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this post was submitted on 16 May 2026
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It's funny that people can understand every person having a lump of gold won't improve their standard of living, but at the same time refuse to understand that owning a piece of a factory or a company they work at also does not directly change the standard of living. Reducing the fraction of the factory output that goes to the owners instead of the workers could. This can be done directly with raising the minimum wage or indirectly via taxes. But in the end, even the most pessimistic calculation I was able to make on how much the owners take was only about 50% of the output. Probably more like 30%.
So the billionaires owning too much is IMO a distraction. Pushing politicians to implement policies that would improve quality of life would have much bigger impact on peoples lives. Consumer protections, walkable cities, good public healthcare, social safety nets, better education, reforming how stock market works, ... And it does not involve the massive risks of trying to switch to a differwnt economic model that always collapsed before.
Perhaps it's the modern obsession with fairness. People don't want to even consider that in reality they may have better quality of life in an unfair system (where billionaire kids get everything on silver platter) than in a fair system. Because in reality, system change, fending off corruption, laziness, authoritarianism, etc. have large costs.
Would workers owning the company not reduce this fraction to zero?
It would. Eliminating the HR would reduce the overhead from HR to zero. Eliminating the tax office would reduce money spent on that to zero. But these things fulfill a function. Could it be done better? Maybe. But why risk on maybes when that's not the biggest problem we have with society at all. Not even in the top 10 if you ask me.
The people just getting paid just for owning something don't seem to be contributing anything useful, and they're using that wealth to make bad long-term decisions on our behalf. We can't fix all the other stuff without the power to do so.
You know, there is nothing wrong with not knowing how investments and markets (stock, commodity, ...) help direct the economy. It's a complex topic that most people really don't need to understand for their lives. But confidently claiming they do nothing just because you don't know is ridiculous...
That's the bad long-term decisions I'm talking about. They are currently directing the economy to end the world.
I am pretty sure what you are trying to talk about is called negative externalities. A negative externality is simply put a cost (harm) that a company inflicts on others and does not have to "pay for" itself. E.g. destroying the environment. The issue is that negative externalities don't just apply to companies and capitalism. They are also what turns communist revolutions into authoritarian regimes. Dealing with them (or realistically minimizing their impact) is an incredibly complex subject. Trying to say we should solve it by getting rid of billionaires is like saying we should solve global warming by dropping ice cubes into the ocean.
How do externalities turn communist revolutions into authoritarian regimes?
This is an incredibly complex topic and depends somewhat on your exact setup of revolution and regime.
Let me give another example of negative externalities to at least vaguely illustrate: corruption. It's the exact same mechanism. The person receiving a bribe benefits from the bribe, but the cost (harm) is usually paid by their employer or society.
For a news agency, a negative externality may be to intentionally spread incorrect information and propaganda. So as an exercise, try to think of the incentives of a news organization in capitalism when it is privately owned and anyone with money can start a competing news agency and in communism, where some kind of political organ (elected or named by elected officials) decides the news agencies funding and if resources are allocated to create a competitor.
Economic and political systems are about incentives. The more the incentives of individual people are aligned with the incentives of society as a whole, the better the system.
Wouldn't workers owning the factors of production reduce negative externalities by introducing democratic voting into the decision-making process? When there's no voting, and simply one guy owning the business, then he's got every incentive to push his costs onto everyone else. If he's bribed to act against our interests, then there's no mechanism to remove him from power.
Have there been any successful examples of markets solving externalities on their own? Like coasian solutions in the wild? The best examples I can think of are banning leaded gasoline and CFCs. And the worst examples of things that aren't happening (like climate targets) are because the people actually in charge don't care if billions of poors die.
Depends on your definition of solve. There is no mechanism directly within capitalism to solve negative externalities that appear in capitalism once they appear. You need government regulations via democracy or another external force to step in and resolve them. That is why the increasing influence of corporations on politics is so harmful.
But capitalism allows fewer negative externalities to appear. Let me give you an example for the worker owned factory. The elected leaders incentive is not to lead a productive factory. It is to be popular and win elections. So what happens when a role becomes obsolete. Perhaps you no longer need a person to stand in an elevator and operate it for people, since it can be automated. But firing people or retraining them for different role is unpopular, so the boss is incentivised to keep elevator operators. This means these people are not allowed to find jobs that are actually productive in improving the standards of living for everyone. People don't like being fired when their position becomes obsolete but it is necessary to develop economies and advance civilization.
