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I feel like we should get to a point where it's common for companies to give their employees a donation budget to spend on whatever they see fit.

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You mean a salary?

I think he means an amount that employees are allowed to spend to support software they rely on but not keep for themselves.

A salary is something you trade for your work, i.e. it's for you to spend as you see fit. This budget would be for the employer to spend, but for the employee to determine how it would be best spent to benefit the employer. It's not a job perk, and not to the benefit of the employee.

I very much enjoy the way you speak about this. Workers determining resource allocation is classical socialism, so the politics would derail the idea in many places. If no one ever points that out though, and you focus on a voucher system rather than ownership, it is actually capitalist but still trying to get at the gains of distributed leadership.

Well... Maybe, if you squint at it. But the donation budget would be orders of magnitude smaller than your salary, let alone the company balance, so in my view it would require some creative reasoning to see that as full-on socialism.

(But then I live in a country where unions are normal, so I can't speak to how it would be perceived elsewhere.)

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