployment) than take a drastic compensation cut during a downturn.

    Socializing ownership necessarily implies socializing risk. I can anticipate a likely retort: "yeah, but we socialize risk now, your company can fire you for any reason or no reason at all." I agree with that - but I'm not arguing for the status quo (in the US). The current American model of capitalism sucks! But I support broad social welfare structures that mitigate that risk, regardless of the way businesses are structured - unemployment insurance, UBI, etc.

    Similarly, upthread you had trouble accepting that somebody just wants to be a "tool" or a "cog in the machine." I wouldn't use those terms, exactly, but I don't really need to feel a strong personal attachment to my job. It's just something I can do to eat and pay rent. It doesn't need to be meaningful.

    The idea of having representation in corporate leadership to cut down on abuse, overwork, bad conditions, etc. very much appeals to me, and I'm totally with you on that.

    But I don't really want to co-own my workplace (in an investment/profit-sharing sense). That doesn't appeal to me in the slightest. It doesn't particularly bother me that somebody else profits off of my labor. I am perfectly comfortable with the basic capitalist relationship: I'll give the investor my labor, the investor gives me a salary, and skims any profits off the top. I'm not comfortable with the investor class and their representatives in management treating labor like indentured servants, but I don't think we need to up-end the whole system to ameliorate that.

    Feral on
    every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.

    the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
  • FeralFeral MEMETICHARIZARD interior crocodile alligator ⇔ ǝɹʇɐǝɥʇ ǝᴉʌoɯ ʇǝloɹʌǝɥɔ ɐ ǝʌᴉɹp ᴉRegistered User regular
    Paladin wrote: »
    Have there been head to head comparisons of the effectiveness of philanthropic vs. government organizations aimed at the same goal? Does the government come out on top generally?

    I'd have to go digging for links, but yeah, in general, governments come out ahead.

    every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.

    the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
  • HamHamJHamHamJ Registered User regular
    Casual wrote: »
    This thread makes me wonder if anyone could come up with a coherent argument why the income tax bracket for say, over 100 million USD per year should not be 100%? It's an amount of money that is still obscene wealth to the degree 99.99999% of humanity will never know anything like it and it would do a great job of dealing with the issue that the 0.00001% have sole decision making capacity for the majority of humanities resources.

    Note, these apply at whatever level you put the cap.

    1) You make it impossible to legally distinguish and attract higher value employees. This incentivises doing so using illicit means whether that is other non-taxed forms of compensation or just under the table payments. See college sports for an example.

    2) Brain drain as the best talent flees to places with better opportunities. This can be both at the individual level and the corporate level.

    While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
  • HefflingHeffling No Pic EverRegistered User regular
    I strongly question the "higher value employees" given the numerous studies showing that CEOs can incompetently run a company into the ground, then get rewarded with a golden parachute and later move to another, equal or better paying position. Or how CEOs will use other CEO salaries as a way to justify their salary, creating a self fulfilling prophecy of increasing CEO salaries.

    And "brain drain" will always happen with your higher value employees, because the grass is always greener somewhere else. And moving from company to company periodically is the fastest way to raise your salary. Or, as I've seen within the company I work for, people on the E-band fast track who change roles every 18-24 months, because you get a 10-15% bump moving to a new role, and a 2% merit increase (hah, merit) if you stay in your current position.

  • shrykeshryke Member of the Beast Registered User regular
    edited January 2020
    Winky wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    Winky wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    Winky wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    Winky wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    Lanz wrote: »
    Heffling wrote: »
    Jebus314 wrote: »
    Winky wrote: »
    Jebus314 wrote: »
    Feral wrote: »
    To clarify, my point is not that any of them are necessarily admirable figures, but that if the thread consensus is "no more billionaires," it is entirely possible for billionaires to simply stop being billionaires. They don't have to kill themselves.

    That still leaves open questions about how many billionaires got their status through perfectly legitimate, ethical business. Feeney made his money by helping tobacco and alcohol addicts evade taxes. Huntsman was an LDS official who made his money through nonbiodegradeable styrofoam. And I'm sick and tired of talking about Rowling, so let's not.

    Everybody has skeletons in their closets. Nobody is perfect. But when you're that rich, whatever skeletons you have are multiplied across a much vaster impact. And I think it's a respectable argument to say that we should discourage individuals from getting limitlessly rich for the same reason we should discourage individuals from seeking limitless political power - it amplifies the negative impacts of our human imperfections to an untenable degree.

    This does bring up the question about wealth versus ownership though. Bezos and Gates for example could not give up their wealth without giving up control of the companies they founded. Similarly, any wealth tax of significant size means that they would also be forced to eventually cede control. Is that a good thing? I don't really know. Certainly CEOs like zuckerberg and dorsey make it seem like it would be a great thing, but I'm not convinced it is always in societies best interest to force large companies into some kind of board based control, and it certainly seems like a heavy cost for the individual for nebulous societal gain (the loss being the control of the company not the wealth lost through the wealth tax).

