Every company should be owned by its employees • Hacker News Board

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#731

Post by consteval » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 6:14 PM UTC

havblue wrote: post #550

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just like how communism There is some kind of derangement in the English speaking West, any attempt to reign in power of capital must be communist. If free public libraries didn't exist and were proposed today, they'd be accused of communism. If free public legal deference did not exist today, anyone proposing it would be accused of being a communist. Also notice that using public money to hurt a person, i.e. prose…

>There is some kind of derangement in the English speaking West, any attempt to reign in power of capital must be communist. I do believe corporatism is a problem with modernity. That being said, the article does sound fairly similar to "workers must own the means of production". Are we not in the ballpark of Marx, for better or worse?

No, this is socialism as best. Not communism.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#732

Post by WalterBright » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 6:17 PM UTC

piva00 wrote: post #689

WalterBright wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's way more efficient than any other system that has been tried. Free markets bury command economies.

It doesn't mean it's the end all system, if it's wasteful it can be improved. At no point I advocated for a command economy, once more you reply to a strawman to one of my comments, Walter.

Public funding for whatever means the government is picking winners and losers. Whoever pays the piper calls the tunes. Public funding always comes with strings.

The government funded Langley with $60,000 to build a working airplane. It fell into the Potomac "like a sack of wet cement".

The Wrights spent $3,000 and build a working, flying airplane.

The jet engine was invented and developed with private funds. The US government told Lockheed to stop working on jet engines and develop better piston engines instead.

AI, the biggest tech revolution in a couple decades, seems to have been privately funded.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#733

Post by pineaux » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 6:18 PM UTC

harhargange wrote: post #675

Apocryphon wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like confirmation bias. We often than not like to lionize successful individuals, but plenty of visions are false or otherwise fail. On the other hand, we tend not to remember group efforts because it's harder to remember multiple individuals at a time. But surely they do exist. Was there a single visionary behind Bell Labs? Xerox PARC? The traitorous eight? The Apollo program? The Manhattan Project?

I believe there would be a single polymath who has skills in multiple fields, such as Oppenheimer who was great at science and administration who can lead a group for successful execution. For Apollo moon mission, it was the US president vision at the foremost. Even for TSMC and other companies such people exist. I don't want to say that entire credit goes to an individual but leaders with multiple skills are necessa…

Nah, this is not true. This is just the narrative because someone want to get the honors or the stacks of cash. Apple wasn't created by Steve Jobs. Not even created by Steve Jobs and the Woz. They did start something that eventually became Apple. They had a lot of sway, but without all the other people that worked there and created all the important details it would have just been a pipe dream.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#734

Post by bognition » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 6:19 PM UTC

overrun11 wrote: post #713

nostrademons wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is arguing for ESOPs, basically stock options for employees. The examples cited are actually quite tame by tech industry standards: "During Central States’ worst year, employees earned the equivalent of 6 percent of their pay in stock, during their best they earned 26 percent." By contrast, FANG employees routinely make >50% of their compensation in stock, and it can be up to 80% in good years. As for how…

There's no reason why this is beneficial. Money and stocks are fungible you can freely exchange one for the other as much as your heart desires. There's no difference between which one you receive.

Let's ignore that most of the places people work are not publicly traded companies and pretend that any employee could buy stock in their employer.

If that were the case and employees were compensated equally in stock vs cash, then yes there is no _rational_ difference. However, most human are not rational.

People like to take pride in their work and do a great job, this is amplified when they stand to directly benefit from their efforts. By enabling employees ownership in a company you're hoping to incentivize them to work harder and therefore amplify the return on their labor.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#735

Post by esarbe » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 6:19 PM UTC

harhargange wrote: post #670

RandomCitizen12 wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How would a business like this get started? Usually the owner is the one who invests a lot of their own time and/or money into the business to get it off the ground in the first place. Would we be asking workers to pony up in those early years when failure is likely? In Canada, there are 'Labour Sponsored Venture Capital Corporations' with union overseers to do this and special tax deductions for investing money th…

Moreover, splitting the decision making is so conflict prone and unoptimised for competition. I had a look at some statistics that showed most successful startups take off when they have a single founder

This is about ownership, not decision making. How you set up the decision making process is entirely up to the company.

