You also end up with management and incentive issues. You can correct those with violence or starvation in the short term and hope everything works out in the long term.
What, to you, is the difference between the owners being the government, and the owners being investors, all else being equal?
Do you think people don’t get paid if there’s no profit? Profit is just money left over after everyone gets paid and the bills are settled. It just goes to investors, and the employees don’t see it.
Do you think that transition would happen without severe turmoil? That’s the period I’m referring to. I think there’s a huge difference in incentives to create new businesses as well as to keep running them efficiently between private investment and government…I’m not sure what method you propose to regulate industry.
It doesn’t matter if people get paid if shelves are empty. The economy isn’t a magical portal that delivers toilet paper to those in need: it’s an insanely complicated set of (highly compromised at the moment, thanks to rich fucks and the officials/politicians they buy) human behaviors that act as market signals.
Why do you think there would be severe turmoil? In existing cases where the government has taken control of a business in the US, it’s typically reduced turmoil, which is why they’ve done it.
The difference in incentive is that private investment is looking for profits, and public ownership is usually more concerned with stability or public welfare.
What do you picture a change in ownership looking like? Do you think that somehow means massive layoffs and changes in management? Why would shelves go empty? What calamity befell the economy when we nationalized passenger rail, airport security, or mortgage financing? Or when we temporarily nationalized GM?
If changing ownership decimates the economy, then why hasn’t it been decimated already by routing changed in ownership that businesses have?
All this is aside from the original point, which is that profitability is not the same thing as solvency.
Siphoning some percentage of the companies revenue to investors isn’t what makes the business work.