    Again, this is a place where I see employee ownership as the solution. The ones doing the work should be the ones to vote on the direction the company takes, either through direct democracy or, when more practical, electing their own board members. It does not bear out in practice that ownership is better exercised by a single or few powerful individuals, they will be driven to actions that increase profit or growth at the expense of long term stability.

    I don't believe employee ownership is a good solution or a good practice for most companies. Big picture company direction type decisions are difficult and require a unique skill set that most people don't have. It is not something that will be easily crowd sourced, and the most likely result is that companies are poorly managed (by the employees) and everything is less efficient/more expensive than it could be.

    This is exactly the kind of nonsense that CEOs spout to justify why they make five thousand times the average wage at their company. Being an employee of a large corporation, I see that roughly every two years we undergo a major change in direction that is almost always counter to the previous direction. Why? It's not because the old direction was bad, it's because the people on the executive fast track change positions every 18-24 months. For example, two years ago we moved all of our sales to regionalized models (north america, south america, europe, china, southeast asia, etc). Now we're moving to a global sales model.

    People setting the directions of large companies often don't have a clue what they're doing, and are so separated from the average employee that they have no understanding of the consequences of their actions. Look at Jeff Immelt's leadership of GE or the results of many other CEOs who often crash their companies with poor decision making and escape with golden parachutes.

    The success of a company is driven by the individuals in that company and is built on their labor.

    If a democracy can put a man on the moon in the 20th Century CE, I'm pretty sure a democratically run business can handle "big picture company direction decisions"

    Hell you don't even have to step away from a hierarchical command structure, you can just make said hierarchical structure founded in representative democracy that makes the people in charge accountable to the employees as a whole

    Eh. Democracy frequently demonstrates that it's incapable of a lot of good decisions and we are currently seeing a ton of this kind of result in our western democratic systems. Frequently power is turned over to groups that are not democratic exactly because of these issues.

    The criticism of the whole "CEO's will know what's best" thing is true. But it's also true the other way. Businesses in general don't really know wtf they are doing most times and just kinda go through the motions of things they've seen elsewhere, cargo-cult-style. And that's true regardless of the structure.

    I would say the goal is more to invest whoever is actually in charge in the welfare of the company as a whole. Or to divorce people's welfare from the welfare of the place they work. You've got to do one or the other. Or both.

    I would actively argue that a lot of the poor decisions democracies make currently are directly related to wealth inequality and money being used to manipulate voters and legislators towards the ends of powerful individuals.

    That's not to say that a democracy is incapable of making bad decisions on its own, but so many of the bad decisions democracies have been making lately can have a clear line drawn to the campaign donations and messaging platforms of the wealthy pushing political decisions that allow specific individuals to make out like bandits.

    Nah. A lot of it is simply basic failures of the democratic system.

    Personal interests and such, especially magnified by various ways the political system distributes power based on geography or the like. eg - democratic systems cater towards the desires of the people most able to tip the balance of power in one direction or another. Because that's how democratic systems work.

    There is also a great degree of simple lack of expertise and understanding. Popular ideas and true ideas or good ideas are not perfectly overlapping sets.

    Or groups with enough power to get their interests catered to using that power for their own benefit at the expense of the whole.

    These are just some examples of the kind of things you see frequently replicated in other similar systems for the exact same reason. Trying to blame everything on capitalism is just silly and monotonous after awhile. Groups of people are very capable of collectively making stupid decisions or being dysfunctional or being potentially incapable of reform because of the individual interests of specific groups within that system.

    So you're saying that democracies make bad decisions when the balance of power is tilted towards particular individuals or interest groups that have outsized power relative to the people the government represents, or when the majority of voters are undereducated on the particular issues they're voting on...

    In what way is massive wealth inequality not wildly exacerbating these problems? Even fully organic moral panics are deeply exacerbated by mass media that capitalizes on people being riled up.

    What you're saying is that the see-saw of democratic power always has the capacity to tip to the wrong side no matter what conditions it's under, which I absolutely agree with. But capitalism is a one-ton weight sitting on one end. It necessarily destabilizes the entire system.

    You said that "a lot of the poor decisions democracies make currently are directly related to wealth inequality and money being used to manipulate voters and legislators towards the ends of powerful individuals". I'm saying this is not true because a ton of things that fail in these kind of systems are not related specifically to wealth inequality and manifest themselves in tons of other ways.

    Like shit, literally probably the most important thing effecting a lot of democracies right now is the random vagaries of historical geography.

    Democratic-systems make bad decisions for tons of reasons. (Which shouldn't be surprising since democratic systems are not designed to produce better decisions then other systems.) It's not just about the balance of power being tilted toward particular individuals or interest groups. Often doing so is actually the solution to the problem.

    The random vagaries of historical geography generally have such a strong influence for explicitly economic reasons. If you look back through most of the political movements throughout history they tend to be thin films over a fundamental economic problem. Our politics are moved by wealth.

    No, they can have a strong influence because (just to use a pertinent example to most people on this forum), the Senate gives 2 seats to every state. This is not a function of economic inequality. The world is not made of nails dude. Democratic systems are perfectly capable of being fucked up by the people in them, absent monetary influences. (other random example - Condo Boards or the equivalent)

    Condo boards exist because people are concerned with their property value. It's not a coincidence at all that the places where such homeowners associations are most powerful and horrible to deal with are in places with the highest property values (try renovating your house in Sausalito, I dare you). Notice how you don't have many renters setting up such organizations.

