You're argument is that the only two alternatives are that the ruling class and owning class be separate groups of people, or the same group of people. And either way the labor class if F'ed. You're right that having the ruling class and the owning class being the _same people_ is terrible. That's what we're living in right now!
But what about the labor class being the owning class? What if Amazon was owned by the people who work at Amazon? Instead of Bezos?
Bezos started Amazon with $300,000. I'm sure it wouldn't take too long for workers to raise that kind of money, after all, $300,000 to buy a house is considered cheap.
On the other hand, the history of businesses being confiscated and handed over to the workers has not been a successful one.
It is a good practice for companies to include stock as part of the pay package. It encourages alignment of the company with the employees. Very, very successful companies follow this model, such as Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, etc.
I wonder how many people who repeat things like this know that Bezos owns less than 10% of Amazon. About 2/3rds of Amazon is owned by institutional investors, much of which is in turn owned by individuals in their 401ks and other retirement plans. So "the people" own more of Amazon than Jeff Bezos already.
If you're implying that the government should confiscate Jeff Bezos' personal ownership stake in the business he created and redistribute it to other people, that's a very different topic. It's in the realm of fantasy, not reality, so I don't consider it very interesting. At minimum, it should be noted that if the government gets into the business of confiscating shares from people, the value of those shares will plummet as investors move their money into safer investments, so it wouldn't be a simple numerical wealth transfer from Bezos to others.
Regardless, there's nothing stopping people from getting together and starting an employee-owned collective company that enters the market. They can compete in the market and try to hire away talent from the other corporations.
If warehouse workers want better conditions they have to solve a national coordination problem without getting crushed. If Bezos wants their working conditions to be more efficient he has to write a memo.
Edit: to connect this back to ownership. This disparity is directly responsible for determining whether profits pay fair wages or got to Bezos and the other owners.
There are probably better means to achieve better ends, but the status quo is very fucking rotten
If we can do twice as much with half of the labour people should work 20h weeks, not be unable to afford a home.
There's also a small cottage industry of people who will make fully custom cars for you. They're pretty expensive, though, as they don't benefit from economies of scale.
Speaking from experience with them in another thread. Your best bet is to ignore the bait and move on to more fruitful discussions.
Besides, I enjoy debate, like other people enjoy playing football. If you don't, why are you here?
I never said American free markets were perfect. They certainly aren't. But they are very successful.
> responding to your comments is like talking to a brick wall
I could say the same of the people I respond to! I don't expect to change anyone's mind here. The average stay at a commune is about 2 years, after which the members leave, cured of the notion that communism is better. I encourage you to join one.
> it is more profitable not to
...and if anyone thinks this is ridiculous, I'd ask them if they are for or against repealing all of our current motor vehicle regulations. If "for," they have admitted to being a hopeless libertarian, and if "against," they have acknowledged that important reasonable features can be incompatible with the profit motive of a free market and it no longer seems so strange that I might have a list which is more of the same.
Highly doubtful. Command economies have far less variety in what they offer. This isn't theoretical either just look at western cars vs Soviet cars. There's this mistaken belief that if the free market can't provide some good then a command economy could, but the reality is that if a free market can't provide a good then the chance that a command economy could is even more doubtful. Command economies tend to be very bad at allocating resources efficiently as outlined by Hayek in "The Use of Knowledge in Society".
Back in the 70s, the Department of Energy was tasked with allocating gas to the gas stations. A gas station had to apply for an allocation, and the DoE doled out the gas. The DoE doled out gas based on the previous year's usage patterns.
Sounds smart, right?
What happened is that gas consumption varies year to year due to a number of factors, like weather patterns, population changes, etc. The result was massive misallocation by the DoE - Californian had shortages of gas, Florida had gluts. That sort of situation has never happened before.
All that nonsense disappeared literally overnight when Reagan repealed all gas price and allocation controls with his very first Executive Order. I remember than wonderful day very well - at last I could drive right up to the pump and get gas, rather than wait in line. The gas lines never returned.
What you're suggesting is called "central economic planning". It is constantly tried again and again, and it never ever works. (The failures of it are always classified as "unintended side effects", though they are entirely predictable.)
Not in the UK, due to a fragile supply chain.
https://news.sky.com/story/supply-crisis-catastrophic-panic-...
We saw it when the Evergiven closed the Suez. We see it whenever irational consumer behaviour caused unpredicable behaviour.
The Randian world you are so enamoured with is one of fragility, because buffers and margins reduces profit.
Or are those "unintended side effects"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_oil_crisis
I don't think the history here is as neat as you have laid out. To be clear: this is not a defense of central planning.
The gas shortages never existed before Nixon imposed price and allocation controls on gas, either.
