Comment by csallen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by csallen | Hacker News Reader

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Why does it matter how much the shares of his company are worth? They just represent ownership of a company. It's not like their existence is somehow holding back wealth from the market or from other people. And if he wants to sell the shares to make some cash, then he's going to have to pay taxes on that, which is good for everyone else. And he wouldn't do that unless he planned to spend or invest the cash receives, which is also good for everyone else. I fail to see the harm.

I think one could argue that taxation should be higher, and harder to dodge, and I would agree with that.

But once you start saying that some people shouldn't have more than others to some degree, that's a very slippery slope. Where do you draw the line? Why is it okay for middle class Americans to buy nicer clothes and move into bigger apartments when people are out there starving? If it's not okay for someone to have the net worth of Qatar, why would it be okay for someone to live in an apartment that's worth more than a poor township in South Africa?

At some point we have to accept that inequality exists, and that although almost everyone could do something to minimize it, there's an ethical and practical line that needs to also respect individuality to a large degree, if we want people to feel incentivized to do things, to feel ownership, to maintain autonomy. And where to draw that line is tough to say exactly, but it probably shouldn't be a line, it should probably be smooth, or at least smooth-ish. So I feel like we're just coming back around to progressive taxation. Which we already have.

> They just represent ownership of a company.

That, exactly, is the problem. It's not even about money and tax evasion but power. Why should one person have more say over the company they work for than 10,000 other employees? Or even worse they don't even work there anymore and just control it from outside?

Even if they are a perfectly good and business smart person who never makes bad decisions or abuses their workers. They will eventually die or sell their share, and in either case it will end up with people who care less about the company's long term health than the founder did. Profit maximizers with no ethics and no feeling of responsibility.

I think the concept of shareholders is the problem. Layoffs, cartels and price inflation happen when the people who make decisions get all the benefits but none of the downsides. If it was up to me I would ban stocks and replace them with time limited shares that give you a right to part of the profits for 1 or 5 or 10 years, but zero control over the company. Leave power to workers and returns to investors but never bind the two together.

> Why should one person have more say over the company they work for than 10,000 other employees?

Why shouldn't they?

That's how pretty much every organization works. Every military, every government, every sports team, every space mission, every classroom, etc., they all have some person or small group up people with more more decision-making power, or "more say," as you put it.

I fail to see the problem with that. In fact, there's a very real benefit in that it's generally more effective. For example, today people are completely free to create organizations that work differently, and they rarely choose to, and when they do, they rarely out-compete the alternative. So the proof is in the pudding that there's something less effective about it.

If I had to wager a guess: decision-making isn't something that scales well. Bodies might have dozens of organs, but they only really need one brain to control them all.

> They will eventually die or sell their share, and in either case it will end up with people who care less about the company's long term health than the founder did. Profit maximizers with no ethics and no feeling of responsibility.

1. There are plenty of counterexamples where the leader of a company ensures its long-term success after their tenure ends.

2. Even if this were somehow a downside of owner-led companies, you always have to ask the question, "...compared to what?" It's not like the alternative doesn't have its own slew of downsides, as evidenced by the dearth of competitive co-ops that compete successfully with owner-led companies. In other words, organizations are always going to have issues and errors and flaws, no matter how you set up decision-making.

People trying to apply the principles of democracy to corporations are misguided. And therefore, corporations function most efficiently, essentially, as autocracies with fascist features. It is not difficult to compare the corporate style with fascism in many elements: certainly more similarities there than a socialist nation, or a liberal democracy, where we've often said that politicians shouldn't be businessman, at least insofar as you cannot/shoudn't run a state like a business.

After all, businessmen often use strategies like aiming to be acquired/purchased by a much larger company, merging with their competitors or partners, or anticipating bankruptcy by draining every viable resource and asset they can reach.

At the same time, observers such as JB Crawford have also pointed out that very large corporations function like a religion. For example, telecommunications. https://computer.rip/2024-09-08-private-lines.html

Of course I mean this metaphor internally, as if we were regarding each corporation as a sovereign microstate, which they aren't... hopefully...

If the ideal CEO has psychopathic qualities, and the ideal capitalist corporation is comparable simultaneously to a new religious movement and fascist organ, and the corporations are the primary unit of American culture, then where does that leave us?

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