The same argument could be made for any other kind of shared ownership company.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#736

Post by linsomniac » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 6:21 PM UTC

I came shockingly close to being a billionaire, and one of the things I've been fantasizing about recently for how I'd spend a billion dollars is: angel investing in a private Amazon/WalMart replacement (online, retail, warehouse, delivery). Never to touch the stock market. With the goal being to build a business that could pay people a living wage to work there, and allow them time to hit the john when they need to.

Rather than filtering vast sums of the revenue into the C-suite and shareholders, coming up with a way to make the workers be able to afford housing.

So far, it's just a pipe dream. "We're all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#737

Post by Aerroon » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 6:21 PM UTC

bccdee wrote: post #466

pembrook wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what are you suggesting? We forcibly allocate capital less efficiently; make markets less efficient and less responsive to innovation; with the sole aim of achieving a utopian worker-cooperative owned world? Hrmmm, where have I heard that before...

> We forcibly allocate capital less efficiently Efficiency with regard to what goal? The current allocation of capital in the US is quite inefficient if we're interested in the welfare of the public. Billionaires have far more capital than they know what to do with, and since they're unaccountable for their investment choices, they strongly tend to steer the economy toward vanity projects. Meanwhile, many families ca…

>The current allocation of capital in the US is quite inefficient if we're interested in the welfare of the public.

The welfare of the public today is not the same as the welfare of the public for all time. The Soviet Union couldn't compete on the development of computers, because the USSR was trying to optimize towards what could computers be used for then and there. It turned out that computers could be used for a lot more than what people thought of at the time.

Drug R&D and patents lead to enormous profits for companies, because they can charge outrageous prices for the drugs. But the benefit to the public is that now those drugs and the knowledge about them exist. That's going to have a cumulative positive effect for hundreds of years in the future.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#738

Post by AnimalMuppet » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 6:21 PM UTC

munificent wrote: post #656

> “It's hard to build true wealth for yourself if you don't have some type of ownership in something, and it's hard for most people to get ownership in something,” Ruger says. I think this is a really good insight. But it also touches on something that many of the HN crowd, especially in the Bay Area find uncomfortable: home ownership. One of the ownership assets that is most attainable by many Americans is a little…

How about this scenario:

Houses go up in price exactly in keeping with inflation. I buy a house with 10% down[1] as a way of locking in the current price, to avoid my rent going up every six months, even if the initial payment is more than my rent[2].

Time passes. The price of everything doubles. If I had kept my down payment instead of buying the house, it would have grown into twice as many dollars, and still be worth the original amount in actual value. My house has also doubled in value. But I only paid for 10% of it with pre-inflation dollars (and since then I have paid the mortgage with dollars of decreasing value). I come out ahead in that scenario - my net worth has grown, even adjusting for inflation.

[1] Yes, I am ignoring the difficulty of scraping together the down payment.

[2] Yes, I am also ignoring the difficulty of having enough spare cash to make the payments the first year or two.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#739

Post by xikrib » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 6:22 PM UTC

linsomniac wrote: post #736

I came shockingly close to being a billionaire, and one of the things I've been fantasizing about recently for how I'd spend a billion dollars is: angel investing in a private Amazon/WalMart replacement (online, retail, warehouse, delivery). Never to touch the stock market. With the goal being to build a business that could pay people a living wage to work there, and allow them time to hit the john when they need to.…

Doesn't sound like you're in the gutter champ

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#740

Post by SanderNL » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 6:23 PM UTC

Businesses are some kind of feudal leftovers that refuse to die. The serfs not only accept it, they actively defend it. Meanwhile the billionaires lean back and smile.

I don’t see why nation states should be democracies, but “businesses” should be private dictatorships. It’s a waste of shared resources. Your personal army of value generating serfs is taking away from our collective capacity to do useful communal work.