(Except during WW2, where gas shortages were caused by gas rationing.)
> The Jimmy Carter administration began a phased deregulation of oil prices on April 5, 1979, when the average price of crude oil was US$15.85 per barrel ($100/m3).
So, the process wasn't really an instant wave of a wand, or stroke of a pen. We also have this:
> Starting with the Iranian revolution, the price of crude oil rose to $39.50 per barrel ($248/m3) over the next 12 months (its all-time highest real price until March 3, 2008).[11] Deregulating domestic oil price controls allowed U.S. oil output to rise sharply from the large Prudhoe Bay fields, while oil imports fell sharply.
We also have silliness like this:
> Due to memories of the oil shortage in 1973, motorists soon began panic buying, and long lines appeared at gas stations, as they had six years earlier.[13] The average vehicle of the time consumed between two and three liters (about 0.5–0.8 gallons) of gasoline an hour while idling, and it was estimated that Americans wasted up to 150,000 barrels (24,000 m3) of oil per day idling their engines in the lines at gas stations.
So we have counterfactuals: if there was no Iranian revolution, would the effects of Carter's gradual deregulation have been felt sooner? If there was no 1973 oil shortage, would the reduction in waste have made a difference? What effect did people simply believing that the crisis was over have?
I don't propose answers to these questions; they are, in my opinion, unknowable.
I suggest that economic narratives such as the one you propose do not capture the entire picture. You had downward pressure on prices due to deregulation and expanding supply, and upwards pressure due to geopolitics and waste.
These processes do not resolve instantly, they take time to play out. I suggest caution when attempting to derive cause and effect from single events in complex systems.
Absolutely correct. But public regulation is quite resistant to course correction. Private companies have to face competitors and adapt or fail.
> The US healthcare system is just one fantastic example of the private sector absolutely failing to deliver even a bare minimum standard of service
The US healthcare system is massively regulated and interfered with by the law and things like people are forced to buy Obamacare and forced to contribute to Medicare and Medicare massively distorts market forces.
Healthcare in the US was affordable before the government got involved.
I would argue that democracy is a superior method in most instances, because its motives are driven by the motives of the population as a whole, whereas capitalist competition is ultimately driven by exactly one thing: profit for the capital owners.
Where we agree I think is in the assertion that United States government tends to run things very poorly. In my opinion, however, this is not because central planning is inherently bad, but because our democracy is very weak, and we allow politicians to be controlled by corporate interests rather than the interests of the people that they represent.
EDIT: Oh, and for the record I disagree with the take that the US healthcare system is bad because it has too much regulation - but that's an entirely separate discussion that I don't think is worth going into.
> capitalist competition is ultimately driven by exactly one thing: profit for the capital owners.
Absolutely correct. And competition is what drives prices relentlessly downwards.
The democratically elected government in the 70s that tried to manage the nation's gas prices and allocations with the best of intentions failed miserably.
Democracy also created the FAA, which used to regulate airline schedules, routes, and fares. Having lived through that era, too, I can attest how costly and inefficient that was. Air fares are amazingly low since, and the scheduling is very tight and efficient at placing airplanes where the people want to use them.
> this is not because central planning is inherently bad
Nobody has ever managed to make it work. Consider rent control. Endless variations of it are implemented, and all produce the "unintended" side effects of higher prices and shortages.
If you want custom leather seats, you can drive your car off the lot into one of many shops that offer such services, or other customizations. Me, I drove to the stereo shop to put a better stereo in (back when the factory ones were terrible).
There are many reality shows on TV featuring shops what will custom build a car to your specifications.
Are you suggesting that suppression of wages is what gave us "more interesting things" to do?
> History shows us that this inevitably means people lose all control over their lives, because the state will make your decisions for you and assign you your job.
How is this different from the "free market" assigning me a job?
> For example, let's say the color of cars produce by car companies is determined by democracy. 59% vote for the cars to be green. And if you want a red car? Too bad. What if you want a 4 seat car? No dice, 53% voted for 2 seaters to be made. What if you didn't want a car stereo? You're stuck paying for it anyway, as 73% voted for it.
Concessions are the price to pay for living in a civilized society.
Of course. That's been going on since the invention of the plow. That's why today we can do more interesting things than turn over the earth with a pointy stick all day every day.
> economic democracy, where average people regain control over their lives
History shows us that this inevitably means people lose all control over their lives, because the state will make your decisions for you and assign you your job.
For example, let's say the color of cars produce by car companies is determined by democracy. 59% vote for the cars to be green. And if you want a red car? Too bad. What if you want a 4 seat car? No dice, 53% voted for 2 seaters to be made. What if you didn't want a car stereo? You're stuck paying for it anyway, as 73% voted for it.