I consider myself pretty politically moderate. I like to understand everyone and all points of view. I must be missing something about the “Abolish Labor” movement. As such, I'd love to hear answers to some questions.
- How would enterprise ownership work? Would we take all shares of all businesses and distribute them equally to employees? Would an employee have to give back their shares when they quit? How does this work for sole proprietorship businesses which are little different than a person just working? If a sole proprietor decides to add an employee years after starting a venture, would that employee automatically receive half of the business?
- Are employees ready to take the risk of downside of business ownership? I.e. Let's say that that sole proprietorship had debt. That debt is now assigned to the partnership that includes the new employee. Now, lets' say that the business does very poorly. So poorly that the business goes bankrupt. Does the new employee own that debt? Or just the previous owner?
- A lot of the answer for how we would do this includes automation. Who would create all this automation? My impression is the reason why technologists, engineers and scientists make comparatively higher wages as laborers today is that they are able to automate much better than others. The world already is trying to automate.
Are we saying that we need to send more people to college to get more Computer Science degrees to work as laborers in more tech companies to create more automation? - On that note, I work as a Software Architect at a big tech company. I make pretty good money as a laborer. I'd have to admit that I would not do this job (creating automation) except there's a high monetary upside. What upside is there for me to continue to create automation in the world where labor is abolished?
- Also, I've spent 500 to 1000 hours “wasting my time” creating products on my own time that never saw the light of day. These are a variety of websites and technology products that did not take off because I mostly care about coding and not creating a business. Should I be compensated for my effort? If not, at what point in the business process does an entrepreneur get compensated for their effort? Is there any incentive for entrepreneurship when business ownership is abolished?
- If we look around, there are many technology products that require a significant amount of investment. These include cell phones, cell towers, Facebook, Google Search, laptops, desktops. Software (and automation) takes a very significant amount of investment. I'd know … I'm a programmer.
If capitalistic companies are the problem, then how do these inventions come to be? How do we get these inventions when you need a large entity to invest in it? If the answer is the government invests in it, how do you convince the government to take risky bets that are not proven? The government is not known to be the best risk-taker to create new technologies. How do we keep these large products being created when there is no entity investing in them?
Is the answer that “the workers will collectively create large products”? I.e. the laborers are the ones investing their own time and money to create these large products? What if there are not enough laborers to take the bet on the product, but Mark Zuckerberg is? What about when the product turns out to be a hit, like Facebook was. Should these laborers that decided not to take a risk get rewarded the same way? - Let's say that someone does not want the risk (nor reward) of business ownership. What is the societal mechanism such that they can simply trade their time for money?
Feel free to answer any or all! I appreciate any help you can give. 😀