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Comment by ocius | Hacker News Reader

Most such discussion suffer from an inadequate definition of what is meant by "socialism" vs what is meant by "capitalism". The most important aspect to me is ownership / control of the means of production, and I think there are very interesting compromises to be had in between extremes. What I mean: imagine if it was normal for companies to pay out a large part of their earnings to their employees. This does exist, of course, in some of the best companies, but is not widely spread and even when in place, the share of profit going to the employees is too small. Another share could still go to shareholders that "didn't work" for the profit to incentivize investments. Seems like a small change that could have a huge impact on wealth distribution.

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I think I like the suggestion, but it’s firmly on the capitalism end of the spectrum. Profit sharing is one of the incentives I look at when looking for a job. Not too far off from employee stock programs or matching 401k with company stock.

If you had suggested the “public” get a share of the profits then you start touching socialism but then I’d also hate the suggestion.

The public already gets its share via taxes, I'd argue, the problem that I see right now is really that the wins for the employees are (usually) limited to their salary, whereas owners get everything that's left over. And the more you already have, the more you are able to gain..

I can see the point but degree matters. If taxes are socialism then the world is essentially 100% socialist, and the word is essentially meaningless.

ChatGPT says 75-80% of business wealth in US is in publicly traded companies, so I’m skeptical the term owner is super useful either.

> The public already gets its share via taxes,

You need to demonstrate this with receipts. Most of what I see are large corporations getting tax breaks regardless of job or wealth creation within an area. The idea that the public is offset by taxes on corporations is quite fucking ridiculous to anyone who pays any attention to what effective rates corporations pay.

I would bet for most people, employee stock programs or company stock will provide far lower and more volatile return than an SP500 index fund. The US public has long been able to benefit from profit sharing, all they have to do is by a low cost broad market index fund.

The root of the problem is that the labor that most people in the US sell is not in sufficiently high demand to afford them the compensation to be able to afford the lifestyle they expect, since they are competing with the rest of the world willing to do it for less.

Regarding the first point: owners typically pay themselves a salary in addition to owning the company and thus benefit from both. Employees do not have this advantage.

The two problems are not mutually exclusive, and certainly unskilled labour is a significant problem for a good fraction of the population; but if this were the only problem, then we wouldn't see the amount of wealth concentration and decoupling of productivity from income that we observe.

There is no guarantee in both the owners salary or equity growing (just like an employee has no guarantee of having their job tomorrow).

The wealth concentration is a combination of government policy rewarding asset owners and automation and communication and transportation technologies increasing competition for labor sellers.

The automation also allows enormous economies of scale such that fewer businesses can do it all, which is also why you see wealth concentration.

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