Tag: Critical thinking

Economic policy suggestions

From a prosocial perspective, it seems eminently reasonable to seek to foster a healthier economy in the society in question, and one way to do this would, of course, be to increase the average efficiency of the economic actors in that society, and given that worker co-operatives are apparently on average not only the most efficient corporations but also the most resilient, keeping the aforementioned perspective it would seem particularly rational to enact policies that would increase such co-operatives’ proportion of the economy. From the same point of view it seems very sensible to also make the establishment of not only innovative limited companies but limited companies in general as uncomplicated as reasonably possible and to give inventive employees healthier incentives.

It seems that a substantial increase in the proportion of worker co-operatives could be achieved by establishing a number of state funding agencies that would finance especially the founding stages of worker co-operatives bound by a certain legally fixed set of rules. Co-operatives like this could be called employees’ corporations, for example, and I’ll use this term for this type of co-operative at least for now.
The agencies should also fund conversions of existing businesses into employees’ corporations through buyouts. They should fund innovative limited companies as well, especially in the founding stages, since a limited company seems quite likely to be the most suitable form of corporation for a primarily innovator-driven business. They should, of course, be able to fund less innovative limited companies too. They should also be allowed to fund more conventional transfers of limited company ownership. It should, of course, be possible to found employees’ corporations with private funding as well.

The agencies should be able to have both solo investors and investment teams, and the investors and the members of the investment teams should naturally have a legally mandated non-disclosure duty, and provided that the state has a fairly solid reputation for consistently enforcing the rule of law, this would obviously make it possible for people to simply get in touch with investors and investment teams and discuss their business plans without having to worry too much about their ideas getting stolen.
Even if the state has a good reputation, there should probably also be a standing recommendation for people to make sufficient records of their communication with the investors and the investment teams, just in case.

The investors and the members of the investment teams should have relatively modest base salaries, but each solo investor and investment team should naturally also get a share of the net profits they generate for the agencies. They should also get automatically dismissed if their ”accounts” are in the negative for too long, and the amounts they are in the negative and the potentials of their investments should be taken into consideration when determining the length of time that qualifies as too long, but there should be an algorithm that would take a general economic downturn into consideration when their performance would be automatically evaluated so that the dismissal of sufficiently competent people could be avoided. Dismissed investors should, however, get their share of the net profits their investments might ultimately end up generating; if another investor or investment team working for the agency or some other agency takes over a case by investing more into the corporation in question, how much each investor and investment team gets paid should be proportional to the amount they have invested in the corporation relative to the total amount invested in that corporation via their agency or agencies.

The funding agencies should have to be self-sustaining, and therefore if the agency-funded corporations that have not reached their investment targets have surplus, they should have to pay the agencies if demanded to do so by those who invested in them until they reach their return-on-investment targets, after which they would be independent. The agencies should have ownership of the corporations that have not become independent of them in order for the investors and investment teams to have the ability to recoup some of the potential losses, but besides being able to dictate how much of the possible net surplus of the corporations would be paid to the agencies and when, the investors and the investment teams should have no control over the corporations.
Corporations that have not become independent from the agencies could be called bound corporations, for example, and bound employees’ corporations would, of course, essentially be agency owned and employee controlled limited companies instead of worker co-operatives.
Limited companies still in agency ownership should, of course, have designated potential owners who would control the companies as if they were the owners, except regarding the payments to the agencies, obviously.
The return-on-investment target percentage should be set by law to a level that would ensure that sufficiently well-functioning agencies can make enough profit to not only sustain themselves but also grow without taking on debt.
Agencies that fail to sustain themselves should simply be automatically abolished.
Because the corporations would become independent upon reaching their return-on-investment targets, the investors would, of course, have a fairly strong incentive to remain active.
The agencies should be legal persons, and they should operate much like employees’ corporations.

The head of state, the head of government, the parliament, and the ministry that would be responsible for most of the supervision of the funding agencies should be able to order funding agencies to be established. Funding agencies should be establishable also by the administrative units of the state. The armed forces, the branches thereof, and the ministry of military affairs should also be permitted to establish funding agencies and naturally also to supervise funding agencies they have established, but funding agencies established by them should be allowed to invest only in services supporting the functions of the armed forces and in the production of military equipment.
The initial capital of the agencies should arguably be loans from the state and the administrative units, and they should naturally be able to lend the agencies more too. The agencies should be able to take on debt from the private sector as well.

