i've always wondered why someone hasn't started a non-profit business to start selling goods and services, in which they should be able to out-compete the for-profit enterprises, since they can sell at cost just to break even, or sell at less of a markup.

you could get one going, then use what would be the "profits" (since you can't keep them) as seed funding a second similar non-profit in a different industry, then a third, by then the 2nd one could seed fund a fourth, and so on and so on until eventually, you would have expanded into every industry. and over time, since you can always out-compete the capitalist, you would have monopolized every industry with non-profit enterprises.

depending on how you structured it, you could stipulate some kind of collective social ownership, or each industry could be run as a non-profit worker cooperative with workplace democracy.

i am sure there are a thousand little reasons why this might fail, but i don't see any big gotcha? it seems like a sound idea. i guess maybe the capitalists would be willing to run at a loss to try and stop you, but that's still a good outcome? maybe try to make it illegal? i am not sure how you could make it illegal to sell good and services at break-even prices. price controls, ok fine, we will just have more money for seed funding.

i guess TLDR the ability to run a not-for-profit business seems like a pretty big weakness for capitalism.

  • diode [none/use name]
    ·
    4 years ago

    The competitive advantage is that the surpluses could be smaller than acceptable profit margins for capitalist enterprises

    But again lot of magical tech companies run like that. They run at no profits or even in red numbers for years, trying to get as much of a market share as they can. Often times they don't even have a clue how exactly they are going to monetize their userbase. See twitters and reddits etc. And after ipo you can profit off of your investment, because if the company is growing and market believes in it, it's share price is going to rise, even if the company itself isn't really making money.

    But also being non-profit, you could always get lucky on a big charitable donation, maybe some rich fucker trying to ease his conscience.

    A lot of huge charitable donations are basically rich people moving their stocks/money from their left pocket to their right pocket and getting pr out of it for their kindness. At best they are donating to one of their rich friends. If they want to ease their conscience, they will fund public libraries and schools like Carnegie did, or fund medical research. In my opinion it's about as realistic as trying to buy lottery tickets to fund your operation.

    Or a kind of crowdfunding situation where a large number of people might say, “wow this is a good idea I will buy your cool product and also donate $5 to this cause.”

    I don't know if crowdfunding would work. A lot of people soured on it after years. And projects that got crowdfunded to me almost always seemed like projects that would highly likely get a conventional investment as well, but with crowdfunding you basically don't have any pressure from investors or any oversight of how the money is actually used. To get the crowdfunding you already need some success, marketing, have a good proof of concept etc.

    And crowdfunding can be further used to illustrate the futility of this endavour. The project that raised the most money in history using crowdfunding is still Star Citizen as far as I know. They raised around 300 millions in around a decade (and they also took around 50 millions in private investments as an interesting side note). That is a similar sum for which Sony bought Insomniac like a year ago or so. Now Insomniac are a nice productive company of around 300-400 employees I think. How many game companies of similar size are there in the world? Another interesting thing that happened in the game industry around a week ago is Microsoft buying Zenimax for 7.5 billion dollars. You would need around 25 Star citizens to buy just Zenimax, which would be very far from taking over the industry.