Economic Dissertation

One reason the rich keep getting richer is because capitalism functions on the principle of weighted money - the more money you have, the easier it is to buy and consume. For instance, magazines are cheaper when you buy a subscription, and cigarettes are cheaper by the carton than a pack at a time. If you have enough money to buy lots of magazines and cigarettes, then you can open up a kiosk and sell them on the street corner.

If your kiosk makes enough money, you can use the profits to rent a chain of kiosks and pay others to operate them. You can even take out ads in those magazines you're selling. If your chain of kiosks is successful and raises enough money, you can turn it into an international corporation with thousands of people on the payroll including lawyers, tax advisors, publicists, lobbyists and private security guards; and buy the publishing company that produces the magazines with your ads in them.

Along with this system of weighted money come other rules of capital, such as interest, treasuries, taxation, deferments and governmental enforcement of financial laws. The more stuff you want to have, the more the rules of capitalism are designed to give it to you. Equal or no wealth distribution goes against our nature and doesn’t work - capital will always be weighted according to our needs.

The vote sizing institute proposes an innovative new and provocative way to design businesses called Empowerment Inc. in order to balance the weightedness of money with an way for workers to also participate in some kind of control over the economy. Its principles can be utilized in economic structures such as communes, partnerships, boards, co-operatives and unions. Empowerment Inc. is part of a general outlook on modifying social behavior promoted by the Institution for Vote Sizing and its subsidiaries: the Democratic Empowerment Party - Canada, the Fair Choice Party - Cameroon, and Vote Sized Learning; and parallels our promotion of vote sized elections, online vote-sized polling, vote sized classrooms, and our vote flocking simulation.

The fundamental tenet of Empowerment Inc. is to develop ways for employees to participate in the decision-making process; which is done by allocating shares to the employees in such a way so that they have some control over their economic fate. In our example, we shall be looking at ways in which a corporation may empower its employees:

On purchasing dividend bearing shares, an investor also receives a voting share - while creating a second voting share to go into the 'employee trust' which then gets re-distributed to the employees and vote sized each election. Since the employees votes are also sized based on income, a ballast of power is placed in the hands of the lower paid employees.

Although everybody has their roles to play in this exercise, the goals of the employees aside from leaving behind a more prosperous world than they found, are to unite to form a company that helps their communities, pays good wages, provides quality jobs where they can learn and learn from making mistakes, benefit from good management, and allows as many people as possible to participate in the decision making process). Ultimately, Empowerment Inc. needs to answer to its investors whose motivation is purely profit.

In order to responsibly grasp the function of Empowerment Inc., we need to first accept that once the project begins; there are no restrictions over what kind of decisions voters can make and where it might go. Empowerment Inc. is an experiment, not a mandate-driven organization. The goal is to see it work, make a profit while keeping its employees and customers happy - but there's no real way of second-guessing what it can do. For example, if this collective run by its lowest paid employee’s ends up running a polluting or exploitive business, all the investors can do is whine, and try to pull out knowing that at least they gambled on the more optimistic side of human nature. Likewise, if the employees, especially the least-paid ones, become disgruntled and one year vote on liquidating the entire project and taking all the investment capital for themselves, screwing the investors, then that's exactly what will have to be. The only option that the investors have is to just try again in a somewhat different arrangement, or else give up entirely on need-based vote sizing collectives.

Empowerment Inc.'s very strength comes from its vulnerability - the potential that the workers have to at any time legally dissolve the company and split the booty. Our kind of vote sizing organization leans very heavily upon the strengths of the employees to make good decisions. Still, we may also find that the dire predictions about human nature (coming mostly from the elite) preferring a quick buck over co-operation, and that the janitor would rather vote to liquidate assets over ensuring their own proper health care; then there's nothing we can do to stop it. Vote sizing can just as easily amplify mutual trust, as lack of trust.

The result of these policies (below) creates a very interesting dynamic over time: As the company grows and expands, and dividend-bearing shares are created and sold to investors, more voting shares are created to distribute amongst the employees, continually diluting the power of investors and tipping the balance back in favor of the increasing amount of employees. New investors increase the power of the employees! In other words, although the pool of employee voting shares grows, the original investor's do not. So built into Empowerment Inc. is the inescapable fact that no matter what happens down the road, whenever it tries to attract investment and bring more money in it will automatically be diminishing the power of the existing investors and delegating them to strictly "in-it-for-the-money" position.

Would the janitors and secretaries vote to liquidate the company and screw the investors? If they do, it’s a bad omen for political vote sizing. But if they use their weighted votes to improve working conditions, services or products, productivity, salaries and growth, and decrease the company’s environmental impact - then Empowerment Inc. would become a magnet for more investment and an indicator that vote sizing can also work in the political arena.

Like any business venture, this Empowerment Inc. project is not an obligation, but an experiment: Can investors get enough wealth to remain in a business which keeps putting more-and-more power into the hands of the employees? If the project fails because it wasn't designed properly and can't support itself financially, we should quite willing to let it do so as proof that vote sizing either need refinement, or perhaps just isn't such a good idea. Like any 'good' business, Empowerment Inc. needs to pay for itself, and to grow by attracting investment - and the only way to attract investors is by showing them that it's profitable; and not because it's somehow their duty. It should only ever request of existing investors that they re-invest their dividend payments. If their money doesn't turn a profit, there's no good reason, including guilt, to expect them to invest more. Because vote sizing plays an integral part in the internal organization of the company, this satisfying of investors need not be at odds with the companies chosen field in the market. In fact, a vote sizing Empowerment Inc. ought to be able to do almost anything that any other corporation does already... only much better for its investors, employees, clients, customers and the general public.