The statement is only generates a contradiction if there is an omniscient being. If there are no omniscient beings, it is consistent.
The idea is that it is impossible for a being to both know and not know something. Knowable is not the same as known to a particular being
My personal view is the following
You're working class if
- you only own small minority percentage of voting shares of an employing corporation or non-voting preferred shares
- are an employee or you are individually or jointly self-employed as in a worker cooperative.
You're employing class if you hold large percentages of the voting shares in at least one company
There are two dual risk reduction strategies one of diversification and one of commitment
Article: https://www.ellerman.org/inalienable-rights-part-i-the-basic-argument/
Video: https://youtu.be/c2UCqzH5wAQ
Either one introduces the argument against capitalism based on the liberal principle of imputation.
Economic democracy, a market economy where worker coop is the only firm legal structure, maximizes liberty much better than capitalism
Capitalism is indefensible from a libertarian perspective. A central libertarian tenet is that legal and de facto responsibility should match. However, the capitalist employer-employee contract inherently involves a violation of this tenet. The employer gets 100% of the legal responsibility for the positive and negative results of the enterprise. Despite workers' joint de facto responsibility for using up inputs to produce outputs, workers as employees get 0%
Owning voting shares at the company you work at is different from owning voting shares in other companies
There is information in it. Namely, that it itself is false. It is fully grammatical. Similar sentence are obviously valid such as:
This sentence has five words.
That is a true valid grammatical sentence.
I didn't invent the paradox. Philosophers have been contemplating this paradox for a long time.
The problem it gestures at is very deep and similar paradoxes showed up in the foundations of mathematics in the 20th century. It can't be dismissed easily.
The arguments for worker coops are based on liberal economics (https://www.ellerman.org/inalienable-rights-part-i-the-basic-argument/). To summarize, the workers are jointly de facto responsible for using up inputs to produce outputs, so by the norm that legal and de facto responsibility should match, they should be assigned the whole product of the firm. Anything else would be unjust.
Equal votes doesn't mean equal pay. Workers can divide the pie however they prefer. In existing worker coops, not everyone gets paid the same.
Classical laborists and mutualists were anti-capitalists. Some of whom predated Marx.
As I said, a mutualist economy or economic democracy has never existed. The modern arguments for economic democracy were first published in a book released in the 1990s. However, we have plenty of examples of worker coops and employee-owned corporations working well under capitalism. An economic democracy or mutualism differs from capitalism in that all firms are mandated to be worker coops
I know what capitalism is. My analysis of capitalism comes from a mutualist perspective and is inspired by the classical laborists rather than Marx
There has never been a worker-cooperative-dominated market economy, but actually existing worker coops and employee-owned corporations don't seem to create billionaires, and have more equitable distribution of wages.
Why does mandating all firms to be worker coops not abolish capitalism in your view?
Pro-market anti-capitalism
Many on the left conflate markets with capitalism and oppose both. This is a mistake. Markets freed from capitalism where every workers' inalienable right to worker democracy may be useful, and help avoid the calculation problem. That being said, I'm highly sympathetic to those that seek to explore what might be possible without markets as that area is under-explored. Ultimately, we should emphasize worker coops
Here is an non-nuanced meme
Or we could abolish the employer-employee contract and mandate that all firms be worker coops, so that no one could appropriate the positive and negative fruits of other people's labor
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