Another example is investment. When the factory has surplus profit, should he increase the wages of the employees immediately or invest the money into improving the productivity by buying better equipment or building another factory site? What about maintenance? Should he increase wages and delay the maintenance until it is someone else's problem? Which will be more popular? By the way, this delayed maintenance issue is why public infrastructure is crumbling almost everywhere, since that is overseen by democratically elected leaders.
Capitalism prevents these issues from happening in the first place, since the owner gets a share of the factory output. He is incentivised to make the factory productive. And everyone below the owner is incentivised to help the owner increase productivity since the owner ultimately decides if they are fired or get raises and bonuses. This tends to fall apart when you have short term investors or reintroduce elections of CEO via shareholders. This is why privately owned companies like steam, costco, etc. are usually so much better and rarely get enshitified compared to corporations.
You're describing the doorman fallacy and it's part of why cooperatives outlast traditional businesses. That elevator operator understood the whole company and was willing to gradually shift to new responsibilities.
In the past generation we've seen productivity skyrocket while compensation hasn't.
So there's little to no incentive to increase productivity. You'll get paid more by switching jobs every few years than you will by putting in hard work for the company. We're "alienated" from the results of our labor - someone else gets the gains while our slice keeps getting thinner. The whole point of socialism is to address that.
You are reversing cause and effect. Productivity is rarely affected by bottom level employees to a significant extent these days. That is why there is no pressure for wages to keep up. Your own graph proves productivity is going up despite your claim of unmotivated employees.
I'm addressing this claim here. If increased productivity doesn't increase compensation, then there's no incentive to help the owner increase productivity. This year in particular we saw a lot of layoffs by profitable businesses! The productivity increases we have seen can be more easily attributed to technological advancement than increasingly motivated employees.
Imagine how much more productive we'd be if everyone actually had any reason to give a shit about their company. Because most of us certainly do not.
First of all, this is very questionable, since data from companies that overpaid/indulged their employees like Google and other tech companies in the past did not really see much increase in productivity as far as I can tell.
Second of all, pressure on wages is different. Hence my referral to minimal wages etc. In a sense, a boss is indeed not incentivised to increase productivity if all the gains go to employees anyway, but this is one special edge case. As you say, a majority of productivity gains come from automation improvements and other kinds of innovation and process optimization, where the incentives do apply.
Why do we even need owners in the first place? We don't need to be beholden to the borgeousie and have a class that owns the means of production and gets rich off the labor of others while all they have to do is spend their money and not do any work.
Like employee owned businesses can be a thing.
It's not like we'd have to upend our whole society, just change how employees are compensated, give them some equity in the company they work for and bring up individual incomes. Also tax the ever loving fuck out of profits (or revenue it's arguable which is better) after a certain threshold so the only way to get more money is to reinvest and grow the business. Same with individual wealth taxes.
Nobody needs to be a billionaire. Companies don't need to constantly push their profit up quarter after quarter. We don't need to be beholden to the shareholders just because they have a bunch of money and own stock, we should be the shareholders ourselves.
We need solutions to issues like capital allocation, keeping money circulation speed relatively constant and many many more. Capitalism is one solution to these problems. Perhaps not the best one, but the only one we know can work.
Capitalism is the cause of those problems. Last I checked the people hoarding money in off shore accounts weren't exactly keeping money circulation speed constant. Well, perhaps constantly zero in that case.
You say that like we're not trying to push politicians for walkable cities and healthcare and stock market reforms. Guess who hates all that stuff?
Because they are not gonna hate losing their ownership of the companies even more? Like it's still significantly easier to push for reforms than completely toppling the economic system.
I don't think we need to topple the system to make progress. But they can't keep that wealth and power if we intend to live in a better world. Letting rich people write policy is a bit like letting the fox guard the henhouse. I'm not saying off with their heads, but we should set a practical cap on how much one person can own and at a minimum overturn Citizens United.
I am skeptical about a cap, but the rest is definitely true. Letting them have too much influence on policy is the issue.
Unless you generally make it difficult to keep a fortune at some largest possible size fortunes will continue growing. Maybe we tax $1T at 100%, I don't know, but we are going to have to inconvenience some rich people if we want to stop living in hell.
Lmfao the billionaires are why we can't have nice things, they put their finger on the scale all the time for their own benefit.