Actually, I’ve got to confess, I’m part of a collective. Well, we call it “family”. It’s quite a manageable size, members aren’t too unruly. And they’re free to leave, once they turn 16.

When they work they work but I think there’s a reason why they’re more common and that’s because they require specific circumstances.

Also, what maybe good for the members of a cooperative may not be good for other members of society. Being a part of a cooperative doesn’t magically extend people’s altruism past their immediate community. Fonteta springs to mind.

bob, I like the sound of Mondragon! Tell me more: how do they cope with immigrants?
Also, what if some young whippersnapper had a new idea and wanted to pursue it? How would she do that? Present it to the committee for new ideas? Or would she head overseas, somewhere like London or New York, and set up a new business there? But how would she do that if she had no property of her own that she could put up as risk? E.g., pay for flights, buy some raw materials, pay rent, employ an assistant, buy some advertising, etc? Do they make tractors in Mondragon? What has been the output (official and unofficial) in recent years?

A CGT hasn’t stopped Sydney house prices skyrocketing and its not the reason the Australians are better off than us.

I’m warry of any argument that runs- we have problems which have simple solutions and the only reason these simple solutions are not implemented is because of bad people.

It never works out well.

“What’s the alternative?” [to capitalism]. One of the greatest victories of the capitalists is conflating the language of business with that of capitalism. While capitalism emerged with the creation of Limited Liability Companies a few hundred years back in Britain, the capitalists would have us believe that business, trade, money are all intrinsic properties of capitalism that will vanish if we scrap Rogernomics, or that we will revert to feudalism. Poppycock.

No human economic system is perfect, and will require constant tweaking, but the cooperative of Mondragon (Basque country, Spain) are a good start. They tie jobs to the ownership of the firm, and put in place community responsibility measures like capping boss paychecks to a ratio of the lowest paid, etc. And in NZ we still have a large part of the national utilities (ie the natural monopolies) in state ownership – no need to change that.

So there would be no collapse in tax revenue for govt Clunking Fist. No need to jump in our bunkers and hoard baked beans Just time to scrap the failed capitalist system.

Reality based analysis would suggest this, yes.
You could swap out ‘neo-lib’ with ‘extremely wealthy’, which removes the political bias which obviously irritates you.