jlou

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

A variant of this should replace non-profit tax exemptions and all campaign finance rules.

The way to prevent bribing is secret and anonymous contributions. You could, for example, imagine including these contributions to your favorite media and FOSS organizations as part of your ballot.

This could be implemented by a federation of worker coops to fund local public goods that all the member coops benefit from with the matching pool coming from membership fees and Harberger leases

@socialism

 

TED talk on quadratic funding, a non-market mechanism that a postcapitalist society could use to support a decentralized ecosystem of public goods available to each according to need

"How Quadratic Funding Could Finance Your Dreams | Kevin Owocki | TED"

https://youtu.be/1GRt0j698T4

This mechanism could be used to solve funding issues in public goods such as journalism and FOSS.

Please ignore the reference to crypto. This could be incorporated into today's voting process

@socialism

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Any company that receives government subsidies or is bailed out because it's too big too fail or whatever the reason should be mandated to become a worker coop

@politics

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The founders can hold more or all non-voting preferred stock in the worker coop to represent their larger stake and investment. They can also use a separate corporation, which only the founders own, with no employees to hold their capital and then lease it the worker coop

@politics

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

It would definitely be easier in an economy where this was the only way of doing things.

I am not a lawyer.

Based on the underlying economic theory and ethical arguments for worker coops/employee-owned companies, what you could do in such a situation is make a separate legal entity for the worker coop, and then lease the assets of the current legal entity to the worker coop. You and your partner maintain exclusive ownership of the original legal entity

@politics

 

A distraction from the election: The case for employee-owned companies

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/column-the-case-for-employee-owned-companies

"Ellerman has for years made an argument as startling as it is hard to refute: “the labor theory of property.” It’s that employees should own the firms they work for because of very simple logic: If they’re responsible for the consequences of their actions while on the job — committing a crime, say — how can it be that they’re not responsible for the positive things they do?"

@politics

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The statement being false implies that it is true, which is why this statement is contradictory if there are any omniscient beings

@atheistmemes

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Today's legal systems mandate that legal responsibility be non-transferable for crimes. The economic democracy position argues that legal responsibility should be generally non-transferable matching general non-transferability of de facto responsibility due to the principle of justice that legal and de facto responsibility should match. Not all mandates are authoritarian (e.g. a mandate that one must respect others' personal property). Employment violates workers' property rights

@canada

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Political democracy also mandates legal non-transferability for voting rights. Would you allow people to sell or transfer their voting rights?

People prefer democratic firms: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/what-do-americans-want-from-private-government-experimental-evidence-demonstrates-that-americans-want-workplace-democracy/D9C1DBB6F95D9EEA35A34ABF016511F4

A mandate doesn't restrict any non-institutionally-described action as labor is de facto non-transferable. It only prevents fraudulently treating de facto responsible persons as legal non-responsible things.

Are we free when we can sell our freedom or when we can't even if we want to?

@canada

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 days ago (4 children)

The idea is to mandate worker coop structure on all firms.

It's not that telling. Without a worker coop mandate, there are collective action problems and market failures. It's harder for all the workers to cooperate to form a worker coop than an employer to hire up all the workers.

No society has a full worker coop mandate because the modern arguments for it were published in the 90s. Some countries do mandate some worker board representation and codetermination though
@canada

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 days ago

Or we could abolish the employer-employee contract and mandate that all firms be worker coops, so that no one could appropriate the positive and negative fruits of other people's labor

@news

[–] [email protected] -2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The statement is only generates a contradiction if there is an omniscient being. If there are no omniscient beings, it is consistent.

The idea is that it is impossible for a being to both know and not know something. Knowable is not the same as known to a particular being

@atheistmemes

 

If God must be omniscient, God doesn't exist

@atheistmemes

 

James Robinson, Nobel laureate in Economics: ‘You cannot achieve an inclusive economy with an authoritarian regime’

https://english.elpais.com/economy-and-business/2024-10-22/james-robinson-nobel-laureate-in-economics-you-cannot-achieve-an-inclusive-economy-with-an-authoritarian-regime.html

The economist and political scientist from the University of Chicago rejects the idea that repressive power structures will surpass the success of democratic systems, predicting that the Chinese model will eventually have to change

@politics

 

Math Is Still Catching Up to the Mysterious Genius of Srinivasa Ramanujan

https://www.quantamagazine.org/srinivasa-ramanujan-was-a-genius-math-is-still-catching-up-20241021/

Born poor in colonial India and dead at 32, Ramanujan had fantastical, out-of-nowhere visions that continue to shape the field today

@science

 

Can a sentence be both true and false in the same sense? - Dialetheism

It might seem nonsensical until one sees the liar's paradox:

This sentence is false.

Using classical logic, this sentence seems to be both true and false. Due to the explosion rule, that implies every sentence. This is absurd, but philosophers don't agree on what has gone wrong here.

Dialetheism is the solution that accepts that it is both true and false and modifies logic to exclude the principle of explosion

@general

 

John Rawls and the death of Western Marxism

https://josephheath.substack.com/p/john-rawls-and-the-death-of-western

Anti-capitalist theory needs to move beyond Marxism. The theory of inalienable rights and the labor theory of property are significantly more powerful critiques of capitalism than Analytical Marxism, and don't suffer from the problems that Marxist critiques do. The theory is also easy to understand. Marxism, unfortunately, has been more influential then classical laborists such as Proudhon

https://www.ellerman.org/inalienable-rights-part-i-the-basic-argument/

@socialism

 

I hate elasticity of demand

@politicalmemes

 

"Are We Being Robbed?" (by the employing class)

https://substack.com/@join/p-122755017

Andrew Van Wagner interviews David Ellerman about Economic Democracy

@workreform

 

Putting Jurisprudence Back into Economics

https://www.exploring-economics.org/en/discover/putting-jurisprudence-back-into-economics/

Economics as it has been defined in the 20th century has largely ignored questions of jurisprudence, property rights, contracts and legal structure of economic institutions. Bringing jurisprudence considerations back into economics leads to radically different conclusions

@economics

 

Why progressives should advocate for universal worker democracy (i.e. worker coops) and oppose employer-employee contracts - "Inalienable Rights: Part I The Basic Argument"

https://www.ellerman.org/inalienable-rights-part-i-the-basic-argument/

One of the original progressive ideas was that of an inalienable right, which is a right that people cannot give up even with consent. This idea is often misinterpreted in modern political thought. This article explains inalienable rights and how it implies a worker coop mandate

@progressivepolitics

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