jlou

Today's legal systems mandate that legal responsibility be non-transferable for crimes. The economic democracy position argues that legal responsibility should be generally non-transferable matching general non-transferability of de facto responsibility due to the principle of justice that legal and de facto responsibility should match. Not all mandates are authoritarian (e.g. a mandate that one must respect others' personal property). Employment violates workers' property rights

@canada

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

Or we could abolish the employer-employee contract and mandate that all firms be worker coops, so that no one could appropriate the positive and negative fruits of other people's labor

@news

The statement is only generates a contradiction if there is an omniscient being. If there are no omniscient beings, it is consistent.

The idea is that it is impossible for a being to both know and not know something. Knowable is not the same as known to a particular being

@atheistmemes

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

@politicalmemes

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

All bailed out companies should be required to turn into worker cooperatives

@latestagecapitalism

There is information in it. Namely, that it itself is false. It is fully grammatical. Similar sentence are obviously valid such as:

This sentence has five words.

That is a true valid grammatical sentence.

I didn't invent the paradox. Philosophers have been contemplating this paradox for a long time.

The problem it gestures at is very deep and similar paradoxes showed up in the foundations of mathematics in the 20th century. It can't be dismissed easily.

@general

The arguments for worker coops are based on liberal economics (https://www.ellerman.org/inalienable-rights-part-i-the-basic-argument/). To summarize, the workers are jointly de facto responsible for using up inputs to produce outputs, so by the norm that legal and de facto responsibility should match, they should be assigned the whole product of the firm. Anything else would be unjust.

Equal votes doesn't mean equal pay. Workers can divide the pie however they prefer. In existing worker coops, not everyone gets paid the same.

@economy