Alas, I am not a gallery, and thus I don't make an income displaying drawings. I encourage you to target your sales at those best placed to profit from your product.

So from my perspective, I can getter better value moving my cash to dome other suppliers.

But even if I did buy your sweet drawing, the money itself us not wasted (I personally just control less of it.) The same money would now be controlled by you, and I'm sure you'll spend it, thus benefiting others.

The money itself cannot be wasted, it merely moves from one set of hands to another.

My personal control of money can indeed be wasted, since I can transfer it to another for insignificant value. But that's simply my control, not the money itself.

It will be dispersed to more thsn a single family. That's the point.

In this case specifically it's unlikely the family sold an asset simply to buy another asset. They've had it a few hundred years, and the gallery has had their eye on it for decades. It's likely they sold it cause they needed the cash, for a new roof or whatever.

If they spend it, then those people providing the goods and services will prosper. If they invest it in a business, then that business has capital to grow, and all those employees will benefit.

I'm not downvoting you, because this is a common economic misconception, and I'm sure your opinion is shared by many.

Money is never wasted.

While the long explanation is some what technical and boring, the short version is this;

"Money is neither created nor destroyed, it simply moves from one hand to another".

Put another way, the National Gallery had 20 mil to spend. So they spent it. That 20 mil us now in the economy, and will travel further. The family that sold the painting might need a new roof, or a tractor, or whatever. They in turn spend the money and it flows.

An economy is just the flow of money. An economy stalls when the money stops flowing and is hoarded.

Fundamentally you want rich people to spend their money. On "what" is mostly irrelevant.

Here's another simplistic example. The US produces a surplus of wheat. USAid buys a lot of that wheat (using tax money) which is thus a round-about subsidization of wheat farmers. This is prudent because local food security, ie having farmers at all, is a good thing.

Now USAid have a pile of wheat, so they donate it to countries that can't afford it. This buys US prestige, both with those countries and their neighbors.

Now USAid stops. The govt "saves money". Farmers loose their subsidy. Long-term US citizens lose their food security.

Money itself has no value. Spending that money has value. Because only by spending it can you realize that value.

Yes, it added a lot of new things snd gained 100% market share. Then did absolutely nothing for years and years.

The web basically stagnated because once you have 100% there's no incentive to even fix bugs.

Taking your suggestion in good faith, I'm intrigued by your concept of democraticly controlled, worker owned. Please explore this further.

I guess I'm wondering primarily what "democratically controlled" even means. Like everyone votes on every decision? Or we elect people to make decisions? Or we vote on "big decisions"? (Who defines "big"?

Most companies are democratic. In the sense that the shareholders appoint the decision makers. Shareholders -> Board -> management.

Your point about "worker owned" simply means the workers own the shares, and hence "democratic" would seem to be redundant. Unless you are suggesting that the democratic function is exercised in another way?

Now clearly Mozilla is a mix of non profit and for profit. A non profit doesn't really have shares (there's usually some other approach to appointing decision makers.)

So, I think you are suggesting that the voting rights move from "shareholders" to employees.

Naturally this opens the door to 51% attacks, or more specifically incentivises workers to coalesce into groups with mutual-support voting.

Given a reasonably high turnover in workers, we should therefore expect decision making to be mostly short-term not long term? (Simplistically, most people will vote to further their short term returns, ignoring long term goals because in the long run they're not here.)

In other words the company starts to behave a lot like a govt does. Regular elections promote short-term goals and results (don't start a project that will complete after you've left) at the expense of things like maintainence etc.

It also values political skills over say engineering skills. Being a good speaker counts for more than being competent.

Do you believe this structure will make a better browser? When funding runs low, will they make better decisions on which staff to cut?