So "publicly" traded (the term public ownership can be confusing because it can also mean state control) just means it's open for the elite to invest in.
“Open for the elite” how?
You still don’t have a say and the investor is also the customer. How is it democracy or keeping companies to being good for society.
Open for the elite in the way that everyone else don't have enough money to matter.
The richest people are so much richer than everyone else that there's no comparison. You could grab a million average people off the street and all of you combined probably wouldn't be richer than Jeff Bezos. Think about that. This one guy is wealthier than a million other people combined, literally wealthier than an entire small country or large city, and he's not alone. There's more of them.
Those guys rule the world, everyone else are passengers.
By far, the largest shareholders in most publicly-traded firms are "institutional investors", but those are themselves in turn usually acting as middlemen managing mutual funds, most of which consist of ordinary folks' 401(k) plans and pensions.
[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wealthiest-10-americans-own-9...
That's simply capitalism, money is spread unevenly across everyone, that does not make everyone an elite
What was your attempted point? Or did you not understand the issue that was brought up?
So a link would be much appreciated, in order to judge the quality of the info. As it is, I'm skeptical that the info is accurate, precisely because mutual funds are so wildly popular among the middle-class people I know (none of whom are in the top 10%, though most of them would likely be in the top 50%).
Employees of a company are the ones who are the most affected by the company's decisions, it's only fair that they have a say.
Also, I wouldn't necessarily make a distinction between the full-time employees vs the part-time ones.
For example, a courier company like UPS employs all of its workers but the packages it delivers are for other companies who contract with UPS to do the work. If you force all businesses to employ their own couriers then UPS can’t even exist as a company and small businesses that depend on courier services would simply be unable to function at all.
This is unquestionably, undoubtedly incorrect. It is a really low information meme that's racing around the Internet right now. If you want a contemporary counterexample take a look at NASCAR. They're also not publicly traded, they're family owned, yet they are abusive toward drivers, teams and fans, and they're gradually ruining the sport that made them rich. We know all of this because it got so bad Michael Jordan decided to sue them and there's a ton of information coming out in discovery at the moment.
The real reason Valve are being the "good guys" at the moment (not really, but yes they're doing some amazing stuff for Linux) is because they feel threatened by Windows and Microsoft, they perceive a long term competitive threat to Steam. Competition makes businesses both private and public work for your dollar. The US economy has been characterized by a decrease in competition and an increase in monopolies for decades now which is the root of many price hikes and anti-consumer practices.
Yep. Valve is seen as virtuous because Microsoft is greedy and the default Windows 11 install is generally viewed as a tire-fire of an OS
Are they doing good things for Linux? Absolutely. As a long-time Linux user I am over the moon that we are where we are. But the general populaton only gives a shit because Microsoft is abusive.
I hear that for every major Windows release. And after 6 months everybody is fine with it.
Well that's your problem there.
I do overall agree that Valve is only situationally the good guy here, but they do also have a sustainable approach to business and growth which I think helps this.
It looks a lot closer to the economic policies of the most successful fascist regimes - the best term for modern American economics might be "democratic fascist." There is a facade of a market economy, but there's heavy intervention to privilege not just domestic businesses, but a specific set of big ones that have close ties to the ruling party. This is not much different from how Hitler and Mussolini approached economic policy. Basically have your system revolve around private ownership, pretend to have a market economy but actually make very centralized decisions and execute them through a small number of private oligarchs you're buddies with. The uniquely American flavor is that there are two parties which do this instead of one (but three would be unimaginable), and you can choose which pack of bandits you signal loyalty to without being executed.
I find it interesting that this "feature" of the US (having those big monopolies) is often mentioned as a "weakness" of e.g. Europe, where companies cannot get as big (I guess partly due to regulations).
And in turn, when US companies "lose" against, say, Chinese companies, they will say it's because they get help from their authoritarian system (through the government). Which is a bit ironic given that the US monopolies do exactly that to the rest of the western world, right?
Ok, but this “at the moment” has lasted at least since 2011. Basically my whole adult life Valve gas been a pretty great company delivering value and not being annoying.
You mean the special class B shares that gives 10 votes per share, right? It isn't just Google though. Facebook and Snapchat also do the same thing, iirc?
Not really. Most people have terribly low time preference. Democracy for example is a very bad idea when you account for that (read Hoppe for a detailed explanation). Public company ownership is much better because it doesn't suffer from one vote per person, but still susceptible to much of the same management problems, specially in a society that already favors lower time preference by other means.
I think distributed public ownership placed in a corporation ruled as proposed here provides a chance to harvest residual good decisions from a citizen/shareholder who cares as opposed to having a single decision derived from some other issue a majority of citizens favor.
Unless you're talking about doing away with any kind of voting but Communism doesn't exactly have a stellar track record.
Not that I condone capitalism, or socialism, or communism, or fascism, or any ism for that matter. Ism's in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an ism, he should believe in himself.
But a private company, at this point, can arguably affect the greater good just as much as a public company. The rich are getting richer, and the corporate model is just there to support that transfer of wealth.
As far as "fixing" the problem, I think it would be important to expand voters' influence over the company in addition to voting changes like you described. I don't know how to make it feasible, but IMO voters should be able to influence or directly decide much lower level business decisions than they currently do
Why would anyone believe that this means an organization is well run, or to everyone's benefit? Here in Germany we're notoriously unfriendly to public companies, most of the (well functioning) Mittelstand is private and family owned. And I pray to god it stays that way because I'd rather trust a company whose leaders have their family name and reputation staked on it for the next three generations than I do the amorphous blob called "the public". As Kierkegaard said, in the crowd nobody is responsible.
If you want to see what happens under public ownership visit a public bathroom. I don't want anything externally steered by nobody in particular, I want something steered by a handful of people with names and addresses.
The issue really lies in the fact that the (long-term, majority) shareholders aren't much, if at all, related to the customers or employees of the business, but first the founders, and then parties who are merely interested in rising stock prices and dividends. It feels like the solution here ought to somehow desegregate voting rights from how many shares are owned, instead of dismantling the concept of public ownership entirely. (Or, perhaps, allow the general public to proxy vote via their 401(k) index funds?)
(There's also strange situations like Google/Alphabet, which is publicly owned, but effectively does not allow shareholders to vote on anything.)