Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's actually not rhetorical - I really wanna know what leads to this to-me-obvious contradiction. One answer is obvious - every organization's primary goal is its own survival. So a democratic state will indoctrinate ("educate") children into believing democracy is the right way. But no school teaches about corporate power structures and cooperatives are so rare that they have little influence on the curriculum. Wha…
> Then people realized you could get a bunch of these builders to work for you and take a cut from each of them - sometimes at least in exchange for providing marketing or "the means of production" but without providing any _real_ (positive-sum) work This is just a classic mistake: failing to account for risk as a significant input. Any business that needs money to start needs people to risk their reputation or their…
Nobody is risking their reputation, that's just being over-dramatic.
Money? Sure. There's two kinds of people here:
a) Rich but not obscenely so - you can save up enough from normal work to get enough runway to start a small company which grows organically - you get a few really good people (who might even accept a lower salary than they could command it a corporation just because they want to work on something meaningful for once) and/or you do a lot of the work yourself. Then you keep building until you get income or run out of money. Factorio is a great example of this approach succeeding - but even they needed to use Indiegogo at one point and were close to not making it.
b) Those obscenely rich - those who have more money than a single person could make from positive-sum work, no matter how skilled. (Art/sport/showbusiness are interesting exceptions but are they really positive sum?) These people have so much money they don't care if they lose it sometimes, as long as they multiply it sometimes. If you fund 10 companies, each with 10% chance of success, only 1 needs to make it and give you >10x return on investment. If you own an apartment complex with 30 people and take a third of each person's salary, you can afford to fund a company of 10 people indefinitely.
As a result, the obscenely rich get a much higher chance to succeed, in turn owning more companies, in turn getting more rich.
> If I design a machine and you build it, who owns what?
Ownership does not have to be exclusive. In fact, it almost never should. It should be distributed based on the amount of work, skill required, competence, etc.
It can get complex but let's not pretend it's worse than the current salary negotiations where one side is basically blind and pair per unit of work and the other has all the information and takes a cut from everyone's output.