    Also, regarding the Senate, it was specifically created as a mirror to the House of Lords, which would have wealthier, more powerful individuals who were "above the common rabble", which is why it was deliberately not built to reflect the common populace as opposed to elite members of the states it represents, and it reflects that notion to this day:
    In 2015, the most recent year for which Quartz could access this information, the median member of the US Congress was worth at least $1.1 million. That is more than 12 times greater than the net wealth of the median US household. And that doesn’t tell the whole story, since the chambers of congress are not equal in wealth terms. The median net worth of a senator was $3.2 million, versus $900,000 for members of the House of Representatives.
    https://qz.com/1190595/the-typical-us-congress-member-is-12-times-richer-than-the-typical-american-household/

    EDIT: At the end of the day, what people really care about is where they're going to get food and shelter. Even things like racism and tribalism are almost necessarily tied to socioeconomic incentives and competition.

    Both of these are you dodging the issue.

    It doesn't matter what the Senate was built to mirror. The point is that the way in which the Senate shifts decision making within the democratic system is not via wealth inequality but via the randomness of how 200+ years of population redistribution map onto borders decided by random issues that haven't been relevant for hundreds of years in many cases. The distribution of power via the Senate is one of the largest factors effecting US politics and it's got nothing to do with money and everything to do with how the rural/urban divide ends up distributed.

    Condo boards don't exist to protect property value, they exist because condos involve collective property and someone must decide on the administration of that property. And the point is that within this system, money is not the main factor. You don't get extra say for being rich. The not-infrequent bad decisions made by groups like condo boards are based in shortsightedness and people's desire for personal power. Like in a lot of very low-level politics honestly, often the deciding factor is who wants to put the most time and energy into fucking around on that issue or who most wants to get that rush from being in control.

    Your attempt to tie everything back to "but capitalism" is silly. Collective decision making structures have their own issues not based in capitalism. I keep giving you examples, both general and specific, about the kind of problems you can have. Collective ownership or collective control is not a fix for a ton of issues.. It's not necessary even a good idea in many cases.

    shryke on
  • FeralFeral MEMETICHARIZARD interior crocodile alligator ⇔ ǝɹʇɐǝɥʇ ǝᴉʌoɯ ʇǝloɹʌǝɥɔ ɐ ǝʌᴉɹp ᴉRegistered User regular
    daveNYC wrote: »
    I think the things that earn someone over $100mm annually are capital gains- nobody has a salary that high

    There’s likely a lot that could be done with capital gains across all income levels...

    Just tax them as regular income.

    BTW, the optimal tax rate for capital gains is zero... or at least, very very low. There are two major economic models that independently came to this conclusion, using two different methodologies: Atkinson-Stiglitz and Chamley-Judd. (I won't pretend to understand the math behind them, but they are widely accepted for what they are - conclusions based on abstract modeling.)

    Any taxes on capital gains are eventually passed down to labor, and they impact labor either in the form of lower pay, or lower employment, or some combination of both.

    However, there are two enormous caveats to that.

    First, it assumes that corporations want to maximize their profit along arbitrarily-long time-frames. Since we a trend of C-level executives getting hired, maximizing their short-term stock payouts, and then jumping ship, that assumption isn't airtight.

    Second, it assumes we can properly tell the difference between capital gains income and personal labor income. We are terrible at enforcing that difference. Giving a CEO a $1 salary and $2m/yr of stock options, and then letting him pay the capital gains tax rate when he executes those stock options, is blatantly a tax avoidance strategy that should be illegal. (In many countries, it is illegal.) Or, at the very least, we identify it as what it obviously is and tax it as personal income.

    The problem is that using the capital gains tax rate as an anti-tax-shelter bludgeon by taxing it all capital gains as personal income is likely to have unintended side effects that disproportionately impact working people.

    every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.

    the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
  • LanzLanz ...Za?Registered User regular
    Heffling wrote: »
    Money is a single unit value we assign to materials and/or time spent, and is meant to be an intermediary to allow for the smooth functioning of things like trade. Like any single unit value representing a complex system, it can be perverted. But money isn't a "method of controlling the behavior of others." There is nothing that you compels you as an individual to participate in the exchange of money for goods and services, and there are people in the US who disavow entirely the use of money and instead live off the land and barter for the things they cannot make themselves. That's not to say it is easy, but it is possible to live a life free from money. It is up the the individual to make that choice.

    Money itself is just a unit of value. A dollar represents X amount of time from one profession, Y amount of time from another profession, or Z amount of material goods. It means I can buy an apple for $0.50 or a large industrial valve for $10,000, and could exchange 20,000 of my apples for one industrial valve without having to find an industrial valve manufacturer that wants 20,000 apples.

    Money can certainly be abused to control others, as is often done with the poor and minorities. But the problem in these cases isn't money, it's the society that represses them. And there are other systemic issues that need to be addressed as well, such as biased laws, a biased police and legal system, racism, etc. Money is just a tool.

