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They supply the capital. That is why they are the owner.
WOrkers have capital. Who do you think money, car, homes, etc are?!?!? I am a worker and I have a fair amount of capital saved up.
The company I work for is about 28 billion. My share is about 1 million. The company I own is worth about 28 million. I started with the capital from my day job and grew it and in the beginning, I was taking on a lot of risk.
The owner/shareholders are the ones who take all the risk. The worker has zero risk. If times get bad, they can go get another job. The company I work at could go bankrupt tomorrow and I would be fine.
That's not capital, that's just things. Capital is material wealth that gives you bargaining power on a larger scale. You don't have that bargaining power just because you "own" a car or a house. In most cases, the bank essentially owns those things, and lease them to you for the interest rate it charges.
The worker has zero risk. If times get bad, they can go get another job.
If you think that's true, you haven't been paying attention to the job market at all.
The company I work at could go bankrupt tomorrow and I would be fine.
And ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the shareholders and owners will be fine as well. They'll have insurance, or backup plans. Or they'll foist all the debt onto the workers. The only time they'd truly feel it, is if they'd make monumentally stupid financial decisions.
That is what capital is. You may not like the definition but it is how the word is used. I own my three homes. I still have mortgages but I can use them as capital to start a business.
I am very aware of the job market. I have several positions pursuing me heavily now. The job market is always good for those with skills in demand.
Now sure you understand a BK. The shareholders lose all their money. Insurance doesn't cover that. I am not sure you understand how money works well because you don't understand capital and you don't realize the average American is a shareholder. What do you think a 401k is? It is buying stock, bonds, etc which would make you a shareholder.
Owning is not supplying. Owning is holding. Supplying is transferring possession to another party. When you hold ownership of a business, you maintain control of the business, as it operates, and you collect profit from its operation. You never deplete the supply of the business you own as a natural consequence of its operation.
Capital is assets that have productive value, such as businesses or rented properties. Cars and homes that are used by their owners are not capital, and neither is cash deposited in a bank. Most capital is owned by a very small cohort of society.
Business owners own capital. Workers own essentially none.
You have very deep confusion about extremely basic concepts, a condition that is not being helped by your snarkiness and hostility
I can see you have no business experience. You're just trying to make up terms that do not meet the definitions in the real world.
Capital is money, care, etc are capital. So is cash.
I am not being snarky or hostile, I am enjoying your limited knowledge of a topic where you think you are right but are wrong.
I am not confused about the topic at all. I am using real words and not some made up vocabulary. As you will see personal savings is right there on the list.
Ok. Capital is just cars and cash.
The article you referenced explains (emphasis added)...
While money itself may be construed as capital, capital is more often associated with cash that is being put to work for productive or investment purposes.
I think my time is better spent now supplying my capital to a local drinking establishment.
Enjoy ranting.
Yes, you supply the money to the business. That is the investment. That is what the owner is risking, their cash, their car, their home, all the things you have to be willing to tie as collateral back to the business.
The act of investment is purchasing (or exchanging) capital using cash or other assets.
A business may acquire funding from investment, but in such a case the investor is trading cash for equity, bonds, or some other investment asset representing the present or future value of the company, or generated by the company. The investor is not supplying capital, but rather purchasing capital (or trading capital).
The idea that the investor is supplying capital to the company is only a metaphor.
Someone may lose money from an investment, but most capital is owned by immensely wealthy individuals, whose situation is vastly removed from that of ordinary workers, who actually do face the risk of losing their only home or their only car.
Even small businesses are owned by individuals who have chosen to become business owners in order to profit from others' work. Any risk they assume is through an attempt to enrich themselves from gains not shared with workers. By not sharing their gains with those who are working to create them, business owners, large or small, are not helping workers, but rather preventing workers from advancing.
It isn't a metaphor. It is how it works.
The gains are shared with the workers; it is called a paycheck, insurance, etc.. The workers do not share the losses. When I had my first business, my house was at risk if I did not repay the loan. The worker lost nothing if it failed. They would just go on to the next job. When I gave them the company, they had as much knowledge as you did and bankrupted it in three months. They didn't get the basics of accounting or finance either.
You don't seem to grasp the basics. You seem to think the average business owner was given the company and has nothing at risk, which is purely mythical thinking. That is why our tax code heavily rewards people who own companies that create jobs. It is because they're taking a risk which rewards the community.
Even on a larger scale, if Twitter does not do well, Elon loses billions. The workers don't lose anything. If the company does well, the workers can gain millions in their stock grants.
It isn't the company preventing you from advancing. It is your mythical thinking of how things work. You are free to go start your own company and pay the workers their real value. Nothing stops you from doing that. You will be BK in very short order as you will have no reserves, if something breaks you will have no cash to repair it, you won't even be able to pay your PO at the end of the month but you are free to give it a swing.
If you chose to use your house as collateral in order for the opportunity to enrich yourself, then no one owes you any gratitude. You are not a hero. You acted in your own interests, not for helping others.
If workers provided labor, and you only paid them wages, then you profited from their labor, and prevented them from advancing by realizing the full value of their labor.
The only reason your house was at risk was because the bank hoards capital, using lending as a device to augment its own wealth.
If capital were shared by everyone, then all the problems you describe would not occur. No one would lose houses or cars, no one would be a tens of millions of times richer than anyone else, and everyone would be paid fully for their labor, without distinction of owner versus worker.
No, it meant I knew how to manage risk and run a business. When they took their full value, they ran it right into the ground.
Of course they wouldn't lose their house or car in your fantasy world. They never had one to start with. Communism has always provided a lower standard of living for the people living under it. There is reason they have to build walls to keep the people in.
You are not understanding.
The risk is artificial.
Those who have the most wealth, the most capital, are not facing risk, compared to everyone else. Someone who has $10 billion in assets and loses $2 billions has not lost in the same way as a poor person who loses a car. The billionaire is completely insulated from the precarity faced by most of the population, because the billionaire privately controls the vast wealth of society. The losses suffered by the billionaire owe to the instability of the business and the business cycle, not to the trials of life.
Those who are most wealthy face the least risk, and in fact impose the genuine risk on everyone else.
If control over capital were shared, then no one would be precarious, nor need to use a home as collateral for a loan.
No I understand just fine. Unless you want to cite something, stop saying I don't understand something when you clearly don't understand.
The risk is not artificial. That is one of the strangest things I have every heard. Small business is a large part of the economy.
There are 33.2 million small businesses in America, which combined account for 99.9% of all U.S. businesses. Small businesses are credited with just under two-thirds (63%) of the new jobs created from 1995 to 2021. In 2021, a record breaking 5.4 million new business applications were filed in the U.S.
You have some weird fascination with billionaires when the average company or employer is a small business that has nothing to do with billionaires.
The average person takes out a loan, uses their cash, put their car or home as collateral to start a business. These are not billionaires, and they're the heart of our economy. Yet you are babbling about billionaires which I am not nor are most people who run a company.
https://www.uschamber.com/small-business/state-of-small-business-now