My own private basic income
Gosh. OP made me sad with his thesis.<p>&quot;1. For owners, work is optional.&quot;<p>... As an owner I wish this were true. For me and most owners I know work is mandatory, and its 60 hour weeks and a lot of sleepless nights. There is no safety net. There is no  unemployment. I get no workman&#x27;s compensation. I have no  employment law protections. Its, as one HN comment said some time ago, &quot;a suffering contest&quot; a lot of the time.<p>&quot;2. ...your stuff will keep on making money forever.&quot;<p>... Again, I wish this were true. Lifetime income producing investments are hard to find where volatility, fees, inflation, taxes and life&#x27;s circumstances don&#x27;t erode value. Sure, the truly wealthy are set. But most business owners are not truly wealthy, and the exit strategies just aren&#x27;t there in many industries.<p>&quot;3. We can get entrepreneurship without the enormous rewards to ownership we have today&quot;<p>... Anyone whose dealt with the day-to-day grind of owning a business would be especially offended by this comment. A firehose of pain, suffering and risk flows to the owner in the form of litigation, regulators, employees, vendors, customers, bank officers, etc., etc. I&#x27;ve equated it to a &quot;lazy susan&quot; dispensing aggravation in every conceivable form. Its the reward - if you can get it - that makes it worthwhile. Try just getting divorced as an owner and you become an instant convert to rewarding ownership.<p>Yes, rent-seeking monopolies are bad. Yes, more needs to be done to create opportunities for wealth creation by employees - to give them the freedom to say &quot;no&quot;. No, punishing ownership isn&#x27;t the answer.<p>UPDATE x2: I&#x27;m really not confusing types of owners. The author&#x27;s thesis is broad not only in the article, but in his works in general. Access to passive income investments (eg. REIT&#x27;s) is among the few places small business owners can go to rent-seek. Rent seeking is bad under a few sets of conditions but doesn&#x27;t deserve author&#x27;s indictment.