I don’t know about the US, but the John Lewis Partnership and Huawei Technologies are the first that spring to mind. Neither of which are either tiny or nonfunctional.

“The whole idea that you could drive major policy change by making a distinction between co-ops (especially co-ops in which everyone, even the one-afternoon-a-week part-timer has an equal share) and for-profits is fantasy.”

Listen, I’m out of my depth here, no doubt. But if you look at the emergence of the corporation, it was a major policy change (in the aggregate) that wasn’t driven by a “distinction” but by a host of legal and policy developments nurtured by an activist state. Well, if the goal of leaders in the 18th C US was capitalist industrial development, then these policies emerge and support the goal. If the goal today becomes a prosperous and ecologically sustainable ownership society (bosses and workers unite!), then a complex and dynamic array of policies and social levers are pursued toward that end.

Yes, any single policy in isolation would be comically insufficient.

Huh? You mean the people who opposed redlining? Who are you talking about?

2) b9n10t and Tim B: Again, the issue that I have with friends on the left is not so much a bias against social engineering (see comment 1) above) but a plea for competent engineering. The whole idea that you could drive major policy change by making a distinction between co-ops (especially co-ops in which everyone, even the one-afternoon-a-week part-timer has an equal share) and for-profits is fantasy. Can you give an example of any non-tiny business in the US that could function if everyone had exactly an equal share?

And, even if you relax perfect equality, you still have the problem of people (like me) becoming co-ops if you make co-ops desirable enough.

Aaron writes:

So the policy change here would be some sort of Basic Income Grant, like Nixon and Charles Murray have proposed.

I can’t recall the last time that someone at Crooked Timber made a non-critical reference to Charles Murray. I often think that the best way to create a “larger left” is to take Murray (and others like him) more seriously.

Just because I want people to start new businesses doesn’t mean I want people like you and your friends to start new businesses. I was thinking more about helping the working class start new businesses, and when I talk to them the problem is always getting loans and capital, not government regulation.

First, just what sort of businesses are we talking about? Second, certainly, if you can’t get capital, there is no need to worry about regulation. But, once they have capital, I think that small business folk complain heartily about regulation. Third, we already have a fairly amazing system for “helping the working class start new businesses.” It is called banking. Walk into any bank, and there is a person whose sole job is to fund new businesses.

Now, one might argue that not enough funding is going on. That is a larger debate. But it sure does remind me of all the people who said, 4 years ago, that not enough people had access to capital/loans for buying their own home. Also, if it is really true that not enough capital is going to help working class folks (or others) start their own businesses, then those loans that are made must be very profitable with surprisingly low default rates. I doubt that is true.

In any event, this has been a pleasant discussion.

Since you ask, b9n10t’s formulation at 100 looks pretty good to me.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/06/who-wants-school-vouchers-rich-whites.html

I am in general agreement with your positions on school vouchers, but my impression was that vouchers were more popular outside the South than inside it. Milwaukee is the famous example of experimentation with them. The south, in general, lacks that tradition of predominantly Catholic private education. There is some discussion at 538 on the regional patterns.

Vouchers could become the new middle class entitlement, channeling tax money to private organizations not under public control, and I am surprised that that does not dissuade more conservatives. If vouchers were awarded only to the poor, watch any public support for them crumble.

Actually, although this sounds plausible, it is completely wrong! The people who already start new businesses are irrelevant to a discussion of how to convince more people to start new businesses. Marginal business-starters can’t be the existing business-starters because they’re not on the margin.

What we would need to focus on is the type of people who don’t start new businesses now, but would under a different legal and/or economic system. I suspect that many of those people are not starting new businesses because they lack either the capital or the educational background to do so, and therefore leveling the immediate availability of resources will lift more people into the opportunity-for-entrepreneurship category. (Educational disadvantages take time to remedy, maybe even a generation or more. But that’s no reason not to start ASAP.)

