I wish we had statutory antitrust mechanisms instead. Get to be a certain size, you have to be a public company. Have a sustained supermajority of the market? You have to file a plan to split up.
iPhones dominate the cellphone market? You now have to figure out a way to split the manufacturing and selling of iPhones across multiple different entities. Consumers end up with a handful of worse products that all cost more.
When AT&T was split up, it was just turned into a bunch of smaller regional monopolies that were in a lot of ways worse. It also forced the closure of Bell Labs - one of the most important R&D powerhouses in the US. (Most of these regional monopolies would end up merging back into bigger monopolies over time anyway)
One thing I wish being a public company entailed was having a set of internal shares that are distributed only to the people working there, that allowed them to vote on board members / top leadership positions. For example, Amazon currently abuses its delivery staff, but I suspect this is a policy that is not endorsed by the majority of Amazon employees. In a democratic public company, there would be a feedback loop that enables the employees to have a voice.
I see this as a way of having built in regulation, where the government doesn't need to pass laws that are continuously becoming outdated but instead giving the people on the ground the ability to fight for their rights.
I don't see it as useful for small companies, but I agree that a large enough company should be forced to be public + democratic. Going from the rule of the rich to the rule of the people that work there.
The neoliberals in government launched a nationwide campaign to educate judges that redefined antitrust from being about power (anything too big is bad) to be about demonstrable consumer harm (much harder to prove).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law#Ri...
It sounds great in theory, but how do you deal with new hires? If you don't give them a vote, then it's slavery. If you do give them a vote, then how do you decide who to hire? If it's up to HR, how frequently do you vote for HR? Do new hires get to vote for HR?
I think for large enough businesses this would incentivize them give the team the person is hiring into much more oversight into the process. I don't think HR is useless, far from it, but incentivizing them to point their efforts to benefit the teams they are hiring for is a plus in my book.
As for the question of new hires getting to vote I think they should be able to vote (past standard probationary period of no more than say 1 month, idk). The company hired them, they should trust their employees with the responsibility of voting. If one person is able to upend a company then they should take some time to reflect on their processes.
A true democracy would place control over "the process" in the hands of the employees. Reflect on the ramifications of that.
> Do we need more people? Sure, I love working less.
> Do we give everyone a raise? Yay, more money.
> Do we switch to a 4 day work week? Of course!
> Should we abolish all night shifts? Yes, working nights is bad for your health.
A more responsible version of the above would have everyone voting that all responsibility should fall onto Greg, because nobody likes him.
... at least until Greg gets fed up and quits.
Don't you think a team that is hiring would want to vet their prospective coworkers? Don't you think they would reject a manager empire building?
Also in regards to "in a true democracy":
In a true democracy, the company releases their internal profitability metrics to all employees, releases the average paycheck per job title, releases the paychecks of the board and CEO. Transparency and accountability solve many of the problems you discussed.
Do people want stability? Of course. Do people want money / not an insane job schedule? Yes, of course.
But I suspect you are underestimating how adaptable people are. If you treat them well, I suspect people are willing to do much more than one might expect.
The problems you present are problems that arise in a low trust environment, where there is low coordination. One of the points of having a transparent and democratic public company is so that there is an increase in trust.
In a high trust environment we wouldn't need cops. Hell, in a high trust environment we wouldn't even need an army since the diplomats will sort everything out themselves by looking at spreadsheets and playing a biased game of chess.
In only takes one thief or murderer to create a need for the state and it only takes one liar or slacker to create a need for an entire efficiency monitoring apparatus within a company. Then there's the age old question of who polices the police and you end up in pretty much the same spot, but instead of making the owners rich you're enriching the "workers representatives". As someone born in the final stages of a communist dictatorship, I can tell you it doesn't work that well in practice. You are underestimating how much some people suck, and how much the people that suck are drawn to power.
Valve tried something somewhat-similar with their Cabal system [1] though they have a BDFL and even then, their focus has mostly transitioned from making video games into selling them on others' behalf, suggesting some sort of take over.
https://media.steampowered.com/apps/valve/Valve_Handbook_Low...
Yugoslavia understood that you can have markets without capitalism and they had one of the best economies in the world from an ordinary citizen's point of view. Ethnic struggles and corruption broke them eventually but they never came close to economic collapse.
Also, in kind of an uno-reverso, Germany kind of did something simlar being described here, but in a much different fashion with Volkswagon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Act which notably traded short term shareholder pressure for long term stability. It's had the unfortunate reality (hindsight of course) of being the very thing that may be leading to Volkswagons current severe economic crisis.
To address your point I agree that it is complicated, democracy in general is complicated, but I think its worth it to try.
I also think that the amount of defenses a company needs to have ready to repel a takeover in my opinion strengthens the case for internal shares: if you want to take over, do it from within, convince the people on the ground, instead of rapaciously as an outside force.