There should be a special type of corporation to make it easy to distinguish the employees’ corporations from other kinds of worker co-operatives, and there could also be two subtypes of it to allow people to easily tell bound and independent ones apart. If these types of corporations are called employees’ corporations also legally, they could obviously be abbreviated as Bec/bec and Ec/ec.
The core ruleset of the employees’ corporations should be legally mandated so that all of them would be on fairly equal footing in terms of rules, and it seems that a core ruleset with the following rules would enable the corporations to function fairly well:
1. Every employee has one vote.
2. The board is elected by the employees, and all employees are eligible to become candidates for board membership.
3. A binding employees’ vote (on should a new board election be held or should a specific employee be removed from a position or dismissed altogether, for example) will be had if at least 10 % of the employees demand one, provided that the number of employees making the demand is at least two.
4. An advisory employees’ vote will be had if at least 5 % of the employees demand one.
5. Every employee has the right to bring up to two (or maybe three) outsiders to observe the voting and the counting of votes (there should also be a number of experts in the overseeing ministry and maybe in the ministry of justice as well who could be invited to observe the proceedings).
6. Company funds may not be used for campaigning to influence internal elections nor employee votes.
7. The share of the dividend each employee gets is equal to their share of the sum total of all salaries and bonuses paid by the company during the preceding full fiscal year.
8. Whether to pay dividend and how much is decided by direct employee vote, but bound employees’ corporations are obligated to pay the funding agencies before paying dividend if demanded to do so, of course.
9. Independent employees’ corporations can be converted to any other type of corporation (with some fixed minimum delay) if at least two thirds of the employees are in favour of doing so, and the form of corporation and other details can be decided either at the same time or with a separate vote.
Violating these rules should naturally be criminal.

Employees’ corporations would obviously operate on the market under normal market regulations, but given that they would not only be relatively efficient and resilient but probably also favoured to some degree by the general public over other types of corporations, they might become very significant on the market, perhaps even fairly quickly, and a country establishing a system like this might experience an at least somewhat prolonged period of rapid economic development, and it would, of course, fairly likely also gain a substantial or even a relatively decisive competitive edge over otherwise comparable countries without equivalent or similar systems.
If there is a perceived need to protect the system and thus also economic and social stability from fluctuating political trends, the right of the people to have a system of this nature could obviously be enshrined in the constitution as well.

A law regarding employee inventions more or less along the lines of the following would seem likely to have some positive effects:
Employees should have the rights to all inventions they make on the job as a result of their possible research and development duties, but they should be obligated to licence them semi-exclusively to the employer they were working for when they made the invention. Semi-exclusivity would mean that they would not be allowed to licence the intellectual property in question to any other party without an agreement with the employer, with the exception of another employer for which they work. They should, of course, be allowed to sell the rights to their inventions by default, but it should naturally be possible for them to enter into contracts which stipulate that they agree to not do so for defined periods of time, and they should also be allowed to agree to not exploit the inventions in question for as long as the patents in question are in force or for shorter periods of time so that the employers for which the inventors involved made their inventions would have better chances to profit from their investments into the research and development projects leading to the inventions in question. People should, of course, also be allowed to enter into employment contracts which stipulate that the inventions they make during their employment are automatically licenced to their employer if the licencing terms agreed upon in the employment contract are met. The inventors should only be allowed to sell the rights to their inventions after they have signed the obligatory licence agreements or after the patents have been granted if a licence agreement regarding the invention is not yet in force, and if an inventor or a group of inventors sells the rights to their invention and a licence agreement is in force, the licence agreement should naturally bind the new owner of the rights to the invention. The new owner should also not be allowed to licence said intellectual property to any other party except the employer for which the inventor(s) made the invention without a written agreement with the employer in question, and they should, of course, be obligated to licence the invention to the employer for which the inventor(s) made the invention in question if a licence agreement is not in force when the rights to the invention is transferred to the new owner. If the employers the inventors were working for when they made their inventions agree that the right to use the inventions can be licenced to others, the proceeds from such licencing should be shared equally between the owners of the rights to the inventions and the employers for which they made the inventions.