    This feels like it's looking at money from a theoretical/intended perspective and not how it is regularly utilized in practice.

    Like money is totally a method by which control and power is exerted, in practice. It doesn't matter that it wasn't what it was meant for, people went and did it anyway, and it's the practical existing use that you need to be concerned about.

    Also I regarding "nothing that compels you" about using money for goods and services: People need to eat, people need shelter. Those things cost money in American society and thanks to, you know, the whole "literally founded as a colony that became an expanding settler nation" thing, there's not a lot of places in America where you could somehow go off the grid, live off the land, etc. even if you had the skills and knowledge about how to survive in the wilds.

    Which also like, how do you do that without money? What areas of the US are there where you don't have to have money to live a detached, wilderness lifestyle? And on top of which, there certainly isn't enough of it to support that for everyone in a nation of over three hundred million people.

    The system as it stands compels you to participate in money-based commerce, because we have by and large made it impossible to live outside of it at anything resembling societal scales, because we generally like living in cities or rural communities where most if not all the land belongs to someone or another (we really like the whole "land ownership" thing in America), be they individual, corporation or state entity.

    To say that nothing compels you to participate seems like a really, really ludicrous prospect for the practical lives of most of the people living in America. We might as well talk about bootstrapping your way up to billionaire status so you too can be a philanthropist.

    waNkm4k.jpg?1
  • QuidQuid Definitely not a banana Registered User regular
    HamHamJ wrote: »
    Casual wrote: »
    This thread makes me wonder if anyone could come up with a coherent argument why the income tax bracket for say, over 100 million USD per year should not be 100%? It's an amount of money that is still obscene wealth to the degree 99.99999% of humanity will never know anything like it and it would do a great job of dealing with the issue that the 0.00001% have sole decision making capacity for the majority of humanities resources.

    Note, these apply at whatever level you put the cap.

    1) You make it impossible to legally distinguish and attract higher value employees. This incentivises doing so using illicit means whether that is other non-taxed forms of compensation or just under the table payments. See college sports for an example.

    2) Brain drain as the best talent flees to places with better opportunities. This can be both at the individual level and the corporate level.

    I don't know that everything over $100 million is the best cut off, but I am quite certain the vast, vast majority of talented people will not immigrate to other countries solely because they're unable to one day be billionaires.

  • shrykeshryke Member of the Beast Registered User regular
    Lanz wrote: »
    Heffling wrote: »
    Money is a single unit value we assign to materials and/or time spent, and is meant to be an intermediary to allow for the smooth functioning of things like trade. Like any single unit value representing a complex system, it can be perverted. But money isn't a "method of controlling the behavior of others." There is nothing that you compels you as an individual to participate in the exchange of money for goods and services, and there are people in the US who disavow entirely the use of money and instead live off the land and barter for the things they cannot make themselves. That's not to say it is easy, but it is possible to live a life free from money. It is up the the individual to make that choice.

    Money itself is just a unit of value. A dollar represents X amount of time from one profession, Y amount of time from another profession, or Z amount of material goods. It means I can buy an apple for $0.50 or a large industrial valve for $10,000, and could exchange 20,000 of my apples for one industrial valve without having to find an industrial valve manufacturer that wants 20,000 apples.

    Money can certainly be abused to control others, as is often done with the poor and minorities. But the problem in these cases isn't money, it's the society that represses them. And there are other systemic issues that need to be addressed as well, such as biased laws, a biased police and legal system, racism, etc. Money is just a tool.

    This feels like it's looking at money from a theoretical/intended perspective and not how it is regularly utilized in practice.

    Like money is totally a method by which control and power is exerted, in practice. It doesn't matter that it wasn't what it was meant for, people went and did it anyway, and it's the practical existing use that you need to be concerned about.

    Also I regarding "nothing that compels you" about using money for goods and services: People need to eat, people need shelter. Those things cost money in American society and thanks to, you know, the whole "literally founded as a colony that became an expanding settler nation" thing, there's not a lot of places in America where you could somehow go off the grid, live off the land, etc. even if you had the skills and knowledge about how to survive in the wilds.

    Which also like, how do you do that without money? What areas of the US are there where you don't have to have money to live a detached, wilderness lifestyle? And on top of which, there certainly isn't enough of it to support that for everyone in a nation of over three hundred million people.

    The system as it stands compels you to participate in money-based commerce, because we have by and large made it impossible to live outside of it at anything resembling societal scales, because we generally like living in cities or rural communities where most if not all the land belongs to someone or another (we really like the whole "land ownership" thing in America), be they individual, corporation or state entity.

    To say that nothing compels you to participate seems like a really, really ludicrous prospect for the practical lives of most of the people living in America. We might as well talk about bootstrapping your way up to billionaire status so you too can be a philanthropist.

    Heffling is more pointing out that money is not "a method for controlling the behaviour of others", it's a representation of value. It's purpose is not to control others and you don't need it to control others. It's only representing many of the things that you can use to do that and absent money you would just use those things directly and use a different representation. Societies without money are not societies without the ability to use power of one form or another to influence and control others. Seeing money itself, as a tool, as the problem is not really accurate.

