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Comment on Gold

DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

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 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. Consumer protections, walkable cities, good public healthcare, … And it does not involve the massive risks of trying to switch to a differwnt economic model that always collapsed before.

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explodicle@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

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.

Would workers owning the company not reduce this fraction to zero?

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- DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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. Probably not even be top 10.
  
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  - explodicle@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    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.
    
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    DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    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…
    
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LePoisson@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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.

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- DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - LePoisson@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    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.
    
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Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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.

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