Speaking of capitalism, what about the situation where someone founds a company? Doesn’t just make an investment, but rolls up his sleeves and dives in?
Who owns that company?
Is the founder by rights an absolute dictator, sole heir to all profit and benefit?
No, not quite.
Ownership is still measured by contribution.
Let’s say that after years of work, hard work by everyone including the founder, that everyone but the founder walks away. It’s a mess, but the founder can create another company, right? If he’s been in there swinging, he’s got the knowledge–most of it, anyway. He can hire new people, train them, get things rolling again–but at how much effort, at how much lost profit, production, and customers?
That extra, the part that disappears with the people, is the least of what the former “employees” owned. The “owner” only owns what is left. That may be more. It may be less. It depends on the real contribution, on the amount of creation. But ownership of this thing called a company is shared.
How do we know that?
Because it went away when those creating it left.
So, even a sole founder is not so sole.
Very quickly ownership spreads out.
And it’s easy to understand.
After all, the creation of a company is the sum of many, many individual acts of creation. Most, nearly all, of those acts must be replayed every day to keep the company created. When a company is rebuilt, it’s a new company, created newly by new actions and new efforts.
What a founder does is enlist the creation of others–but he can never own their ability to create. That is unless one subscribes to slavery. That’s what slaveholders try to do–own someone’s ability to create, own all that someone does create.
Even then, it doesn’t last. Eventually the system collapses–slaves have very little stake in success.
Neither do employees who are denied their rights to ownership, denied the recognition and exchange demanded by their individual acts of creation.
Such companies eventually die.
That’s because the life leaves them.
It simply walks out the door.