Even when there are strong financial motivators, people still treat something they plan to hold on to for years better than something that tomorrow someone else will hold. If I lease a car for 3 years, I obviously will take a better care for it than if I just borrow it from someone for one day - but I still will treat it much more poorly than I did if I planned to drive it for 20 years to come.
And yet car rental companies make a profit.
People will take care of rented property if the system to hold them accountable for abuse are effective and clear beforehand. If people have abused lime scooters, the error was in the fact that the lime investors and management underestimated the need to hold people accountable and/or reward them for responsible behavior.
An error in application, not theory.
That coffee maker at your office that everyone uses is going to be less precious to you than the coffee maker at your home, regardless of how much you care for your officemates.
No longer applicable to me, but I have worked in offices where the coffee maker was $5000.
What would not be worth it to have in my home, was worth it for so many coffee addicts in one place. There is efficiency in sharing where sharing is possible.
As it so happened when coffee makers are $5000 they tend to be glorious constructs of invincible stainless steel that are nearly impossible to damage or incidentally abuse.
If the choice is between a very robust and reliable machine that is shared with strong financial motivators for responsible use, and everyone having an easily broken or unreliable machine, I choose the former and I think most people would as well.
It does require reliable and efficient civil courts of course, and that is not something anyone has had recently.
if you are a sole owner of the company, you will have much more stake in its success, than if you are just one of a hundred shareholders.
and yet the first thing everyone who wants to start a company does is limit their liability.
Owners are like everyone else, they want to maximize profit and minimize risk.
Owner/employees combine the interests of investment and wage and that is an improvement. I do not believe that the benefit of highly motivating a few individuals at the top of the management hierarchy is superior in terms of productivity to somewhat improving the motivations of all employees.
I think when it has been tried in the past it failed because employees who tend to want this tend to be communists who started off with a flawed social theory, i.e. they thought rich people were evil and once they were gone everything would magically turn out fine.
Rational self-interest is the important part, not irrational self-interest.
Those workers ate their own company alive and hurt themselves in the long run, but 'investors' do the same thing intentionally in hostile takeover -> liquidation.
Internal chartered structures would be necessary to discourage the irrationality of the worker/shareholder and I think a constantly refined family of charters would outperform the current prevalent models.
We don't need any special use of force to run this experiment, just let people be free and we'll see. As it stands the giant parasite called "the deep state" "the establishment" "the military industrial complex" favors company structures that are easier to corrupt, so we cannot know that success in this environment is truly reflective of success in a free market.
Feeling of ownership of your work is crucial.
This is perhaps correct, but at the same time most projects are beyond the scope of the individual. What is then needed is a mechanism to formalize owning a part, owning a subproject, owning a subcomponent, owning a certain step in the process, etc...
I think this is orthogonal to who owns the company as an asset for the most part, but if there is interaction, it must be true that someone who owns part of the company feels more ownership than someone who doesn't (all else equal).
and there is no such thing as maximization of profits at the expense of the customer
There is such a thing as overpricing your product and it is more prevalent due to psychology than under-pricing. A company charter which corrects that psychological irrationality may lead to companies which are more competitive in the long run.
Profits reflect the value of the company to the market players
No, that is sales, or income.
What amongst the income constitutes profit depends on the perspective. If you're a worker, your profit is the wage, but in the classical view a worker's wage is a cost of production.
You could just as easily view self-investment as separate from profit, and storing the value in a bank for liquid flexibility as separate from profit as well.
I am pointing out that even if you are at the perfect price point, i.e. peak income where marginal cost = marginal revenue, that doesn't say anything about how the income is used except maybe that further investment is pointless.
As investment no longer becomes rational and the bank account of the company becomes sufficiently large to guarantee stability, the income left to be paid as wages and dividends increases.
There is no reason to believe that a company that has no shareholders but its own employees would be more likely to achieve this state or more likely to endure.
In other words, there is no need for remote shareholders in this picture. It is neither here nor there.
