I think this is a much better idea: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/05/07/fixing-employment-with-consulting-call-options/ http://michaelochurch.wordpre

I think this is a much better idea: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/05/07/fixing-employment-with-consulting-call-options/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/05/07/fixing-employ... Essentially, it's a system that allows people to collect some stability income upfront by selling call options on future consulting services. This would also allow intermediaries (like GT) to arbitrage. For example, I'm damn sure there's someone out there who'd pay $750 per hour for my time (or, at least, could justify that much value) but I can't find that person-- and he probably only needs a few hours of my time, here and there. I'd be happy to sell a call option (strike $100/h) for $150/hour and let the option holder take most of the profit ($500) in order to have him doing my marketing and finding those $750/h high-value clients (which I can't). The one way my consulting call options would differ is that the option holder only gets 95% of the profit; 5% goes back to the consultant. That's to make sure the consultant knows the actual price he or she is billed at. Employment is already a call option, really. Take software engineers. The median of us is worth less than our salary, but the good ones are worth 5x and the great ones are 20-100x. That's hard to predict, because it's not only a factor of the individual, but also project/person fit and being assigned to high-yield work. Many software engineers at large companies could be rendering over $1 million per year in value, but are being held on evaluative Fourth Quadrant Work ( http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/fourth-quadrant-work/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/fourth-quadra... ) while management decides whether or not to trust them with a real project. So there's already a call-option dynamic in place; it's just that right now, it works entirely out of employee favor. I want to fix that.