Whether workers can maximise profits is hugely sector dependent - factory workers can't a lot of the time, a lot of other sectors they can, and having a motivated workforce I think is pretty much always a good thing.
I don't know what areas you expect cooperatives to work anyway. I had assumed it was something remotely sensible like a factory or something without any sort of creativity. You kinda just ignored my point on IPs and how that works in relation to shares.
It doesn't cease to become a cooperative if it has an elected board, just the point is that in a cooperative the workforce elect the board on a OMOV system rather than the shareholders controlling board members (because there aren't any of those).
Yes, yes you still get shareholders. The shareholders are then the workers but you still have them, and how would you allocate shares in the company? By pay? Just so everyone has an even number? You want a workforce to elect a board of directors? I don't know if you're being ridiculously optimistic or incredibly naive. It doesn't work, hasn't worked and won't work. You get one guy saying 'we'll pay you more!' and he gets elected director, does he give a armadillo? No, he gets a directors salary and then leaves the company to bankrupt itself by overpaying the workers. It's so open to exploitation it's ridiculous.
It's up to the board to re-invest profits, I see absolutely no reason why cooperatives should have poor reinvestment rates. Clearly attracting new investment for expansion may be more challenging, but there are ways around this - having money on loans rather than via shares, for example (higher short-term repayments but better long-term payoff than giving someone a continued stake in the company).
You don't get enough profits to make anything happen unless you're at the very top of the chain or are selling from an IP. And then you want companies to share their profits with the community, no. There isn't enough money to do that. If you create the money then you get serious inflation and you bankrupt the nation again.
And this is of course also what I was saying about the need to transform investment structures. I should also add that I was including SEs as well in my original article which hasn't been addressed - again, there would be a board of directors there, you seem to continually be assuming that social business means nobody's managing it, which it doesn't, it just means that the structure for distributing profits after reinvestment, wages, etc is different.
Change them how? What is so difficult about them now? What is there to gain for anyone to invest in a CIC? There isn't, they do it for philanthropic reasons. You can't create desire to invest in something with no return, what would be the benefit of loaning money to a CIC under your restructure than simply investing abroad? You'd have to create such an incentive that once again, you'd put unnecessary strain on the economy.
My point about social businesses is that you can't manage them without giving someone economic power: which goes against what you want from the whole enterprise in the first place.
Why include SEs? They're doing absolutely fine. Been increasing in popularity since at least 2008 if not before.
The aim is to replace shareholder ownership with different ways of distributing profits.
You still have shareholders. Even when you get rid of all the shareholders, someone inherits the shares and then they become the shareholder. It's all part of a capitalist plot to keep the working man down.
That's not because I think shareholders are cackling maniacs, so there's no need to put words into my mouth - it's because shareholders (by definition) are able to make money simply from having money
It is not the definition by any means. If the company fails they lose money. If it stagnates, they get nothing. Given how an employee at JL is a shareholder in the company, you think that they make money by having money? I can tell you that is false. What I believe you mean is shareholders in a public company. Stockholders/shareholders in a public company have nothing to do with the company except making decisions on who runs it. They are the ones that make money from having an investment in the company. It's a specific scenario related to shareholders, not an issue with them in and of themselves.
which compounds inequality and wealth gaps (which I appreciate you don't think is a problem for society, but I do)
It's a problem insofar as more of our citizens should be wealthier but there aren't enough jobs in the market for that. If you want to remove inequality, the best way you can do that is to get a flat tax rate. What you want is to bring people down to push others up, you want to dictate who is deserving.
and so that profit goes to people who aren't doing anything for it rather than being diverted to people who need it more or to more societally beneficial uses. The aim is ultimately to find ways of a) getting money moving into where it's needed (i.e. by good causes or people who are currently struggling for money) whilst b) not doing that by the state funnelling all the money through government departments in a traditional state-socialist model.
You (you represents if Jub was the whole government) would decide where it's needed or the company would? I assumed it was the latter which led me to the oligarchical/cartel model. More of a cartel now that I think about it actually. Regardless, if it is the former - sure, that's more government intervention and I see a whole huge nest of corruption just waiting to happen but it could possibly work. If it's the latter and the companies decide where their social duty (wordplay because duty is also a tax, like people are getting taxed again by this system you propose on top of the rest) then how would any competition get past the barriers to entry? You inherently create consumer loyalty if one company has been doing good deeds around the 'hood. Why would they then try a new company doing the same thing who hasn't yet done any of the 'socially responsible' things? It's definitely bad for free market competition by this alone.
