by evilgenius » Sat 25 Aug 2018, 12:35:44
Don't forget why capitalism is called that. Someone took a chance and invested. They put capital into an endeavor. They get to own the endeavor because of it. The concept of ownership is reflected in the basis of accounting, assets = liabilities plus owner's equity. But who says it stops there? Corporations, which are legally understood as people, are how we operate capitalism. You can be a private person and operate within the system, but you can't declare bankruptcy for your business separate from your person. To do that, you have to incorporate. Incorporation means officially stating the basic structure of the business. The charter states how many shares there are of ownership and who owns them, initially. If you own shares you can sell them, as outlined in the charter.
When I talk about the law addressing this I mean some of the things mentioned already. Taxes, for instance, are a great way to influence people's behavior. And it is the behavior of the people who own a business toward how that business operates that we are getting at, isn't it? But you can also do that by addressing ownership itself.
Socialism has sought to do that through confiscation. But confiscation is radical and prevents a clear understanding of what role a business will play when the playing field it's always operated upon itself changes. Businesses, like rail or television, work alright under government direction until something fundamental happens to change their business environment. Then the too slow pace of how the collective mind of the people, which is what the government is, fails to provide adequate direction.
I've suggested, in some other posts on this site, ways to do this, by creating opposing classes of stock which are set up to naturally come from different viewpoints as to how to run a corporation or to whom the benefits go, which might be more responsive, for instance. That's just one suggestion. The gig economy lays out another, that gig workers can form collective ownership of an enterprise. These could be adjunct enterprises or play as you may enterprises. We don't have to treat corporations like gamblers at a table either. They don't have to participate at each go round. They could be things which only participate when there is something for them to do.
We've always looked upon those who contribute labor as expenses. That has always been the correct way to look upon workers. But gig economy workers are not your typical worker as we've come to think of workers over the past few hundred years. When they've always been interchangeable, they secured that definition. But gig workers could adhere together in certain endeavors where there is a sort of cooperation made possible by the modern flow of information. Would you give the facilitator of such a thing, some website maybe, sole ownership of such a thing merely because it brought various actors together to do such a thing? For certain endeavors, the interchangeability could actually be said to lay with the website, and not with the so-called workers. Who says that corporations require some sort of central directive focus? Can that focus be more decentralized and the result still be called capitalism? We only say that it can't because that's how we've always done things.
Basically, it's about involvement. When Bernie Sanders comes along and wants to share the wealth it's acceptable if he chooses to do that by using taxes. If he chooses to do it by using confiscation, however, that is a whole other matter. It isn't correct to expect direction from the uninvolved. There isn't a way for them to participate. They will have a whole governmental layer between what they want as individuals and what directives get handed down. And pace of leadership would be effected. Bernie is not coming and asking the people what they can do for their country, as John Kennedy did, requesting involvement. Nor is there a way to institute responsibility, the type of which only something like bankruptcy can resolve when things go sideways.