  • HefflingHeffling No Pic EverRegistered User regular
    Lanz wrote: »
    Heffling wrote: »
    Money is a single unit value we assign to materials and/or time spent, and is meant to be an intermediary to allow for the smooth functioning of things like trade. Like any single unit value representing a complex system, it can be perverted. But money isn't a "method of controlling the behavior of others." There is nothing that you compels you as an individual to participate in the exchange of money for goods and services, and there are people in the US who disavow entirely the use of money and instead live off the land and barter for the things they cannot make themselves. That's not to say it is easy, but it is possible to live a life free from money. It is up the the individual to make that choice.

    Money itself is just a unit of value. A dollar represents X amount of time from one profession, Y amount of time from another profession, or Z amount of material goods. It means I can buy an apple for $0.50 or a large industrial valve for $10,000, and could exchange 20,000 of my apples for one industrial valve without having to find an industrial valve manufacturer that wants 20,000 apples.

    Money can certainly be abused to control others, as is often done with the poor and minorities. But the problem in these cases isn't money, it's the society that represses them. And there are other systemic issues that need to be addressed as well, such as biased laws, a biased police and legal system, racism, etc. Money is just a tool.

    This feels like it's looking at money from a theoretical/intended perspective and not how it is regularly utilized in practice.

    Like money is totally a method by which control and power is exerted, in practice. It doesn't matter that it wasn't what it was meant for, people went and did it anyway, and it's the practical existing use that you need to be concerned about.

    Also I regarding "nothing that compels you" about using money for goods and services: People need to eat, people need shelter. Those things cost money in American society and thanks to, you know, the whole "literally founded as a colony that became an expanding settler nation" thing, there's not a lot of places in America where you could somehow go off the grid, live off the land, etc. even if you had the skills and knowledge about how to survive in the wilds.

    Which also like, how do you do that without money? What areas of the US are there where you don't have to have money to live a detached, wilderness lifestyle? And on top of which, there certainly isn't enough of it to support that for everyone in a nation of over three hundred million people.

    The system as it stands compels you to participate in money-based commerce, because we have by and large made it impossible to live outside of it at anything resembling societal scales, because we generally like living in cities or rural communities where most if not all the land belongs to someone or another (we really like the whole "land ownership" thing in America), be they individual, corporation or state entity.

    To say that nothing compels you to participate seems like a really, really ludicrous prospect for the practical lives of most of the people living in America. We might as well talk about bootstrapping your way up to billionaire status so you too can be a philanthropist.

    This is an excellent response. There are parts with it that I disagree with, but I need some time to mull over my response.

  • WinkyWinky rRegistered User regular
    edited January 2020
    Feral wrote: »
    Lanz wrote: »
    I think one method for what it would look like is that you would have federal business regulations that stipulate that a business must form a charter that allows for some kind of employee democracy regarding how the businesses is run. I don't want to prescribe any one specific form since I don't think there's necessarily going to be any kind of one size fits all "best democracy" implementation, so it's best to leave that to the employees forming the company to structure that themselves. A fully equal collective that has no hierarchical structure and features equal pay among all employees, like the Dead Cells development studio? Sure!

    Silicon Valley has been experimenting with flat structures for decades. For every team like Motion Twin, there are a Zappos (where flat structure is floundering), or Medium (where it was abandoned), or GitHub (where it imploded due to the organization's inability to police its own members' bad behavior).

    Medium's blog post on why they abandoned it is telling: https://blog.medium.com/management-and-organization-at-medium-2228cc9d93e9
    Our experience was that it was difficult to coordinate efforts at scale. In the purest expression of Holacracy, every team has a goal and works autonomously to deliver the best path to serve that goal. But for larger initiatives, which require coordination across functions, it can be time-consuming and divisive to gain alignment.

    In the US, worker-managed co-ops tend to be small: 300 employees or less. (To be fair, most businesses are small - the number of sole-proprietorship one-person businesses drags the mean way down.) But worker-managed co-ops seem to cap out at a few hundred... or a couple thousand if you're lucky. This co-op-friendly FoCo article focuses on employee ownership, not employee management, but it mentions one of the problems with scale.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/40572926/more-u-s-businesses-are-becoming-worker-co-ops-heres-why
    The factors that determine if a business is eligible for transition to a cooperative vary by circumstance, but there are some rough criteria. Generally, coops tend to form from businesses with a minimum of 20 employees, and no more than a few hundred (though there are exceptions–Cooperative Home Care Associates in New York is the country’s largest worker-owned cooperative and employs nearly 2,000 workers). The relatively manageable size ensures that each employee can purchase a share of the company that’s large enough to be meaningful, but not so expensive as to be prohibitive. Longevity in the community is also a benefit. Businesses like A Child’s Place that have a long tenure in a specific neighborhood and meet a social and emotional need often make the most sense to organize as a cooperative, as employee ownership guarantees that company culture holds steady even in times of transition.

    Maybe that's a feature, not a bug. Maybe it's better for workers in general for firms to be smaller. But I don't think we can conclusively say that.

