The solution would have been to not have an owner in the first place. The only shareholders should be stakeholders and that way the interests of the company would always consider the interests of all stakeholders, most of whom are workers.
The current shareholders have no skill or efficiency. Shareholders hire people to run the company. That doesn't have to change. "worker control" is not a literal sense but in terms of power hierarchy. Workers have no interest in their company being run inefficiently.
The socialist economy you describe is nothing like anything socialists are advocating. Complete misrepresentation.
I mentioned programs like TARP in the OP. Those sort of programs could invest in builidng cooperatives instead of corporate welfare. Mondragon in Spain is a perfect example and it is much more efficient than a company like GM.
Unfortunately that only works when the workers own the company, not the State. So a cooperative, like
Haier, and not a state owned company like
CNPC both Chinese.
Also unfortunately, many socialists advocate State ownership, not worker's ownership. As cooperatives are seen as another kind of capitalist company, only with a bit more horizontal hierarchy. Ideally there are no employees, but cooperatives can and often do employ people who do not own any shares.
I did not say Haier, I said mondragon. The thing you need to realize about socialists adovocating for state ownership, is that they are viewing socialists the people as the state and you are thinking about socialism within a capitalist state like the U.S. or Soviet Union. Two very different things. There is also a lot of nuance involved. Natural resources should be collectively owned but that isn't the entire economy.
In fact in a free capitalist society, a group of disgruntled "exploited" workers CAN leave en mass and form their own company, as long as that State isn't colluding with the former companies by giving them protections or special privileges. This is far from what we see in all "attempts" of socialism. Venezuela had a few attempts at worker's control, and the State itself dissolved them, or let them rot, because in a "command" central planned economy, if the bureaucrat doesn't "assign" you raw materials, or foreign currency (promptly), or let you set your own prices you go bankrupt. And they rather "assign" resources to their own (corrupt) people, ironically accusing the workers of being thieves or anti-revolutionaries (because in "socialist" Venezuela, if you don't raise prices to compensate inflation you go bankrupt, but if you raise the prices you are an agent of imperialism seeking to overthrow the gov.)...
Exploited workers don't have the capital to do anything. That is the point. If they weren't being exploited, they would definitely start their own companies but that wouldn't be capitalism anymore. Capitalism is all about rewarding capital, not labor.
State control is not worker control. Central planning is literally the opposite of worker control.
The giant obstacle of socialism is the abysmal separation between theory and practice. "if only people behaved this, or that way", but they don't (unless coerced). Capitalism, at least exploits people's greed in a way where everyone ends benefiting, so long as the state remains small and out of the way...
The free market solves things with a near realtime highly scalable voting system called: "your wallet". This is forcibly taken away in Socialist States "in the name of... workers, revolution, party, blah, blahW) by bureaucracy. Even if you practice some form of "direct democracy", you cannot take decisions as quickly and efficiently as the free marker. By the time a decision is made, it is always too late, to little, too much, too high or too low.
The free market is a mythological creature. "Everyone ends benefiting" shows that you have bought into the externalization of costs. Everyone loses long term because eventually you run out of resources to extract from the outside. Capitalism is literally trashing the entire planet and only benefiting about 15% of the population. Everyone else is in grave danger. 15% is far from everyone. Most of the people on here are well into the top 1% and have no idea what its like for the 99%.
Capitalism is extremely inefficient and completely disregards the safety of the public as well as future sustainability. Nothing is produced for actual consumption. Everything is produced to be sold. This means we grow food for 10 billion people and feed 5 billion well while throwing half of it away. We literally build products to break early so we can sell them again. Don't ever mention efficiency and capitalism again.
"Communists" have it worse, as they push for a super strong omnipotent State dictating the economy and all aspects of life that "somehow" should later dissolve itself (never going to happen).
In "capitalism", you work because you need money. Socialism wants you to not need money, so there is no reason to work. Then no one makes anything.., except the bureaucrats who get to decide who eats and who doesn't, until the last resource is exhausted.
First of all, you are way off base with the bold statement because one of the key requirements for communism is a stateless society. The rest of your post is irrelevant. Maybe you should read Marx instead of letting Jordan Peterson types tell you what communism and socialism are. Once you learn about it, you might actually like it.