A few more things: the point of coops is that they don't remove free market mechanisms, they operate according to them, can compete for prices, etc etc. I'm not suggesting (which you seem to imply with your slightly odd notion that this would be "oligarchic") that we should have an un-mixed economy and I'm certainly not suggesting in any sense that we should have any industry under a single co-operative aegis. Rather, I'm suggesting that cooperative and social enterprise businesses should be encouraged to be competitive in the same niches that large shareholder businesses currently occupy (which are different to the niches that SMEs tend to work well and flourish in).
Are....Reallly? Do you know how shares even work? How PLCs work and what the difference is between theoretical power and actual uses of shareholder rights? It really seems like you don't.
Part of the free market is to allow people to buy and sell companies and businesses, by not allowing them to do that, yes it is anti-free market mechanisms. We have a mixed economy now, why do you feel that it's not serving whatever purpose you think it's supposed to serve. Also, by the by: mixed economy is a mix of socialism and capitalism. Everyone has a mixed economy. WRT this, it's meaningless.
PLC stock can be bought at the London stock exchange. If you have a cooperative, you can't sell stock. It's effectively worthless on the LSE. This is like 90% of the reason why they can't compete with PLC (LLC in the U.S) or even proprietary limited companies (companies owned privately which can't be auctioned at LSE unless hoops are jumped).
There are already methods and precedents in place to allow members of a coop to invest in the coop and for other investors to loan to them. It doesn't happen because there's no money in it.
EDIT: I should also add that in terms of paying for a transformation of how we do things, I'm not suggesting this is a one term government agenda; it can only really transform at the rate we can transform investment to keep it stable, so I see it as a generational long-term plan that we can progressively move towards over 25-50 years and that should be driving how liberals think about economics. So what I'd want in a manifesto out of this would be more "we will set up a pilot system of local investment non-profit banks to help SMEs and non-profit businesses in their areas" and "we would provide more advice and support to businesses seeking to set up as social enterprises" and stuff like that, rather than "we're going to force every business to turn into a cooperative in one go and tax the armadillo out of everyone for a decade to pay for it".
SME's really don't need any help still, google uk smes, all the stats point towards them doing absolutely fine.
http://www.fsb.org.uk/stats The way liberals think about economics will baffle me to my dying day I'm certain
....Setting up a pilot system of local non-profit banks? That....Who would agree to that? Who pays the bank staff? Is it voluntary? Non-profit businesses? Why? Why help those? They don't generate any income for the country. Which is kinda necessary. There is tons of advice and support for CICs or social enterprises.
http://www.cicassociation.org.uk/Literally tons. Metric tons. Asstons. Metric asstons.
@ penty, Right, you can't buy shares, same as with a proprietary limited company. The director is appointed by the board, right, but that's more in keeping again with a proprietary limited company than it is with a co-op. It's referred to as a partnership in my belief because it's a partnership between the workers and the management. Both share in the company. The difference is that in a cooperative, any of the members can create a product to sell via the company I think even without consultation of the other members (although there may need to be a vote, not 100% sure on that tbh) whereas with JL, you can't just put what you like on the shelves of a store without higher management giving the go ahead.
No, you don't need shares to have good management strategy but as I've mentioned, you do need to sell shares to be relevant to the LSE. Why is this important? It creates demand for stock in a company which pushes it's value up, and in turn market capitalisation. This lets them change how many shares they have in total to either dilute it to acquire some quick money for investment, or to solidify excess stock and try to drive the value up even further and just sit on it making money.
Consumer driven capitalism? You mean consumer capitalism where demand is manipulated through mass marketing? That's like a tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy.
Or that we(consumers) drive the free market by buying what we want at the price we're prepared to pay for it. Because that's actually just the market. And it works like that because that's what people do, it's fully sustainable so long as resources last. And even when they don't the item moves to like a higher tier of good which becomes more luxury.
This is also pretty much the definition of government intervention.