    There's an essay written by second-wave feminist Joreen Freeman about her experiences with flat organizational structures, specifically in feminist activism, where she identifies (from her own observations) what makes flat organizations work and what doesn't. It's not a scientific study, but I find it convincing (and it is compatible with some of the social science I've read on the subject). It's called The Tyranny of Structurelessness. Here's what makes them work, in her view:
    1) It is task oriented. Its function is very narrow and very specific, like putting on a conference or putting out a newspaper. It is the task that basically structures the group. The task determines what needs to be done and when it needs to be done. It provides a guide by which people can judge their actions and make plans for future activity.

    2) It is relatively small and homogeneous. Homogeneity is necessary to insure that participants have a "common language" for interaction. People from widely different backgrounds may provide richness to a consciousness-raising group where each can learn from the others' experience, but too great a diversity among members of a task-oriented group means only that they continually misunderstand each other. Such diverse people interpret words and actions differently. They have different expectations about each other's behavior and judge the results according to different criteria. If everyone knows everyone else well enough to understand the nuances, these can be accommodated. Usually, they only lead to confusion and endless hours spent straightening out conflicts no one ever thought would arise.

    3) There is a high degree of communication. Information must be passed on to everyone, opinions checked, work divided up, and participation assured in the relevant decisions. This is only possible if the group is small and people practically live together for the most crucial phases of the task. Needless to say, the number of interactions necessary to involve everybody increases geometrically with the number of participants. This inevitably limits group participants to about five, or excludes some from some of the decisions. Successful groups can be as large as 10 or 15, but only when they are in fact composed of several smaller subgroups which perform specific parts of the task, and whose members overlap with each other so that knowledge of what the different subgroups are doing can be passed around easily.

    4) There is a low degree of skill specialization. Not everyone has to be able to do everything, but everything must be able to be done by more than one person. Thus no one is indispensable. To a certain extent, people become interchangeable parts.

    While these conditions can occur serendipitously in small groups, this is not possible in large ones.

    ...
    Lanz wrote: »
    A hierarchical organization wherein employees elect their bosses and a council to chart the course of the company, with term lengths and recall ability? Go for it. At the end of the day, the key is to allow for worker self-determination, and there are multiple forms and levels of democratic methods to achieve that end.

    I'm more sympathetic to this. I'm not a fan of direct democracy at all. I do not believe it is a valid purpose of democracy to execute the will of the people. I am sympathetic to representative democracy - giving the people affected by leadership the ability to choose their leadership.

    But I'd like to contrast two statements against each other:
    Lanz wrote: »
    I don't want to prescribe any one specific form since I don't think there's necessarily going to be any kind of one size fits all "best democracy" implementation, so it's best to leave that to the employees forming the company to structure that themselves.
    Lanz wrote: »
    As for those who won't shift, in the long term, provided you have a state or federal legislation that requires employee ownership of their places of work, I would imagine the same thing happens to any other business that runs afoul of various regulations: fines, loss of licensing from the state corporate commission, etc. Loss of license to operate as a business would probably be better for larger companies that could potentially just weather fine after fine.

    The law, as they say, is a blunt instrument. If you want to use legislation or regulation to enforce democratic corporate structures, you have to be very specific about what that looks like, and accept that the gavel will smack down some businesses that are democratic but don't fit the narrow model defined by law. (Or the law can be vague, and therefore toothless.)

    Also, this reminds me of a conversation I had a while back with a socialist who was a fan of Elinor Ostrom. I think Ostrom's work is fascinating. She also supports a multiplicity of approaches and diversity of bottom-up organizational structures.

    But what if the workers don't want what you're offering?

    In these discussions we often conflate employee-managed businesses with employee-owned businesses. I'm guilty of it, too. I was being sloppy in my language earlier in the thread.

    In the US, we have a number of ways to turn employees into investors, like profit-sharing, or employee stock purchase programs. These may or may not come with the ability to vote on leadership.

    To contrast, we can easily imagine a world in which labor is unionized by default, and union leaders have seats on the board of executives. (Similar to the corporate structure that exists in many EU companies.) In these cases, labor doesn't (necessarily) have an ownership stake (though they might, employee stock purchase programs are incentivized in a lot of EU countries).

    Giving employees a representative in corporate leadership (who can be voted in or out and actually has some authority) makes sense to me.

    But I may or may not want to own a piece of my business. I sometimes get job offers where I get a slightly lower regular salary in exchange for stock ownership or profit sharing and I will usually (though not always) turn them down. Why? Because I want my compensation to be stable. In almost every case, I'd rather be laid off (and collect unemployment) than take a drastic compensation cut during a downturn.

    Socializing ownership necessarily implies socializing risk. I can anticipate a likely retort: "yeah, but we socialize risk now, your company can fire you for any reason or no reason at all." I agree with that - but I'm not arguing for the status quo (in the US). The current American model of capitalism sucks! But I support broad social welfare structures that mitigate that risk, regardless of the way businesses are structured - unemployment insurance, UBI, etc.

    Similarly, upthread you had trouble accepting that somebody just wants to be a "tool" or a "cog in the machine." I wouldn't use those terms, exactly, but I don't really need to feel a strong personal attachment to my job. It's just something I can do to eat and pay rent. It doesn't need to be meaningful.

