A variant of this should replace non-profit tax exemptions and all campaign finance rules.

The way to prevent bribing is secret and anonymous contributions. You could, for example, imagine including these contributions to your favorite media and FOSS organizations as part of your ballot.

This could be implemented by a federation of worker coops to fund local public goods that all the member coops benefit from with the matching pool coming from membership fees and Harberger leases

@socialism

Political democracy also mandates legal non-transferability for voting rights. Would you allow people to sell or transfer their voting rights?

People prefer democratic firms: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/what-do-americans-want-from-private-government-experimental-evidence-demonstrates-that-americans-want-workplace-democracy/D9C1DBB6F95D9EEA35A34ABF016511F4

A mandate doesn’t restrict any non-institutionally-described action as labor is de facto non-transferable. It only prevents fraudulently treating de facto responsible persons as legal non-responsible things.

Are we free when we can sell our freedom or when we can’t even if we want to?

@canada

The idea is to mandate worker coop structure on all firms.

It’s not that telling. Without a worker coop mandate, there are collective action problems and market failures. It’s harder for all the workers to cooperate to form a worker coop than an employer to hire up all the workers.

No society has a full worker coop mandate because the modern arguments for it were published in the 90s. Some countries do mandate some worker board representation and codetermination though
@canada

https://www.nceo.org/articles/employee-ownership-100

https://www.usworker.coop/en/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

@canada

Article: https://www.ellerman.org/inalienable-rights-part-i-the-basic-argument/

Video: https://youtu.be/c2UCqzH5wAQ

Either one introduces the argument against capitalism based on the liberal principle of imputation.

Economic democracy, a market economy where worker coop is the only firm legal structure, maximizes liberty much better than capitalism

@canada

Capitalism is indefensible from a libertarian perspective. A central libertarian tenet is that legal and de facto responsibility should match. However, the capitalist employer-employee contract inherently involves a violation of this tenet. The employer gets 100% of the legal responsibility for the positive and negative results of the enterprise. Despite workers’ joint de facto responsibility for using up inputs to produce outputs, workers as employees get 0%

@canada

I am an anti-capitalist.

To get rid of capitalism, you don’t have to abolish absentee ownership of capital. A worker coop can lease capital from third parties and remain a non-capitalist democratic worker coop. Abolishing capitalism just requires abolishing the employment contract and common ownership of land and natural resources. Without the employment contract, everyone is either individually or jointly self-employed, so every firm is a worker coop

@196

Here is a short introduction to the core argument against capitalism based on liberal principles: https://www.ellerman.org/inalienable-rights-part-i-the-basic-argument/

@socialism

Econ 101 is designed to obfuscate the real issues. Even talking about specific wealth distribution ratios is falling for the misframing of the issues that Econ 101 wants to lead people into with the pie metaphor. In the capitalist firm, the employer holds 100% of the property rights for the produced outputs and liabilities for the used-up inputs while workers qua employees get 0% of that. The entire division of the pie metaphor in Econ 101 is based around hiding this fact

@196

If you emphasize giving workers what they literally produce instead of its value, the contrast is even greater. With value, you are still emphasizing the pie metaphor, which capitalist economists invented to obfuscate the real issues. In terms of property rights to the produced outputs and liabilities for the used-up inputs, workers qua employees get 0% while employers qua employer get 100%. In the property theoretic terms, workers don’t get the fruits of their labor at all
@humanities

The universe might be discrete.

If mental states are finite, then the space of all possible human minds is finite and includes the one that believes they have knowledge of the computation’s result. It is possible for mental states of 2 minds to be different but extensionally behave like the same person. We would exclude human minds whose models don’t map well onto the physics of our universe though. You might not be willing to pick the opposite if we are talking about morality also @askbeehaw

There are finite number of possible humans due to there being a finite number of states a brain can be in.

There is an argument for moral realism that takes advantage of finiteness and computability of mental processes to show that there could be an objective morality

@askbeehaw

The advantage would be that there would be a clear business model for funding the work and any license enforcement, and with a clear source of revenue, we could use various public goods funding mechanisms like quadratic funding to ensure upstream projects are funded.

I agree that the FSF wouldn’t endorse it. We would have to convince developers that this approach makes sense and they need to adopt it to work towards a free and open world. @socialism

I have a specific theory of rights in mind. This theory of rights proposes worker coops as the only rights respecting way of organizing labor relations based on the inalienability of responsibility. I’m not using rights in a general vague sense to refer to harm.

Worker coops view workers differently than capitalist firms. They see labor as a fixed factor e.g. worker coops cut wages not jobs during economic, downturns.

The theory of rights I have in mind can fit in a license @programming

Far left as in explicit restrictions on capitalist firms using the software without paying for it while still allowing full software freedom for worker coops, which don’t violate workers’ rights.

Copyfarleft should set up a whole family of licenses of varying strengths and its own alternative ideology from the FSF. The first principle is an almost complete rejection of permissive open source licenses as enabling capitalist free riding @programming

I wouldn’t say FSF is too ideological. They just don’t have a political strategy for how they will bring about the changes they desire. To really change things towards a new mode of production, you need a way for people in the new mode of production to earn a living. Also, their ideology is wrong in its lack of emphasis on software workers’ rights and the relations of production

If you look at property rights, the contrast is even stronger. The employer owns 100% of the property rights to the produced outputs and owes 100% of the liabilities for the used-up inputs. Meanwhile, workers qua employee receive 0% of both. This is despite their joint de facto responsibility for producing those results violating the basic principle of justice.

We need to move towards a copyfarleft model that considers the rights of both software users and developers unlike copyleft

Can Land Value Tax Be Passed On To Tenants?

https://gameofrent.com/content/can-lvt-be-passed-on-to-tenants

@socialism

That’s why you use the revenue derived to fund a UBI. Then, there would be a safety net, which could potentially be used to partially cover one’s land value tax obligations. As land becomes more valuable it is important that people use it more productively. Land value tax encourages building denser and reduces urban sprawl.

Many people rent housing. The key advantage of a land value tax is that landlords are unable to pass it on to tenants. They have to take the hit.

@socialism

The path to a solution for journalism is a funding mechanism that is a mixture of quadratic funding by Zoë Hitzig, Glen Weyl and Vitalik Buterin and artistic freedom vouchers that Dean Baker proposed. These are mechanisms where the public directly decides what news sources receive public funding.

Quadratic funding: https://youtu.be/xwY0UAk14Rk

Artistic Freedom Vouchers: https://cepr.net/report/the-artistic-freedom-voucher-internet-age-alternative-to-copyrights/