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I think you’re confusing the word “merit” with the word “ownership”. Merit cannot be measured objectively, so you are using ownership stakes in large corporatio

I think you’re confusing the word “merit” with the word “ownership”. Merit cannot be measured objectively, so you are using ownership stakes in large corporations as a proxy for merit. But you haven’t shown that ownership in a corporation is correlated with merit. You’ve just automatically assumed they have merit because the corporations they own are large and successful, and it seems you’ve defined merit by owning a large and successful corporation. This is circular reasoning, unless you want to try for a better definition of merit. But large and successful corporations are large and successful precisely because of the work of tens of thousands to millions of people. You are trying to say they shouldn’t have a say in our economy? In the work they do? Even though they are the ones on the ground doing actual work, building actual products and technologies with their hands? Amazon and Walmart do not exist without this army of workers to make them operate every day. Jeff Bezos could die tomorrow and Amazon would continue unabated, just as Apple did the day after Steve Jobs died. Why? Because Amazon and Apple and Walmart are not one person or even one family. Why then, should we give such an outsized role over our lives to single individuals at these companies, when we can’t even prove the success of these companies is due to their individual “merit”?

TameAntelope 5y ago
It's not circular, it's simply causational. If a corporation does well, the owners of that corporation have demonstrated their merit. The goal is not to reward work, the goal is to reward risk. Owning a company is risky. Simply working at a company is not risky. Successfully taking on risk and navigating from that risk to a successful and sustained outcome is what defines merit. It is perfectly acceptable that the workers who do not take on risk through ownership at Amazon and Walmart do not get to have a say in what Amazon and Walmart do. It's also true that both Amazon and Walmart pay many of their employees with shares of their company, for this exact reason. Employees who become (small percentage) owners of a company demonstrate merit proportional to their risk, and generally proportional to their individual contribution. It's not perfect, but if your goal is perfection, you will live the rest of your life dissatisfied and frustrated by inequity.
- ModernMech 5y ago
  > If a corporation does well, the owners of that corporation have demonstrated their merit. > [merit is defined as] Successfully taking on risk and navigating from that risk to a successful and sustained outcome I'm not looking for perfect, I'm looking for well-reasoned. This is not a causal relationship, it is definitional. A tautology. You provided a definition of merit here and then claim that anyone who meets the definition has merit. But so what? This is a circular argument because you have not proven that those people are responsible for the success of the corporations they own. In order to prove a casual relationship, you will have to control for all other factors, including the efforts of other employees and even random chance. And this better be a very robust analysis because if you want to put these people in charge of our lives due to their supposed "merit", they better damn well have it. Because successful and sustained operation of Amazon is achieved by all workers collectively. The owners of Amazon are not necessarily doing the work of Amazon. They are not even directing that work in many cases. I'm an owner of Amazon and I don't do anything for them. So which owners were responsible for the success of Amazon and how do you determine that? What is the threshold for being attributed merit for Amazon's success? 10% of the company? 20%? A majority? A plurality? You have offered no way to objectively figure this out, and instead defined merit in vague terms. What is "successful"? What is "sustained"? > Simply working at a company is not risky. Thanks in large part due to workers having a say over the economy! Travel back to the early days of America or even the early 20th century, and you'll be in a world with no worker protections on the job. Unsafe work environments, no regulations, long hours, child labor, no breaks, no leave, no healthcare, no paid sick days, 6 day work weeks, indentured servitude, private corporate armies, company towns, company stores ... I could go on and on. Oh and let's not forget to mention slavery. Keep in mind the same logic and reasoning you are applying here could have been used in the 1800s to put slave owners in charge of the economy. ("Look at how successful their business is! They should be running the entire economy!"). Here is a taste of the climate created by the very same kind of "meritorious" business owners that you want to put in charge today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi... "Because the doors to the stairwells and exits were locked[1][7] – a common practice at the time to prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks and to reduce theft[8] – many of the workers could not escape from the burning building and jumped from the high windows." These are the kind of thing that happens when you let "meritorious" owners of corporations do whatever they want. These are the kinds of ideas they come up with. So if you want to put these people in charge of our lives and our economy you will also need to somehow assure us that this kind of violence against workers will not happen again. Would it interest you to know that "CEO" is the job title of a disproportionate number of psychopaths? Take a look at the psychological profiles of a board room and a prison cell block -- you won't find much of a difference in frequency of psychopathic tendencies between the two groups. If we define merit as running a successful corporation, and we select people from that pool to run our economy, you're going to be selecting a disproportionate number of psychopaths in the process. My fear would be that they would go right back to putting chains on the doors and conducting violent attacks against striking workers given the first opportunity.