There shouldn’t be a legally defined minimum royalty percentage for obligatory licences, but there should be a legal requirement for the compensation for the obligatory licences to be at least adequate relative to the benefits provided by the patents in question, and if an agreement regarding the terms of an obligatory licence has not been reached within, for example, 100 days after a patent application has been filed, it should be possible for the parties involved to take the matter to a competent court. The royalties should be calculated by multiplying the base prices before taxes with the royalty rates.
It seems likely that a signing bonus equal to some fairly modest percentage of a reasonably conservative estimate of the value of the invention would be the norm in licencing agreements, since it would seem to make a lot of sense for companies to pay such bonuses without much encouragement.

In cases in which an invention has multiple inventors, the inventors should share the royalties equally if they haven’t made a contract regarding their shares of the rights to the invention. If a product utilizes a number of inventions covered by the law regarding employee inventions, the royalties paid could be calculated as follows, for example: the total royalty percentage paid to the owners of the patents covering the employee inventions could be equal to that of the invention with the highest percentage plus the others added up and divided by ten (or maybe five), and the royalties would be shared between the holders of the patents according to the royalty percentage(s) of their patent(s) divided by all of the royalty percentages added up, for example, i.e. if a product utilized 3 patents with royalty rates of 7 %, 8 %, and 11 %, the owner of the patent with the 7 % royalty rate would get 7 / 26 of the royalties, the total rate of which would be 12,5 % (or 14 %).
It seems that this way the market prices of products utilizing even a relatively large number of inventions licenced from inventive employees would also stay at a fairly reasonable level, and all of the owners of the applied patents would get rewarded more or less properly.

It seems quite likely that corporations primarily driven by a single key person or a small group of key people would continue to be limited companies to a significant degree and probably even for the most part in cases in which the key people are also the owners. Employees’ corporations would seem fairly likely to be very key person driven as well, as they might be able to retain innovators and other key people quite consistently, given that they too would obviously have quite strong incentives to pay key personnel adequately, and especially considering that employees’ corporations would probably be relatively likely to have healthy workplace cultures.

A lot of key-person-driven corporations would obviously rather likely keep getting founded as privately funded limited companies as well. There should arguably also be a form of limited company the establishment and operation of which would not require the involvement of more than one person, and if these are an option, it should, of course, also be possible to establish corporations of this kind through funding agencies as bound corporations.
Business arrangements involving inventive corporations and individuals outsourcing manufacturing and/or licencing a patent or patents to an employees’ corporation or multiple would probably be quite common in an economy utilizing this kind of a system, since they would most likely be the most efficient options more often than not and due to greater average efficiency probably also more common than similar arrangements in comparable economies in which employees have less healthy incentives on average.

In the lead-up to and following the establishment of a system like this, private investment in the economy would, of course, be less attractive, and thus the transition period might be somewhat difficult, but it seems that the negative impact might be fairly moderate, i.e. manageable if the funding agencies are provided with ample funds and especially if the system is established at a time when private investment in the economy is already at a relatively low level.

All things considered, the resulting system would seem to be one in which inventive employees would have fairly healthy incentives, employees in general would be relatively difficult to abuse, starting and buying businesses would be relatively easy, corporations would have less superfluous management on average, employees would be on average more productive and also happier and thus probably healthier too, and it seems that the economy in general would quite likely work significantly better after the transition period, and thus it would seem that the unemployment and underemployment rates would also most likely be lower than before it. In addition, it seems that the immigration of many kinds of professionals and especially of the innovative kind might increase quite considerably, provided that the other qualities of the society in question don’t make it somehow repulsive, obviously.

A bit about weapon rights and some related matters

Are you in favour of relatively unlimited individual weapon rights? If you are not, you might want to reconsider: I like to think that my reasoning behind this claim is quite convincing.
Before moving on to the aforementioned reasoning, I would like to make it clear that among other things, I design firearms and other kinds of weapons, and why I do so should become fairly obvious if you read the rest of this entry. I am, of course, arguably at least somewhat biased concerning these matters, but it doesn’t seem very rational to simply assume that I am so biased that my arguments about them are somehow deeply flawed or even completely invalid.