    The idea of having representation in corporate leadership to cut down on abuse, overwork, bad conditions, etc. very much appeals to me, and I'm totally with you on that.

    But I don't really want to co-own my workplace (in an investment/profit-sharing sense). That doesn't appeal to me in the slightest. It doesn't particularly bother me that somebody else profits off of my labor. I am perfectly comfortable with the basic capitalist relationship: I'll give the investor my labor, the investor gives me a salary, and skims any profits off the top. I'm not comfortable with the investor class and their representatives in management treating labor like indentured servants, but I don't think we need to up-end the whole system to ameliorate that.

    I really appreciate this post and agree with most everything you have to say except the final point, which I think is an important part of why the system is fundamentally broken. The problem relationship is that when you are working for a flat market wage rather than receiving a proportion of profits, you are building the structure that funnels money upward. Proudhon breaks it down in a sort of simplified illustrative example which I quite liked (which I paraphrase here):

    You have a group of farmers who have struck out into the frontier and staked a claim on equally divided land, with each plot capable of yielding many times the food necessary to feed a single farmer given that it is worked for the entire year. One farmer has been blessed by having been wealthy beforehand, and has brought copious amounts of food with him, the rest of the farmers had little food to bring with them and begin to starve while they try to work their fields for the harvest. The wealthy farmer, in his generosity, offers the other farmers a deal: come work my land for me instead of your own and I will feed you while you work. The farmers labor on his farm, and have enough to eat, but little left over, and when the job is done and harvest time comes they haven't been able to use any of their labor on working their own fields so they're all barren, and with no claim to the (literal) fruits of their own labor they will starve (having already eaten their wages in the course of laboring for a year).

    What are the farmers going to do? The wealthy farmer, having the whole harvest of all the other farmer's work available to him, gives all the other farmers another deal: I'll give you a portion of my land's harvest if you sell me your own land, which is useless to you now as it was never plowed. Faced again with starvation, the other farmers have no choice but to take the deal. And now with no land of their own to work, when spring comes again they have no other option for obtaining sustenance but to work the land that was once theirs but now belongs to the rich man in return for the wages the man offers, these wages being significantly less than the harvest that they produce for the rich man on his land that would've been theirs.

    The initial inequality of the situation is necessarily exacerbated. The workers could not improve their situation by demanding a higher wage (assume that the rich man really did pay them all the highest wages he could afford, initially), it is explicitly because they do not have any right to the profit of their own labor (labor that could not have happened without them) but no room to negotiate for a portion of the profit (they will starve if they do not take their wages), the person who will benefit by the greatest portion will always be the rich owner, and his wealth will always increase in such a way that puts him in a better position to make a claim to a larger portion of the wealth than any of the workers over time, inequality will only ever get worse without workers having a necessary claim on the profits of their own labor.

    Winky on
  • WinkyWinky rRegistered User regular
    edited January 2020
    shryke wrote: »
    Lanz wrote: »
    Heffling wrote: »
    Money is a single unit value we assign to materials and/or time spent, and is meant to be an intermediary to allow for the smooth functioning of things like trade. Like any single unit value representing a complex system, it can be perverted. But money isn't a "method of controlling the behavior of others." There is nothing that you compels you as an individual to participate in the exchange of money for goods and services, and there are people in the US who disavow entirely the use of money and instead live off the land and barter for the things they cannot make themselves. That's not to say it is easy, but it is possible to live a life free from money. It is up the the individual to make that choice.

    Money itself is just a unit of value. A dollar represents X amount of time from one profession, Y amount of time from another profession, or Z amount of material goods. It means I can buy an apple for $0.50 or a large industrial valve for $10,000, and could exchange 20,000 of my apples for one industrial valve without having to find an industrial valve manufacturer that wants 20,000 apples.

    Money can certainly be abused to control others, as is often done with the poor and minorities. But the problem in these cases isn't money, it's the society that represses them. And there are other systemic issues that need to be addressed as well, such as biased laws, a biased police and legal system, racism, etc. Money is just a tool.

    This feels like it's looking at money from a theoretical/intended perspective and not how it is regularly utilized in practice.

    Like money is totally a method by which control and power is exerted, in practice. It doesn't matter that it wasn't what it was meant for, people went and did it anyway, and it's the practical existing use that you need to be concerned about.

    Also I regarding "nothing that compels you" about using money for goods and services: People need to eat, people need shelter. Those things cost money in American society and thanks to, you know, the whole "literally founded as a colony that became an expanding settler nation" thing, there's not a lot of places in America where you could somehow go off the grid, live off the land, etc. even if you had the skills and knowledge about how to survive in the wilds.

    Which also like, how do you do that without money? What areas of the US are there where you don't have to have money to live a detached, wilderness lifestyle? And on top of which, there certainly isn't enough of it to support that for everyone in a nation of over three hundred million people.

    The system as it stands compels you to participate in money-based commerce, because we have by and large made it impossible to live outside of it at anything resembling societal scales, because we generally like living in cities or rural communities where most if not all the land belongs to someone or another (we really like the whole "land ownership" thing in America), be they individual, corporation or state entity.