But I’m not sure we really need more new business starts anyway. There are already a lot of failed new businesses, which involve considerable waste (and bankruptcy externalities). We could keep the average business size down (assuming that’s desirable, and I think it probably is) by stronger antitrust enforcement and a more wary attitude toward mergers and acquisitions, rather than total regulatory capture of the agencies tasked with watching those developments, and such an approach might be as efficient or more efficient than trying to encourage more new business starts (that just lead to being squeezed out of the market by the big guy, or being bought up by the big guy making him even bigger).

P.S. Five minutes’ study of the history of labor conditions in the Gilded Age will prove the point at #87-88 beyond any reasonable possibility of doubt. Butchers, bakers, and brewers may provide a quality product out of their regard to their own interest, but employers do not provide quality working conditions out of their regard to their own interest unless potential employees are scarce.

“Is that what the rest of you (Salient, Alex, b9n10nt, Tim B, et al) want?”

Perhaps a bifurcated system:

for all: a generous state safety net (healthcare, unemployment, retirement)

for business with a form of limited liability that hires workers: a regulatory “nanny state” (minimum wage, workplace safety, paid vacation)

for coops in which all participants have equal ownership: do what you want re: labor standards

for the public: consumer protection and progressive wealth taxation

That’s a schematic of where we should be going, plus greater incentives for coops. Down with bosses, down with workers, up with citizens.

Certainly. It’s below. It’s a bit long, hope that’s okay.

If it involves the labour theory of value I doubt I’m going to be convinced.

It doesn’t, I don’t think. I’m pretty sure I accept marginal utility as a more reasonable definition of value, though all of my feelings here are tentative. If you do see LTV latent somewhere in my definition below, please point it out.

But if it involves some notion of bargaining power, then I can’t help but suspect that without its application being ruled out by fiat, the description ‘exploitation’ is going to apply to most people’s dealings with the state.

A little closer. Let me define the verb, not the noun.

To exploit someone is all of the following things taken together. For the time being, if even one of them does not apply to a given scenario, I will not call that scenario an instance of “exploitation.”

(1) To induce suffering in a population.

(2) How? By leverage one’s control over resource allocation. (This includes allocation of jobs, circumstances of employment, et cetera because it includes control over wages and hiring contracts.)

(3) Why? In order to accumulate wealth.

(4) Under what circumstances? Both of these conditions must hold:

(4a) It must be possible for one to allocate resources in a way that does not induce suffering. This would probably require one to accept less wealth accumulation per annum.

(4b) The individuals in the population must be accepting the suffering you induce only because that suffering is marginally better than material deprivation, e.g. starvation. It must be a choice between the option one offers, equally exploitative options offered by others, or starvation.

In order to test 4b, one asks, if guaranteed sufficient food/shelter/healthcare to ensure the survival of themselves and their dependents, would the people you are allegedly exploiting refuse to have further dealings with you?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shmoo

I think this takes us back to the Jerry Cohen’s shmoos. The shmoo was a character in the Li’l Abner comic strip that could turn into any of the necessities of life, but not any of the luxuries. Thus a shmoo could turn into rice-and-beans, but not caviar. Before the shmoos arrived, the citizens of the town were exploited—capitalists gave the subsistence wages in return for grueling, dangerous labor and (since this was the 1940s) women had to be nice to their man if they wanted to survive. The shmoos changed all that—since basic subsistence was guaranteed, people only engaged in contracts that they genuinely thought they would benefit from; they were no longer forced by circumstances into things they really didn’t want to do.

So the policy change here would be some sort of Basic Income Grant, like Nixon and Charles Murray have proposed.

if, like Aaron, you do want lots of people “to start new businesses,” then you ought to listen to either a) the sorts of people (like me) who do, in fact, start new businesses or b) the sorts of people (like many of my buddies) who might start new businesses

Just because I want people to start new businesses doesn’t mean I want people like you and your friends to start new businesses. I was thinking more about helping the working class start new businesses, and when I talk to them the problem is always getting loans and capital, not government regulation.