Worker Cooperatives(pro) versus traditional, capitalist businesses(con)

I'll respond to quotes from my opponent, which will be in italics He claims not to be advocating for government intervention to make coops the only legal business form, yet he argues that it should be required in all economics classes that students be taught about cooperatives. Yes, this makes sense seeing as majority of schools are public schools owned by the government. The government gets to set the standards of education for their schools. He argues that banks shouldn't be allowed to discriminate against coops, another way of saying that is, banks should be FORCED to do business with coops. Hmm, or perhaps what would be better is that the federal reserve won't replenish the bank's supply of cash unless they do business with coops. There are other ways to incentivize banks to do business with coops. Maybe there is some legitimate reason why banks don't usually do business with coops, but I don't know of it. If there is one, then nothing should be done about it. I just don't think there is one since coops are generally more successful than traditional businesses anyways. My opponent argues that if the government were to drop all regulations on businesses, that would leave us seeking an alternative, such as cooperatives, but that is simply conjecture, it is only an opinion on what could possibally happen. In my opinion, if all regulations were scrapped, such as minimum wage requirements, then businesses could produce at a lower cost, which would bring down prices. Lower prices means higher buying power for consumers, including lower income consumers, and the cost of living would go down for all. People would have more money to save, or even start a small business themselves. This is also conjecture by my opponent, but to disprove your conjecture one only needs to look at history. In the 1800s we didn't have these regulations as we do now. What happened? People were paid terribly, had to work terrible conditions, etc. What my opponent suggested is not what happened in the 1800s.[11] [12] Employers would charge as much as they can get away with in order to maximize their own profits. And if you look here, cost of living simply wasn’t better[13]. There's a reason why the regulations happened to begin with, it's because conditions were terrible in the 1800s back when we didn't have regulations. I would argue the people went in the wrong direction, and instead we should have sought after worker cooperatives. They would have easily solved the issue since then it would give the workers a voice over the business, which affects them, their wages, etc They could infuse competative wages into the system which can be troublesome to coops, and they often offer a higher quality product as opposed to corporations. Small businesses were the reason the coop wave of the seventees died out, because they could cater to the specialized needs of costumers of the coops. This seems to be referring to food consumer co-ops, or at least what my opponent linked to here does. This debate is about worker co-ops, and not consumer co-ops. They are different. At any rate, this can’t be used as a reason against worker co-ops since consumer co-ops are very different. Re: point where we draw the line for a business owner being evil I would draw the line at being if they knowingly decide to make other people(their workers) subservient to them, without any representation given to those workers, they are tyrannical. Every worker is subservient to the employer, and those workers have no representation. I just noticed that my opponent made no rebuttal to when I brought this up previously, in the second round under when I discussed the morality of traditional businesses versus worker co-ops. I already mentioned how there is no representation of the governed when a business owner makes a specific decision that governs over them. Re: cost of living would go up in a worker co-op economy Actually, I don’t follow my opponent’s argument here. A worker co-op would have higher wages for the workers without having to raise prices. Again, you’re getting rid of a single business owner. In a worker-co-op, there is no single business owner. This means that the profit that the business owner would take, can be split among the workers, and that raises the wage of the workers without having to raise the price of the goods. Could my opponent explain to me how what I said would result in a higher cost of living because the price of goods would go up? Sources: Note: if you don’t trust these sources, you should be able to look it up anywhere. I just used the first sources I found for this, since what I claimed was something that should have been taught in history books in schools. [11] http://www.encyclopedia.com... [12] http://www.let.rug.nl... [13] http://oldrecipebook.com...