Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[SalmonGod]

Most humans are easily corruptible. Machines break. What options do we really have?

Abolish hierarchy.  Coercive authority is not strictly necessary in order to organize a society.

Abolish the societal mechanisms that grant one person leverage over another. 

Property is the top offender. 
Capture a person by force and threaten him into doing work for you, and he will plot for freedom, with the understanding that he is slave and subject to an immoral and violent master. 
Capture the resources that human beings need to survive by way of economics, and refuse to share with anyone who doesn't agree to help you capture more and.... people will shrug and say "It's their stuff.  What can I do?" 
And it will be that way until the very idea of owning something that one does not have a direct and personal relationship with (i.e. a house that you don't live in) is challenged.

[Reelya]

Inter-generational wealth is one of the most insidious things. And I notice that libertarians alway avoid discussing the issue.

The idea that an ever-growing pool of rich people are excluded from ever having to be productive because of what some ancestor did is not a good thing.

Just grabbing chunks of cash off people doesn't seem like a great long-term solution either. Maybe a better way would be to make it law that all excessive wealth must be held by productive corporations rather than individuals, and bring in the idea that all employees of a corporation have a valid stake, not just the "owner". Working for a company and producing has value. "owning" it does not produce value, it sucks value out. By changing the nature of corporate ownership and profits, you'll see a drop in CEO salaries too. Those salaries are there basically to align the CEO's priorities with the shareholders.

[aenri]

Property is the top offender. 

Property is integral part of our life. Nothing satisfies primal urges more than saying "This is mine" and holding said thing in hand.

Inter-generational wealth is one of the most insidious things. And I notice that libertarians alway avoid discussing the issue.

Isn't it a perverse idea that your work in your life won't benefit your next generation? That incentivizes people to think only about themselves and squander all the wealth they get in life and then dying in poverty. It is my belief that you should be proud of the great things your ancestors did, and you should also strive to leave a great legacy behind for your children.

[Helgoland]

Property is the top offender. 

Property is integral part of our life. Nothing satisfies primal urges more than saying "This is mine" and holding said thing in hand.

Y'know, my girlfriend satisfies my primal urges much better than that...

[Sheb]

You don't hold your girlfriend by the hand? That's sad. 

[Helgoland]

You consider women property? Now I know why your ex broke up with you

[Antsan]

Property is the top offender. 

Property is integral part of our life. Nothing satisfies primal urges more than saying "This is mine" and holding said thing in hand.

The "no property" rule normally refers to capital (as in "stuff you need to do work"). Property as in "stuff I need to feel good about myself" is another matter.

[Helgoland]

How does capital accumulation work under such a system though? Politicians haven't exactly proven themselves to be great economic planners...

[Reelya]

That's why I suggested public corporations. We know how corporations work. It's not a mystery how chartered corporations operate.

Removing the concept of private shareholders doesn't have to automatically jump to appointing government beureucrats instead of managers in some sort of frankenstein experiment. 99.9% of people doing their job now would do their job exactly the same if we had chartered public coroprations instead of private shareholder ones.

Corporate entities can invest their funds in other ventures too. There's nothing magical about dividends. And the other idea I did actually float was that every employee becomes a shareholder. Workers for the company can elect or hire a board of directors just the same as other types of shareholders. Again, nothing radical has to happen to the corporate structure so this can fully be enacted as an evolution, not revolution of the model.

[Helgoland]

What's a chartered public corporation? Where does it get its starting capital? How is it controlled? How are the salaries of its managers determined?

[Reelya]

Again, this isn't rocket science. It's establish stuff that's been done over and over

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-benefit_corporation

Actually, maybe it is rocket science since that metaphor is archaic, and rocket science is well established, just like these ideas. You might as well ask how non-profit corporations even exist? But they clearly do. Generally chartered corporations like this are given control over a monopoly area. But there is no reason the law can't stretch to chartering a competitive profit or non-profit corporation.

The idea that a startup like this can't get loans for capital or something really sounds like it's being deliberately stupid. Like I said before, there's nothing magical about shareholders than makes the impossible possible.

[wierd]

You might want to re-evaluate what fascism is.

(Hint: Benito Musolini defined it as "The synthesis of corporate and government powers", where "corporate" was the old "bodies corporate" meaning-- large trade groups operating out of mutual interests. a modern example is the MPAA. What you are proposing is a modern twist on that. Be careful, there be dragons.)

[UXLZ]

Blurh, I'd do terribly in a meritocracy. I'm good at most everything but I'm too apathetic, I'd get outdone by the super-hard-workers.

Honestly, pretty much everything I can think of will always end up like capitalism is now, with 0.0000001% of the population possessing ludicrous power over the rest and warping the system to make themselves practically untouchable.

Humans will always be corrupted by power, even the better systems appear as if they'll still decay with time. Machines also aren't reliable. I'm not sure if a solution actually exists, really...
I'm beginning to sort of understand why people want to believe in higher powers. Then they don't have to be quite so abhorred.

[Reelya]

You might want to re-evaluate what fascism is.

(Hint: Benito Musolini defined it as "The synthesis of corporate and government powers", where "corporate" was the old "bodies corporate" meaning-- large trade groups operating out of mutual interests. a modern example is the MPAA. What you are proposing is a modern twist on that. Be careful, there be dragons.)

... which is why I actually proposed that the employees be the stakeholders when I first brought this up. No government involvement was suggested or is needed. My core idea was that you can start a corporation, but you can only draw your own wage, not a profit. Wages could be set by mutual agreement within the company. If the founder leaves the company, he no longer draws a profit, he's only paid for the value of his actual work.

Also, you're basically saying all public utilities = fascism here, which is a jump off the deep end, almost a Godwin.

[UXLZ]

There was something I was thinking of that limited the highest pay grade in a company to some percentage of the lowest pay grade. The issue is, there are just soooooooo many loopholes in pretty much everything.