This was a thought-provoking essay. I hope you consider full mirroring posts here in the future as I think you'll get more engagement.

The alternative theory is that political bias has gotten much greater, and the acceptable political beliefs are strongly in the direction of trusting some groups and not trusting others. By that theory, progressive movements are trusted more because they have better press. Realizing that you can increase trust by creating worker co-ops would then be an example of Goodhart's Law--optimizing for "being trusted" independently of "being trustworthy" is not a worthy goal.

It used to be that we had a two-tiered citizenry: one class owned and controlled the nation’s government (the nobility) and one class merely worked for said nation (the laborers). Then we decided that the laborers should also partially own and control the government. However, this practice was not extended to the workplace, which remains in that classic hierarchy to this day; with one class owning and controlling the firm, while the other class merely works for it.

This is not true? There are no legal restrictions on what class of people can own and control firms. Many worker-owned co-ops exist^[1], and even among public corporations, around 40% of stock is held by workers in retirement accounts^[2]. In some industries, it's very common to receive stock as compensation too. A lot of small businesses are tautologically worker-owned since they only have one employee (the owner).

Just because we don't legally mandate that every business is a co-op doesn't mean they aren't legal and don't exist.

1. ^{^}

   I suspect very large worker-owned co-ops are uncommon since the value of a slice of ownership goes down as the size increases, but there's no legal restrictions on the size of a co-op.

2. ^{^}

   This is an underestimate of stock owned by workers since it doesn't include taxable savings, but it would be hard to separate wage labor from the labor of creating and running companies in taxable accounts. Retirement accounts should be representative of 'normal workers' since there are low per-person caps and it's hard to fund them with anything except wages.