It seems to me that power is not intrinsically corruptive, but also that the corrupt tend to seek power and that only the absolutely corrupt seek absolute power, and from this viewpoint, it would seem to be quite sensible for people to seek to safeguard their rights and liberties as well as reasonably possible. Those who are fundamentally opposed to liberty will, of course, work against such safeguarding efforts in a rather consistent, arguably even compulsive manner. It is obviously a priority for such people to seek to deprive the people whom they seek to repress of weapons that can be used as effective means of resistance against repression, especially of the kinds of weapons that are particularly suitable for military and paramilitary uses, of course, and thus it seems that it should be made clear that rifles in this latter category of weapons are used only in relatively small proportions of criminal homicides and other violent crimes involving firearms committed in the United States of America, and that the vast majority of them are, in fact, also at least good and relatively often even excellent for defensive and sporting uses.

To me it seems quite obvious that a state is an entity separate from a people, ideally much like a corporation is from its owners, and that one at least should be just a tool, i.e. a means to an end rather than a self-justifying end in itself, and it would seem to be approximately equally obvious that a state will act only as prosocially as it has to, and it is, of course, rather difficult for a people to coerce a state if they are not suitably equipped to do so.
It would appear to be quite sensible to want to live in a society in which the people don’t have to essentially just hope that the state and obviously law enforcement and the armed forces in particular won’t turn against them at some point due to, for example, systematic extremist infiltration, i.e. to want to have a society in which the people have an overwhelmingly strong ability to keep state power in check instead of a society that is essentially based on wishful thinking. Some people, however, seem to be so indoctrinated and/or enthralled by their fantasies of in some ways relatively unrestricted power, greater wealth, higher social status, and/or ”glory” that they rather conveniently ignore the quite distinct possibility that a society in which at least just about everyone can in practice be coerced to serve it indefinitely is not necessarily a great idea.

The abolition of liberty would seem to be a real threat at least for now, even if it seems like a fairly remote one at the moment. Things can, however, change quite rapidly, as is well known, and it seems that it should be kept in mind that the replacement of liberty with abject repression might happen as a consequence of the relative foolishness of only a single generation. It would thus seem quite reasonable for a people to invest amply in education.
It seems that combining an education system in which a very considerable proportion of the eligible population gets at least half a year or so of military education (including civics classes) with constitutionally guaranteed weapon rights (with some reasonable limitations, of course) would also help to perpetuate liberty: it is obviously relatively difficult to successfully limit the rights and liberties of a people arbitrarily and/or to carry out a coup d’état or a violent revolution successfully if a large proportion of the population in question is opposed to such actions, genuinely capable of well-organized paramilitary and/or military operations against their domestic enemies, and determined to crush them. A well-armed civilian population is, of course, also an extra deterrent against invasion.

From the viewpoint of prioritizing the safeguarding of liberty, a registry of privately owned weapons seems like an eminently bad idea, even though such a registry can, of course, be helpful when used for legitimate purposes, since such a registry can obviously also be used to, for example, facilitate mass confiscation of weapons and/or the creation of a database of people who are, on average, relatively likely to engage in armed resistance against a repressive state and/or to support such resistance. Weapon registry data is, of course, also very attractive to a state or states planning to invade the country in question. Burglars, too, might want to acquire weapon registry data so that they would know which dwellings are relatively safe to burgle even when the inhabitants are present and which dwellings to burgle when the inhabitants are not present if they want to steal weapons. Taking into account all of the ways such a registry can be abused, it seems that the existence of one is arguably a rather considerable threat to the people living under the jurisdiction of a state with one.
Law enforcement work is obviously more inconvenient without the aid of such a registry than with such aid, but at least in this context it doesn’t seem very reasonable to prioritize what is convenient for law enforcement when crafting potentially extremely significant legislation. Law enforcement officers who have to cope with the inconvenience of not having such a registry at their disposal should, of course, be trained and paid relatively well.
In my opinion, there should, however, be a non-logging, well-maintained, robust, easy-to-use system for making instant background checks in order to help prevent and reduce the possession of weapons subject to legal restrictions by people who are not legally allowed to possess them, and the use of a system like this arguably shouldn’t require any special qualifications so that it would fulfil its purpose as well as possible.

States obviously tend to be relatively very significant concentrations of power, and thus it would seem to be quite sensible to maintain a reasonable degree of suspicion towards them.