Hanging chads will always be uncool

He doesn’t have to be. 🪞

I honestly forgot that payphones still exist

OK fine best case scenario Jesus comes back tomorrow and everybody’s problems are over

To be fair those guys are not exactly crying right now.

Let’s call it “Prosperity”!

In typical fashion, Henry George wasn’t even invited.

Not like that!

One of the few ways in which I pity billionaires.

everyone below the owner is incentivised to help the owner increase productivity since the owner ultimately decides if they are fired or get raises and bonuses

I’m addressing this claim here. If increased productivity doesn’t increase compensation, then there’s no incentive to help the owner increase productivity. This year in particular we saw a lot of layoffs by profitable businesses! The productivity increases we have seen can be more easily attributed to technological advancement than increasingly motivated employees.

Imagine how much more productive we’d be if everyone actually had any reason to give a shit about their company. Because most of us certainly do not.

You’re describing the doorman fallacy and it’s part of why cooperatives outlast traditional businesses. That elevator operator understood the whole company and was willing to gradually shift to new responsibilities.

In the past generation we’ve seen productivity skyrocket while compensation hasn’t.

So there’s little to no incentive to increase productivity. You’ll get paid more by switching jobs every few years than you will by putting in hard work for the company. We’re “alienated” from the results of our labor - someone else gets the gains while our slice keeps getting thinner. The whole point of socialism is to address that.

Wouldn’t workers owning the factors of production reduce negative externalities by introducing democratic voting into the decision-making process? When there’s no voting, and simply one guy owning the business, then he’s got every incentive to push his costs onto everyone else. If he’s bribed to act against our interests, then there’s no mechanism to remove him from power.

Have there been any successful examples of markets solving externalities on their own? Like coasian solutions in the wild? The best examples I can think of are banning leaded gasoline and CFCs. And the worst examples of things that aren’t happening (like climate targets) are because the people actually in charge don’t care if billions of poors die.

How do externalities turn communist revolutions into authoritarian regimes?

Slop of slop from slop!

That’s the bad long-term decisions I’m talking about. They are currently directing the economy to end the world.

They said evade

The people just getting paid just for owning something don’t seem to be contributing anything useful, and they’re using that wealth to make bad long-term decisions on our behalf. We can’t fix all the other stuff without the power to do so.

That explains why our economy is so shaken today!

This level of inflation amounts to 1.2% per year compounded, a relatively low inflation rate for modern-day standards, but rather high given the monetary policy in place in the 16th century.

owning a piece of a factory or a company they work at also does not directly change the standard of living. Reducing the fraction of the factory output that goes to the owners instead of the workers could.

Would workers owning the company not reduce this fraction to zero?