undefined | Better HN

0 pointsdash21y ago0 comments

Better still, optimize for social value provided. If taxes and regulation are right, companies that provide social value will make profits and their owners will get rich. The proposed changes would make that less likely to happen. If nothing else, (a) individual companies all optimizing their own workers' welfare does not add up to optimizing the welfare of all workers and (b) non-workers are left out of the equation.

0 comments

7 comments · 2 top-level

jjmarr1y ago· 5 in thread

This is the purpose of the mixed economy in which most of us live. The government changes the rules of the game to try to align the profit motive with social good, because they are naturally not aligned.

You haven't said why worker cooperatives optimizing the benefit of their own workers wouldn't add up to more welfare if the entire economy was based around worker cooperatives.

in my opinion worker ownership of the means of production is just socialism, and that doesn't have a good historical track record.

malcolmgreaves1y ago

> good historical track record

Please cite some sources that are not communist countries. You know, “just socialism.”

You way want to also ignore the existence of Norway, much of Europe, and popular US federal programs too when you're doing this exercise.

qwytw1y ago

Please list any countries are are "just socialist" not communist. If we're compared hypothetical systems vs actual real-world ones it's not exactly fair.

> existence of Norway

Which is certainly not a "socialist" countries, unless you define socialism in extremely broad and ambiguous terms at which point the word losses any meaning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy isn't socialism by any reasonable definition. Unless you think Bismarck was a socialist...

jjmarr1y ago

I'm more interested in hearing why the above post and the examples you've cited fixed the problems that others have encountered in the socialism space.

If this was a startup trying to make worker owned co-ops more attractive I'd see a blog post explaining how they fixed the problems everyone else was having. That, and explanations of how this scales to an entire society.

That's the standard of discussion for everything else on this site and it shouldn't disappear because the subject is socialism.

trinsic21y ago

Exactly. Sick of people applying the catch-phrase "socialism" to everything to marginalize a method of community good.

2 more replies

blackhawkC171y ago

Norway has more billionaires per capita than the USA.

It’s not socialist in any sense. It’s a diehard capitalist country with a lot of public services and welfare (funded by taxes generated under a capitalist system).

kerkeslager1y ago

As opposed to now, when non-executives and non-shareholders are left out of the equation...

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse