32 points

See, the thing is that workers have not traditionally enjoyed the freedom to engage in economic activity freely. Unless you were part of a privileged caste you were only allowed to work for others, instead of working for yourself.

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5 points

I guess they mean it more literally in that workers actually did the work to make a thing.

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24 points

i appreciate the sentiment but pasting Marx’s face over Omniman’s is maybe sending some mixed messages

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19 points

Capitalism breeds innovation

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2 points

Image lists Mercedes twice

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1 point

The two are extremely different, each clearly made for its own purpose and its own demographic

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1 point

They are literally different Mercedes models

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9 points

At the same time, we’ll have to recognize that a world without megacorps is going to involve a much greater presence of state power in the technological sphere due to the need to standardize communication protocols to facilitate a free market of mutually communicable softwares and hardwares.

The question will stop being about how we stop price gouging for the latest iPhone and more about how we prevent a situation like HIPAA where people are forced to use a less secure less efficient technology because it was the most efficient and secure at the time Congress was last able to get off it’s ass to legislate on the matter.

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9 points

Corporations are doing a bad job at it as well. While Gouvernement standards tend to be slow and stagnant, the free market produces an incomprehensible sea of standards. Like with USB, HDMI, 3/4G signals, cat-X Internet cables. If a single global manufacturer decides to do things slightly different you get a new version of a standard that everybody has to be compatible with.

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3 points

Additionally, corporations will only invent the standards that they benefit from. A government can introduce requirements that people benefit from.

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5 points

There are plenty of communication protocols that are developed and expanded without corporate support, one of which is the ActivityPub protocol, which this platform is built on.

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-2 points
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You’re assuming that we must have a free market and a state though. Those are not requirements for many economic theories.

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7 points

They are requirements for any theory that intends for there to be economy at a scale beyond a tyranny of cousins and inequitable allocation of non municipally managed resources.

It also sounds as if you believe there can’t be any sort of democratic accountability to a free market, which is just not even remotely true, there is objectively nothing which makes worker ownership of productive firms incompatible with the sale of what they produce in a free economy.

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1 point

I have no clue where you got that assumption, but I’m well aware of worker cooperatives, and that worker cooperatives are compatible with a socialist free market. All I said was that not all economic theories require the assumptions you made.

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