June 2024
Once upon a time a group of young, ambitious entrepreneurs bought a large ship, wrote a ship constitution, hired their own captain, and set sail to make their fortunes, serving as deck hands on their own ship. While owner-operated small boats were common, as were the occasional pirate ship, back in the day, large ships needed beefy captains and tough officers to rule large crews of unruly deckhands. Everyone knew that it was ridiculous, even immoral, to expect deckhands to manage a ship. That was the captain’s job. Deckhands would just argue amongst themselves until the ship ended up on the rocks.
Everybody sat back to wait for the shipwreck. They waited. And they waited some more. But a strange thing happened — or didn’t happen. The ship sailed peacefully from one success to the next. Captains came and went peacefully while the owner-operated ship became the most successful ship on the seven seas — so successful that more owner-operated ships joined them. This privately owned fleet brought prosperity and peace wherever they sailed.
The owner deckhands of the flagship soon became so rich that they ordered the captain to hire a crew to do the work, leaving them plenty of time to enjoy the cruise: to play pickle ball, to drive golf balls off the aft deck, to gamble in the casino, ...
