“If there is a massive overhaul, I would like to use this once in a century event to enact minimal changes that will help to keep the capitalist system in place.”
SabinStargem@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
I don’t think the numbers themselves are that important, the key bit is that AI is an advancing technology over this century. If we don’t rework our society to account for an oncoming future, people will get run over.
If there is an overhaul of my nation’s Constitution, I would like economics to be addressed. One such thing would be a mechanical ruleset that adjusts the amount of wealth and assets a company can hold, according to employee headcount. If they downsize the amount of working humans, their limit goes down. They can opt to join a lotto program, that grants UBI to people whose occupation is displaced by AI, and each income that is lotto’ed by the company adds to their Capital Asset Limit.
BruceAlrighty@lemmy.nz 3 weeks ago
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Expert here. That’s a bad idea. Example: a small law firm, 10 employees including owners/partners/I don’t care how they’re organized. They have 3 bank accounts: their payroll account, their operating fund (where all their nonpayroll expenditures are made) and their client liability account. None of the money in that account is actually theirs, they just hold it while waiting for clients to cash their settlement checks.
Proportionally, at least at the firm I’ve consulted with, their client liability account is several orders of magnitude larger than either of the other accounts. Technically the money isn’t theirs, they are just custodians, and the interest from that account is their bar association dues.
My point is, certain asset caps may look appropriate for one industry and simultaneously be absolutely disruptive to others.
survirtual@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
What is it you’re an expert of, here? Game theory? Or do you mean you’re a lawyer?
If you’re a lawyer, you are not an expert on formulating a society. We’ve let lawyers run things for a long time and look at where it’s gotten us.
The system needs to promote positive, human centric outcomes. Maybe having clients with that much wealth isn’t fundamentally a positive outcome? Perhaps that idea needs to be reworked as a part of the oncoming changes?
In other words, anyone dealing with a certain threshold of wealth needs to hire human beings in order to raise their cap. I like this idea a lot actually. The bigger the clients, the more they have to pay if they want legal representation. For billionaires, legal representation would cost an absolute fortune and provide income to thousands of people.
Honestly I haven’t thought of this pattern but the more I think about it, the better it seems.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
let’s remove the ability of people to sue for damages when they’re injured, that’s ALSO a positive societal goal.
where do you think that money came from?
survirtual@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Preferably, yes. Ideally, we are all insured by a single payer system and in the case of an accident, people are compensated via that insurance.
No legal bank account needed.
Next point?
SabinStargem@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
In that case, what would you believe to be an appropriate solution for your industry? I would like your viewpoint, it might refine my concept a bit further*.
*My approach is assuming a scenario that can be broadly be described as ‘What if FDR failed to save capitalism?’, or a total breakdown of the economic reality we know. That is the sort of thing that the Framers of America did when they made the Constitution. They formalized rules on preventing absolute political power, so I am looking for something similar regarding economic gaps.
ShittDickk@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I’ve thought a good one would be to have all publicly traded business allocate 15% equity to employees, and require a seat on the board for an employee elected representative. Employees should be allowed to vote to sell off a certain amount every quarter, and any stock buybacks would go into the employee pool until the 15% is reached again.
SabinStargem@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
I have a feeling that this is different from Beeg’s concern about client assets, but more about employee influence over the company? The idea of an equity limit might be a good addition to the Universal Ranked Income concept that I have cobbled together. Thank you. :)
In any case, my notes has two things about my own take:
1: Employees can vote for whether someone can obtain and retain their leadership position within their chapter and for higher rungs of the organization. Also, the pay grade of those leaders. Employees who are fired or retired from the company will receive 1:1 retirement pay over time, equal to the days and pay grade that they worked at the company, and can vote on any position of the company or those it has merged with. This essentially means that legacy employees can determine the leadership of the company, and cannot be made to ‘go away’ in a political sense.
2: Stocks when sold, have two components. The first is that they pay an amount over a fixed time, that is more than what they were paid for. It cannot be be sold nor traded, until it has been exhausted of this payback value. When exhausted of value, the share can now be traded to another individual for money, or returned to the company for the value it was bought at. The company cannot refuse the return, nor offer an increased price. A share returned to the company can be reissued, which allows it to start paying the fixed value again. Secondly, people who hold a share can vote for company leadership*. People within leadership positions at the company cannot own stocks from their own organization.
*It is assumed that we are operating within an economic system, where there are absolute wealth and asset caps. There is only so many shares a person can possess, and holding shares can prevent someone from owning a yacht or bigger house - they have to lose the shares to make room within the cap for things they enjoy. This helps limit the influence of individual stock holders.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
There’s a few ways to account for it. i mean, if you are doing Net Assets (Assets-Liability), that’s just Equity and having a limit on the total Equity a business is able to carry at specific sizes feels like it’s incentivizing the wrong things.
It’s kind of interesting to see the changes in investment rates that happened when the tax rate dropped from 90% on anything over a million in annual income. People would essentially buy losses (invest in businesses that were struggling) in order to keep from having to pay the government more. So struggling businesses got a little more capital to survive. Simply changing the top personal/corp income tax rate to something draconian at some arbitrarily high amount can have transformative effects on a society. that’s where i’d start.
phutatorius@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
As a more general principle, don’t build nitpicky implementation detail into a strategy document. That’s how you get brainfarts like the 3/5 compromise.