Just gathering one data point for my own brain. I know really good people who are doing everything right - but you could dock them for not having gone the co-op route. (Wonder if they had, if they could’ve extracted all profits until breaking even on their enormous capital investment, but that’s something I could research.)

I’m used to “eat the rich” ideas but wanted to dig into your comment to understand whether the little guys garner your ire. ‘cause, gosh, the particular little guys in mind are tiny. And wonderful in every way* *(minus the cooperative model, but inclusive of fair wages and excellent management, etc.).

My link went here.

[–] AllonzeeLV 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Honestly I'd need more data. What did the family make annually relative to the non-family workers, etc.

That said, I wouldn't consider them the primary villains, possibly more symptomic of a larger problem. Kind of a when in Rome situation of "well I have enough capital to start something small, and I won't exploit my workers as badly as faceless corporations, which makes me good by comparison" kind of thing.

I don't believe the people that throw money from previous capital gains at a proposal to build the means of production deserve as much back as the people that LABOR day in and day out to run those Machines and produce value from them, let alone orders of magnitude more than the laborers as they do.

I think being a business owner/investor should mean getting a tiny cut of the final net profits, most of which goes to the people whose blood, sweat, and time they'd rather be spending elsewhere produced widgets of value that society wanted.

So no, if your family payed anyone who wasn't family less than family despite them running or accounting or whatever their role was harder than your family LABORED, merely because the family owns/leases the building and machines, the worker deserved more of the net profits than your family on the projects they labored on. Not Bezos evil, but not right either.

I think it's deeply, deeply wrong for someone to just throw money they got from god knows where and who they hurt to get it at a potential profitable business, walk away and not be part of building it using their own hands and headaches, and then expect not only a lot, but most of the net profits. It's perverse that our society rewards such activity and punishes doing the work by comparison.

[–] KepBen 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

"is this specific example a good person" calculus doesn't really help anybody. Are they exploiting workers? Will they stop? End of question.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 11 months ago

Helped me - made it real!

They’re “exploiting” workers by not planning to evenly split profits once, years from now, they’ve hopefully made a return on their enormous capital investment.

I do not know whether the knowledge that they would not have to evenly split profits, but rather could pay a fair wage, was a necessary incentive for them to start their business. But I am curious. This is a copout line of thinking for say the Waltons. But again, it is real for me – I know this very small handful of people, their large investment, their respect for the triple bottom line.

Reflecting now, I’m comfortable judging them based on the obvious good decisions they’ve made. Respect for employees in treatment and pay, respect for customers and the environment - I would not readily accept failings there.

Not joining the 0.015% of small businesses who went the co-op route? Defensible. (Relying on the figure from the earlier commenter, and Statista 2020.)

btw I’ve generally yearned for UBI but now I’ll give more thought to forcing co-op structures and potential unintended consequences :)