From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@yahoo.com)
Date: Sat Nov 02 2002 - 19:46:49 MST
--- Charlie Stross <charlie@antipope.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 29, 2002 at 12:22:42PM -0500, Dehede011@aol.com wrote:
>
> "Worker control of the means of production" means, basically, that
> when
> the enterprise makes a profit, the workers share in it. Nothing more,
> nothing less. If you worked for a dot com and had stock options, you
> were participating in a socialist scheme.
>
> (With me so far?)
No, because ONLY a dot com where ALL stock is owned ONLY by employees,
and their ownership is entirely in proportion to their contribution to
the company, minus salary and benefits used for living expenses or
otherwise taken out of the enterprise.
The percent of employee stock ownership among most dot coms, outside of
generally a handful of founders in each case (or less), tends toward
the single digits.
Of course, we could assume that you are making a statement of fact that
is accepted in the socialist community. In which case, I would point
out that a majority of Microsoft is owned by its employees (if you
count Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and other founding management as
employees). In which case I find it strangely odd that those on the
left, especially those tending toward socialistic policies, also tend
to be those who are the most vehemently hateful of Microsoft. Shouldn't
we blame the evils of Microsoft on socialism?
>
> The headache of socialism is that the term has been used to cover a
> wide range of sins -- including the communist program, which went far
> beyond
> worker participation in ownership, and including a number of failed,
> dictatorial attempts to enforce joint ownership by effectively
> ensuring that nobody had a stake in anything.
That is the essential character of communal ownership. That which is
owned by all is owned by none. The ills of the tragedy of the commons
strikes any attempt at socialist solutions or alternatives to pure free
markets.
>
> It's extremely noteworthy that all the failures of socialism have
> involved
> attempts to impose it from the top down, by government fiat. The
> successes are all bottom up.
And they remain successes only so long as the partners are aware that
they can't vote themselves into wealth. When they forget this, they
generally vote for whoever promises it to them, resulting then in top
down fiat government. This is the essential instability of socialism,
and has been proven to be a far worse instability than any ascribed to
libertarianism of the anarcho-capitalist variety.
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