I'm depending on the money in my 401k to have value when I retire.

While I can certainly sympathize with such a problem, one of the benefits of a BIG/NIT or citizen's dividend funded through printing money is that it is essentially social security for all so that you wouldn't have to depend on the money in your 401k in order to live when you retire, and people just starting out wouldn't have to borrow money in order to life when they go to school. How big of a 401k would you need to be able to buy an inflation adjusted 30 year $15k perpetuity?

Piketty proposed a wealth tax for those with over x million dollars, although I'm not sure how feasible that would be given that there are those who make a living specifically hiding that amount of wealth and many others who make a living ensuring that their wealth will survive seizure from any government, be it in a trust or whatever else. If you were able to make SoCred/Citizen's Dividend work as a backdoor tax on wealth without simply making everything more expensive (ie. inflation) then I would think it would be a necessary evil to shrink the size of your 401k and the value of your home in order to make successive generations able to afford to buy a home or get an education without having to live their lives in debt.

Can I voluntarily sell shares to people, but not be required to give shares to employees without payment? Basically what businesses do now.

Ah, that's different from what you said:

Can they sell shares to other people, but not give it away to workers?

You can give your employees shares of your business. No one is stopping you from doing so. You aren't forced to do so, though, and doing so would count as compensation under current law and thus it would be taxable income afaik.

There is a co op coffee shop in Winnipeg that is named after a town in Spain which is the name of the co-op which runs essentially every business in the town. At the co op coffee shop in Winnipeg, they pay slightly more than the market rate ($15/hr when the minimum wage was $10 I think). Restaurants don't tend to make good coops though due I would assume to a transitory worker pool.

There is a Co-Op gas station chain in Manitoba which is a customer co op where instead of getting a discount at the pump ala Petro-Canada with the card, you get a lump sum at the end of the year based on how much you and everyone else bought. I would think that this would be somewhat similar to what a worker based co op would be where a portion of the profit would be split amongst the workers, which is not unlike what happens with the Christmas bonus at my job where it is split evenly amongst the full and part-time staff, although again that is entirely voluntary on the part of the employer.

The only one that matters is oil.

I disagree. Currently, still half of the electricity generated in the USA (with Alberta not far behind) is produced by coal. Meanwhile, natural gas is fracking everywhere, pardon the Farscape (edit) Battlestar Galactica (/edit) pun.

Also, there is the potential for Thorium, although I admit I might have been sold a bill of goods, although my boss who is a nuclear physicist by trade doesn't seem to think so. The main drawback to adoption of nuclear power (and Thorium having the added uphill battle of there being fewer people trained in its adoption and being tested at scale) is the political will to do so.

Oil is finite, but I'm optimistic human ingenuity isn't.

I would recommend the Massey lecture series A Short History of Progress which was turned into a subpar talking head documentary (subpar in that it consists of a bunch of talking head experts telling you essentially the same thing) that delves into the history of humanity and how everytime we find a new resource, we get to the point where we exploit it so efficiently that it gets used up, usually leading to a crash. It's region locked I'm pretty sure, but there are ways to fake a Canadian ip.

iirc, we should've crashed about a century or so ago except we found how to use oil and so we're being taken on a bit of a ride. In my opinion, the reason oil is so important in everything we do is because it's what we are currently exploiting. While we would have trouble adapting to something else, something else could and would fill the void. The way oil/plastic is so prevalent in everything to me reminds me of how the Native Americans of the prairies would utilize every part of the buffalo.

Meanwhile, we're throwing the planet for a bit of a loop by tossing all of the carbon and methane (I've not seen numbers, but I'm sure there are record population numbers for cows, pigs and chickens now than ever before) which hopefully won't end up making it impossible to grow food.

Also, Natural Capital is more than just nonrenewables and also includes the renewables that need to be shepherded so that they do renew, the most important of which would be potable water, without which we would have bigger problems than living in huts. Luckily we're apparently developing shit like solar powered moisture vaporator billboards, so perhaps there is hope.

Some smart guy will get rich off solving that problem (maybe Elon Musk). Having a system that richly rewards extraordinary talent is required. Guys like Elon Musk come here because they can profit from their talents.

Which is why I'm not an absolute Leveller/egalitarian and am instead in favor of a "floor below which no one is allowed to fall" as either Milton Friedman or FA Hayek would say. A modest wealth tax coupled with a sales tax to pay for it is fine by me. There were plenty of rich folk making money on ingenuity under a 90% top marginal rate, so I don't really see a problem with taxing wealth in order to prevent the consolidation of wealth over time.

The one example that I brought up that I came across back in university when studying the classics was Athens and Sparta. Athens had the same issue Rome had centuries later, where wealth consolidated into fewer hands, although with Rome it had to do with politically connected families getting large plots of land won by the Roman soldiers.

In Athens, farmers would borrow money to plant next year's crop and if the harvest was bad, they might not only lose their land, but their 'person,' meaning they would become the slave of the lender and would then essentially have to work their land for the person who lent them the money. In Sparta, it was different. There, the Spartiates would terrorize the helots (part of their coming of age ritual would be killing some of them) into working the land for them. Unlike anywhere else in the world at the time, though, land would not only be inherited by the men, but also by the women. This would be the main reason in my opinion compounded by the men constantly being sent to war that the number of Spartiates would dwindle over the centuries to a number in the hundreds instead of the thousands it had been, where wealth was allowed to consolidate in a class which could only engage in an activity (equestrian sport) that was useless to the economy (fighting wars, terrorizing slaves).

Anyways, Athens managed to reform. They recognized they had a problem and that they were incapable of fixing it with the current system. So, they appointed Solon to come up with a solution. The arrangement was such that Solon wouldn't live in Athens during the time, so he had no chance to personally benefit from the result, and the Athenians wouldn't be able to change anything until after ten years, so that the reform would be allowed to take hold. Essentially, debt on your person was banned, a limit on the size of your land (wealth, really, in the classical era) was enacted so that you and your family and some workers/slaves could manage it instead of huge sprawling estates, and anyone who was a debt-slave would be freed and their land returned if they could reasonably prove that it had been there's in order to reverse the damage done to the landowning class. Landowning farmers, after all, were the ones who would be called upon when the polis/city-state went to war, and the more fighters the better their chances.

In a similar sense, I would say that by educating as many people in the world as possible by providing them with the means to worry about greater issues than their day to day survival, we would further our chances of developing the next Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, Elon Musk or Sergei Korolev.