AI and The End of Dynastic Passive Wealth

Starting a company is hard and often requires unusual amounts of capital and unusual access to knowledge, such as connections with property brokers, or other due diligence advantages, like having an inside connection with a franchise, or a family member who paved the way.

Yes, getting started is a difficult, specialized, and all-important part of a successful business. It is essential, without which you can’t have a business. But if this business requires laborers, the available pool of laborers in theory, if united, have a lot of bargaining power.

With organized power they could negotiate many things, such as a contract where they start out owning less and over time vest and own more and potentially take control from the owner. Laborers having a lot of bargaining power will lead to higher wages and the gradual “cooperativization” of the business.

But if laborers are desperate, owners will easily negotiate terms where they can hold onto total control and authority indefinitely, and keep all the surplus indefinitely, probably with doing little or no labor themselves. They can hire HR, buyers, sellers, consultants and managers, and live off a swelling pile of passive income that makes them and their children a royal family of leisure off the backs of others’ sweat, forever.

The way out of the second scenario is not to force owners to voluntarily cede control because it’s “moral” or to even force socialist rules from a central government. The better way out without rigging the market is for workers to somehow unite completely, and then negotiate harder and have the ability to walk away from any job that doesn’t offer a vesting period or a path to cooperativization. The way to ensure this worker leverage is with a UBI.

This is why owners and conservatives in general don’t want a UBI. UBI is a Kingslayer. The overwhelming majority has to vote in favor of UBI, legally, and then we can have a cooperative-based economy arise legally and organically within a market-driven economy without changing a single additional law.

If this really happens, people will still start new companies. But the ones driven totally by profit motive and dynastic passive royalty will have less incentive and the ones driven by building a vision or improving society will still start companies even if they know labor has an upper hand. As a result, a Darwinian process means that over time more businesses will be launched out of passion and vision instead of merely profit motives. We will see healthier products, and better and more useful services, and a more humane and loving ecosystem of business and production. We will see fewer grotesque profit-driven companies that ruin humanity. And fewer obnoxious kings living off of passive incomes simply because once, a long time ago, they knew a guy or had capital and took a risk and “started a business.”

You have a right to property of your business and a right to try to negotiate cheap labor within current labor law and seek passive income and dynastic wealth. However, you don’t have a right to guaranteed cheap labor, or a right to block the democratic process of changing our safety net to include a UBI; and you don’t have a right to interfere with collective bargaining.

The people have the control to bargain collectively and vote in a UBI. This needs to happen and will happen. Nothing can stop it no matter how much corporates spend on brainwashing, lobbying and wedge issue nonsense.

With knowledge on-demand and GPT-4 it will be much easier for people to synchronize and execute on these powerful strategies. Ignorance and chaos is why it hasn’t happened; knowledge on-demand will help the majority organize and execute very quickly. The free market system will mint fewer kings in the decades ahead.