Quote from: Vandroiy on July 02, 2013, 12:57:52 PM

Quote from: crumbs on July 01, 2013, 08:13:13 PM

You substitute "control" & "manage" for the word in your quote, "own." That's the cause of your misunderstanding.
A factory boss manages scores of people, he controls them, though he doesn't own them. I think the objection in your quote is to 1% owning so much, not simply controlling it. Have i helped?

Quote from: crumbs on July 01, 2013, 08:13:13 PM

You're mixing thing up again. When you pay insurance premiums, your insurance guy doesn't pocket the money. He controls it, his firm might invest or loan it, but there's no concentration of wealth -- the money's not his.
As far as insurance being a good or a bad idea? That's debatable, though has nothing to do with the 1%.

While making this distinction is meaningful in theory, not giving a company's highest level decision-maker substantial ownership yields very bad results.

It depends on what you mean by "substantial." A .01% stake in Google would be substantial enough for me to pay attention, if that .01% happened to be 99% of my net worth. OTOH, my mind may wonder if i owned Microsoft & Apple, so even 100% ownership of Google would not guarantee my decisions to be motivated by the welfare of Google, exclusively.

My interest would be in the cumulative value of my three companies, so bankrupting Google would be in my best interest, as long as my other two companies are enriched by a greater amount in the process.

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Top-down organization works to some extent -- mainly through high intelligence by organizers -- but just degenerates at the top. The reason for this is corruption, or game theory on selfish actors if you want to put it that way.

To me that's not immediately obvious, so i'd probably want a more reasoned argument -- based on empirical data & all that tedious stuff. Corruption finds a way into every human enterprise, like rats find their way onto ships. No rats? Sailors panick -- sure sign of a sinking ship.
Once you agree that corruption is motivated by more than simple greed, the harbor rats scurry over the mooring lines, and there you are.

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So I'm not mixing things up, but reducing the problem to feasible solutions. You need someone who owns a company so that you have someone who really cares about it. While very high intelligence might in principle find other setups with favorable incentive systems, that appears to be too hard for us humans right now.

I'm guessing that you model your assumptions on ma & pa companies, where owners are also the employees & as such most attune to the company's business. In reality, the owner is no better versed in the workings of his company than an investor in pork belly futures is at raising pigs. This is important. Your reasoning leads to a dubious conclusion: A dictatorship is the best way to run a country. On paper, i would agree. In practice? Not so much.

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So to answer the question:

Quote from: crumbs on July 01, 2013, 08:13:13 PM

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Distributing large-scale resource management to over 70M individuals (1% of the planet's population) is not currently possible and managing resources in a non-capitalistic fashion leads to systemic degeneration. Most people currently alive are not educated enough for such a broad asset distribution to work.

What is it you wish to distribute to 1% of the world's population?

It's not me who wants to make an assumption on wealth distribution. The "99%" crew wants to distribute a large amount of it well beyond 1% of the population.

My argument is that control over resources and personal wealth are strongly coupled. To reach their goal, the "99%" protesters must either decouple resource control from wealth, which does not seem to work, or have a whole lot of people trained in resource control, which we don't seem to be able to. This leaves them with no realistic options to achieve their goal.

Agreed. Your alternative fails likewise, see dictatorship above.

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The distinction between control and wealth blurs on large scales anyway. Nobody can consume a billion dollars right now. One can waste it, but a politician can waste it on funny agriculture laws as much as an oil exporter can build a ski resort in the desert.

The difference being that the politician, at least in theory, is held accountable, while the billionaire is free to waste his money as he sees fit -- it's his to waste. Other than his own ethics, which are already put in question by the simple fact that he has accumulated such a hefty sum, there is nothing to stop him from doing so. As far as desert ski resorts, i'm sure the oil sheiks & their shiksas are planning one as we speak Cheesy

Responsible ownership in action -- watch it go.

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The difference between a communist party leader and the owner of a giant monopoly of the same size is irrelevant to a human starving on the street.

I'm not sure how this serves your argument -- both are seen as oppressors, who rose to their positions by cunning & corruption. The "human starving in the street" would like to roast both over a slow fire, smother them in BBQ sauce & chase them down with a cold brewsky.

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Whether the person at the top owns or just controls something -- and what ownership even means -- is a question of control structure optimization, not reality in terms of power accumulation.[/i]

If the difference is simply rhetorical, why is actual ownership (and not merely control) important to you? I assume the 99-percenters are fine with the control part, it's the ownership that rubs them the wrong way.