    To say that nothing compels you to participate seems like a really, really ludicrous prospect for the practical lives of most of the people living in America. We might as well talk about bootstrapping your way up to billionaire status so you too can be a philanthropist.

    Heffling is more pointing out that money is not "a method for controlling the behaviour of others", it's a representation of value. It's purpose is not to control others and you don't need it to control others. It's only representing many of the things that you can use to do that and absent money you would just use those things directly and use a different representation. Societies without money are not societies without the ability to use power of one form or another to influence and control others. Seeing money itself, as a tool, as the problem is not really accurate.

    Again, this is worth breaking into its own thread, but to quote Banks "Money is a sign of poverty".

    At least in the current system we live in (there are potential ways to have a currency system that avoid these problems), the end result of our money system is to distinguish people who are allowed to have resources as opposed to those who are not. As a fiat currency, the only way in which the value of money is maintained is through the use of violence (US law ensures that violence will be used to back your right to your own assets, liquid or otherwise, in accordance with the law of the state/country). So in a very real sense the value of a dollar is that you are physically forced to respect it (if you don't, you will fall on the wrong side of the law), and that's fundamentally where it derives its stability and therefore value as a currency from. And, mind you, if you do not have money, you must starve or otherwise be severely limited in your ability to carry out basic life functions. There is no sense in which anyone can opt out from the repercussions of our economic system. Even the land itself is owned, taxed, and must yield interest or else put you deeper into debt.

    Winky on
  • LanzLanz ...Za?Registered User regular
    edited January 2020
    shryke wrote: »
    Lanz wrote: »
    Heffling wrote: »
    Money is a single unit value we assign to materials and/or time spent, and is meant to be an intermediary to allow for the smooth functioning of things like trade. Like any single unit value representing a complex system, it can be perverted. But money isn't a "method of controlling the behavior of others." There is nothing that you compels you as an individual to participate in the exchange of money for goods and services, and there are people in the US who disavow entirely the use of money and instead live off the land and barter for the things they cannot make themselves. That's not to say it is easy, but it is possible to live a life free from money. It is up the the individual to make that choice.

    Money itself is just a unit of value. A dollar represents X amount of time from one profession, Y amount of time from another profession, or Z amount of material goods. It means I can buy an apple for $0.50 or a large industrial valve for $10,000, and could exchange 20,000 of my apples for one industrial valve without having to find an industrial valve manufacturer that wants 20,000 apples.

    Money can certainly be abused to control others, as is often done with the poor and minorities. But the problem in these cases isn't money, it's the society that represses them. And there are other systemic issues that need to be addressed as well, such as biased laws, a biased police and legal system, racism, etc. Money is just a tool.

    This feels like it's looking at money from a theoretical/intended perspective and not how it is regularly utilized in practice.

    Like money is totally a method by which control and power is exerted, in practice. It doesn't matter that it wasn't what it was meant for, people went and did it anyway, and it's the practical existing use that you need to be concerned about.

    Also I regarding "nothing that compels you" about using money for goods and services: People need to eat, people need shelter. Those things cost money in American society and thanks to, you know, the whole "literally founded as a colony that became an expanding settler nation" thing, there's not a lot of places in America where you could somehow go off the grid, live off the land, etc. even if you had the skills and knowledge about how to survive in the wilds.

    Which also like, how do you do that without money? What areas of the US are there where you don't have to have money to live a detached, wilderness lifestyle? And on top of which, there certainly isn't enough of it to support that for everyone in a nation of over three hundred million people.

    The system as it stands compels you to participate in money-based commerce, because we have by and large made it impossible to live outside of it at anything resembling societal scales, because we generally like living in cities or rural communities where most if not all the land belongs to someone or another (we really like the whole "land ownership" thing in America), be they individual, corporation or state entity.

    To say that nothing compels you to participate seems like a really, really ludicrous prospect for the practical lives of most of the people living in America. We might as well talk about bootstrapping your way up to billionaire status so you too can be a philanthropist.

    Heffling is more pointing out that money is not "a method for controlling the behaviour of others", it's a representation of value. It's purpose is not to control others and you don't need it to control others. It's only representing many of the things that you can use to do that and absent money you would just use those things directly and use a different representation. Societies without money are not societies without the ability to use power of one form or another to influence and control others. Seeing money itself, as a tool, as the problem is not really accurate.

    again, this is an argument from abstract theory.

    In theory, yeah, money is "a representation of value."

    In actual practice, in the context of a market society that does not provide a base level of living to its populace, that theory breaks down and you have to engage with how it is being used by the populace. And it is regularly used as a method of control and execution of power on the part of those with money.

    It doesn't matter if the intended purpose is some value neutral whatever when that breaks down and changes function the moment you actually put it into the system with human actors who don't give a fuck about the "intended purpose of money"

    You have to engage with actual reality, and not ideal hypotheticals!

    That's why we have this thread to begin with, because billionaires use the power their money affords them to execute power according to their desires without democratic accountability in influencing the course of a shared society!

    Lanz on
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