TameAntelope 5y ago

It's not circular, it's simply causational. If a corporation does well, the owners of that corporation have demonstrated their merit. The goal is not to reward work, the goal is to reward risk. Owning a company is risky. Simply working at a company is not risky. Successfully taking on risk and navigating from that risk to a successful and sustained outcome is what defines merit. It is perfectly acceptable that the workers who do not take on risk through ownership at Amazon and Walmart do not get to have a say in what Amazon and Walmart do. It's also true that both Amazon and Walmart pay many of their employees with shares of their company, for this exact reason. Employees who become (small percentage) owners of a company demonstrate merit proportional to their risk, and generally proportional to their individual contribution. It's not perfect, but if your goal is perfection, you will live the rest of your life dissatisfied and frustrated by inequity.

ModernMech 5y ago
> If a corporation does well, the owners of that corporation have demonstrated their merit. > [merit is defined as] Successfully taking on risk and navigating from that risk to a successful and sustained outcome I'm not looking for perfect, I'm looking for well-reasoned. This is not a causal relationship, it is definitional. A tautology. You provided a definition of merit here and then claim that anyone who meets the definition has merit. But so what? This is a circular argument because you have not proven that those people are responsible for the success of the corporations they own. In order to prove a casual relationship, you will have to control for all other factors, including the efforts of other employees and even random chance. And this better be a very robust analysis because if you want to put these people in charge of our lives due to their supposed "merit", they better damn well have it. Because successful and sustained operation of Amazon is achieved by all workers collectively. The owners of Amazon are not necessarily doing the work of Amazon. They are not even directing that work in many cases. I'm an owner of Amazon and I don't do anything for them. So which owners were responsible for the success of Amazon and how do you determine that? What is the threshold for being attributed merit for Amazon's success? 10% of the company? 20%? A majority? A plurality? You have offered no way to objectively figure this out, and instead defined merit in vague terms. What is "successful"? What is "sustained"? > Simply working at a company is not risky. Thanks in large part due to workers having a say over the economy! Travel back to the early days of America or even the early 20th century, and you'll be in a world with no worker protections on the job. Unsafe work environments, no regulations, long hours, child labor, no breaks, no leave, no healthcare, no paid sick days, 6 day work weeks, indentured servitude, private corporate armies, company towns, company stores ... I could go on and on. Oh and let's not forget to mention slavery. Keep in mind the same logic and reasoning you are applying here could have been used in the 1800s to put slave owners in charge of the economy. ("Look at how successful their business is! They should be running the entire economy!"). Here is a taste of the climate created by the very same kind of "meritorious" business owners that you want to put in charge today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi... "Because the doors to the stairwells and exits were locked[1][7] – a common practice at the time to prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks and to reduce theft[8] – many of the workers could not escape from the burning building and jumped from the high windows." These are the kind of thing that happens when you let "meritorious" owners of corporations do whatever they want. These are the kinds of ideas they come up with. So if you want to put these people in charge of our lives and our economy you will also need to somehow assure us that this kind of violence against workers will not happen again. Would it interest you to know that "CEO" is the job title of a disproportionate number of psychopaths? Take a look at the psychological profiles of a board room and a prison cell block -- you won't find much of a difference in frequency of psychopathic tendencies between the two groups. If we define merit as running a successful corporation, and we select people from that pool to run our economy, you're going to be selecting a disproportionate number of psychopaths in the process. My fear would be that they would go right back to putting chains on the doors and conducting violent attacks against striking workers given the first opportunity.