Constitutional Libertarianism

Constitutional Libertarianism

Saturday, May 13, 2017

The Co-op vs Socialism

A co-op or cooperative is a voluntary association of people working together with a profit motive.

For example, a few local gardeners and small scale producers with chickens, cows, bees, etc...  want to sell their products in a marketplace but none has the means to do so individually.

By forming a co-op, they can work together to combine all their products, share responsibilities and work, and share profits among themselves.  The end result being that a need was met by voluntary collaboration as opposed to assuming risks too great for any one of the members or no one getting anything worthwhile by trying to do it all on their own.

In a co-op, there is often a financial shared investment and a labor investment as well.  Co-ops are often known for the flexibility off working with "sweat equity" to allow those with less financial resources to contribute more labor or product in exchange for the value of the financial investment.

Some key concepts expressed in the co-op a the fact that it's voluntary and that it has a profit motive.  That sets it apart from socialist endeavors immediately. Socialist setups are almost always mandatory participation or start voluntary and end up mandatory.  The main reason is related to the not having a profit motive.

Without a profit motive for each individual participating, the incentive to fully vest oneself in the effort is limited if not lacking.  History has time and again given us examples in which when given the opportunity, most people only do as little as necessary to claim their portion of the guaranteed return.

Risk and reward work together as incentives.  Reward is obvious.  Do the task, achieve the result.  Risk is the potential.  Risk not only allows for the possibility of no reward, but to tentatively relate the investment to the reward.  Greater investment usually results in greater reward.  However, there is a possibility that even with investigator money or sweat, the reward will no happen or will not be commensurate.

Rick influences us to invest more effort to get more reward.  It also pushes us to invest more creativity and planning so that if the probability of losses become too great, it only can we work harder and/or  invest more money but adapt and modify as well.

Without risk, we lose so much of all of that.  We indeed may as well be automatons without risk.  Socialism eliminates or dramatically reduces risk.  It ensures a set minimum reward which is also all to often the only reward able to be achieved.


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