multiheaded1793 asked: "Privatizing public services and state-owned corporations would be most naturally done by handing ownership to their users and workers"... appears to be a bad enough idea that it was more or less consciously implemented as a wild primary accumulation grab in Soviet Russia. Vouchers...
Yes, I’m quite aware of the failure of the soviet voucher program, and that’s why I wouldn’t do it that way. I’d expect that turning public assets into cooperatives of the smallest functioning size (single clinics instead of county hospital systems; buses given to individual drivers instead of city bus corporations, etc.) would be far less vulnerable to outside capture away from ill-informed and desperately poor owners.
If one believes that workers who cooperatively own their workplace would be willing to sell their ownership and mutual autonomy to some external capitalist for way too little without an authority to keep them in line, then I’d suppose that it’s their property and they’re free to do what they want, but I don’t think that would be such a massively high risk.
The actual problem I’d anticipate for the newly created free cooperatives is that many of them would have no sustainable business plan.
While some, like clinics and schools, have an obvious source of value-creation and would only require an administrative adjustment to become well-functioning businesses (or non-profits, or whatever the workers want to turn them into), some ex-bureaucracies such as the National Pension Agency (whose function is to simply gatekeep welfare instead of doing anything useful) would be in really deep shit without the state apparatus of violence creating artificial use for their “services”. They would still have their offices though, and the workers would be able to scramble to figure out some kind of a productive use for them, or simply abandon the sinking ship and go find real jobs instead.
Some, like social services offices, would be somewhere in between; they would have counselors who could sell their services on the market for people who need help (and can easily afford to buy it with the 15k€), but they would need to shed their artificial make-work parts.
Obviously this isn’t equal in any meaning of the word; someone whose comfy office bureaucrat job turns into a glass parking lot would be in a really unfair position compared to another office drone who happened to be in a really well-functioning hospital, but tough shit, maybe they should’ve gone to the private sector in the first place if they didn’t want to be dependent on arbitrary state policy (oh, wait…), but that’s what the floor of 15k€ is for. It’s still way more than what they themselves dispensed to the poor while they were doing their own coercive state job.
Furthermore, the capital that actually makes people rich obviously belongs in the national investment fund instead, generating revenue and growing itself so that taxes could be eventually, if not abolished outright, at least drastically lowered when the publicly owned capital would be enough to pay for the basic income or a substantial fraction of it. And if someone were to buy up the welfare gatekeepers and somehow turn them into a profitable business on the free market, then that would be quite an amazing feat of value-creation and I wouldn’t be too bothered with such a genius becoming a billionaire. This mutualization plan would mostly be about “carving up the beast” so that whatever productive can be salvaged from the “expenses” column of the national budget would not concentrate too much in the hands of a few while still being able to reap the rewards of eliminating bureaucratic control of things that do have a way of functioning on markets.
And most importantly, it would be way too hilarious to see the CEO of the postal office (salary: ~500 000€/yr, a lot more than most executives on the private sector) sweating in front of The Owners, aka. mostly the previously precarious postal drones whom the executives had just recently been thoroughly kicking (wages: ~12 000€/yr at the lowest). And the same for all the other state monopolist cronies. I’d expect that this would be a pretty big redistribution from useless executives and bureaucrats to nurses, teachers and other Actually Value-creating public sector employees, who have been unfairly screwed over by the parasites way too much for way too long.
1 month ago · 7 notes · .permalink
hotmario reblogged this from ozylikes
ozylikes reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin
ketzerei-heuchelei liked this
ozymandias271 liked this
collapsedsquid reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin
woodswordsquire liked this
socialjusticemunchkin posted this