alt Hacker News> So, what happens if person A is prohibited from selling their business?
I actually made that thought experiment. Disallow selling businesses. Disallow selling shares. Disallow stock market. Disallow mergers. The only way to acquire a business is to found it or to inherit it. The only way to quit a business is to shut it all down, with all assets liquidated, all liabilities settled, and all contracts terminated.
The main downside is that it's harder for to make money. Otherwise... I only see positives. And no, it wouldn't kill innovation. The investors would just have to invest the old fashioned way - by founding companies or expanding their existing businesses. As for job security, we already don't have it in the current system.
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Private property is theft!
Disallow eyeglasses. Abolish money.
Any other good ideas?
OK. Your job is from now is dung transport. Because you inherited it, whether you like it or not.
Sure, you are allowed to start a new business. But where would you get money? You can't sell your dung transport business, and you don't have enough money of your own to just start a new business from scratch.
That's such an incredibly shortsighted view of the downsides.
In your model, the only possible business owners would be those with major capital resources to begin with, encouraging the spread of existing businesses into a sprawl: Walmart is now your doctor, pharmacist, and pharma manufacturer. Nobody would start a small business because they'd have to carry all liability, any new ideas are limited to spread at a glacially slow pace, because companies can't be aquired or acqui-hired, but can instead only scale on their own revenues.