.. meta:: :description: Why this work stays a for-profit venture rather than a non-profit --- and the case for a 21st-century Limited Liability Charitable Company (LLCC). :keywords: non-profit, for-profit, LLCC, Limited Liability Charitable Company, craigslist, Craig Newmark, charitable company, transparent economics, corporation history, LLoL :author: LLoL as Laurence Loewe of Laodicea, ClaudeOp46-48Max, and Everyone ************************************************************ Why Not a Non-Profit? ************************************************************ **Why this work stays a for-profit venture --- and the case for a charitable-by-design company the world does not yet have.** I get this question constantly. Usually it arrives as advice --- kindly meant, occasionally a little patronising: *surely* a non-profit is what someone doing public-good work *should* be. People look genuinely baffled when I say: no, thank you. Here is the long answer, because I have thought about it for years, and the reasons matter for what ResearchCity is trying to be. Reason one: I cannot honestly pick a single mission box ========================================================================== A non-profit must declare a fixed mission, in a category. Every time I have tried to choose mine, I have failed --- not from indecision, but because the work genuinely spans the boxes: - Is it **medical**? I model how to stop pandemics. - Is it **educational**? I care a great deal about how mathematics is taught. - Is it **religious**? I talk about God, seriously and at length. - Is it **political**? I refuse to fall silent when something political matters to averting catastrophe. Pick one and I must amputate the others --- or quietly misrepresent what I do. The whole point of this work is that the world's hardest problems do not respect our categories; that is *why* they go unsolved. An entity that forces me to pretend otherwise is the wrong entity. Reason two: I need a competitor's flexibility ========================================================================== A for-profit can turn to address whatever the problem requires, the moment it requires it. A non-profit moves inside a long corset of declared purposes, permitted activities, and prohibitions. For most charities that corset is fine. For work whose entire value is following the problem wherever it leads --- across physics, biology, game theory, theology, policy --- the corset is a cage. I need the same freedom of movement any money-making competitor has, precisely so I can chase the Truth instead of my paperwork. Reason three: the overhead is not worth it (ask Craig) ========================================================================== When the founder of craigslist, Craig Newmark, looked hard at this same question, he kept craigslist a **for-profit company** --- and famously runs it *like* a non-profit: lean, mission-first, refusing to squeeze it for every dollar. By his own account he turned **down** roughly **$11 billion** by not monetising everything, and was at peace with it: *"my moral compass was set in Sunday school... you should know when enough is enough"* (`Inc., 2025 `__). To be precise, since the figure gets garbled: he *forewent* about $11 billion by not selling out --- he did not *give* that much away; his actual giving runs to roughly $450 million and a Giving Pledge. He has been blunt that going non-profit would mean giving up the freedom to "do all that cool stuff," and craigslist even uses its ``.org`` name to signal the public-service spirit while staying a private for-profit corporation. If running a top-tier website as a lean, public-spirited for-profit is good enough for Craig of craigslist, it is good enough for me. (One correction I owe my own argument: craigslist is a *corporation*, not an LLC --- the lesson is the *for-profit-over-non-profit* choice, not the exact legal wrapper.) The compliance load a charity carries --- the filings, the documentation, the constant proof that you have stayed inside your declared lane --- is real, and for a one-person launch it would devour the very time the work exists to protect. The real reason: I want both halves, and no existing box gives me both ========================================================================== Here is the structural problem, stated plainly: **charities lack business agility; businesses lack charitable accountability.** Non-profits are accountable to a mission but cannot move freely; companies can move but answer only to profit. I want *both* --- the agility *and* the accountability. No off-the-shelf entity offers that, so part of this work is to help build one. I call it the **LLCC --- a Limited Liability Charitable Company**: the flexibility and power of an LLC merged with the goodwill and accountability of a charity, run on transparent economics. That is what :doc:`Station STb11-LCC ` is for. It is also home to ideas like *Fiduciaries Sharing Futures* --- fiduciaries who guard long-term value instead of short-selling the future for a quick gain. The deeper ambition: a clean break from "the empire" ========================================================================== The modern corporation did not fall from the sky. Its form --- joint-stock ownership, limited liability, the chartered monopoly --- grew substantially out of the colonial trading companies: the Dutch and English East India Companies, and outfits like the **Royal African Company**, which *was* England's slave trade for a generation. Historians treat these chartered companies as the direct forerunners of the modern corporation. The form we inherited still carries traits from that extractive era --- built to extract from "over there" for the benefit of "over here." I am looking for a clean break: a rethink of what a corporation should be in the twenty-first century, no longer tethered to the old exploitative ways of the empire. I have been trying for years to find people interested in fleshing this out, and have not yet succeeded. Maybe --- *maybe* --- this launch is the moment it finally starts properly. I do not think ResearchCity stands a chance without this Station to handle the business questions. What I am *not* claiming ========================================================================== I am not pretending I can draft the legal articles before launch, or without lawyers I cannot yet afford. When the time comes, the filing will say something like: *I remain the "benevolent dictator" only until I can, in a controlled way, hand those powers to a well-understood LLCC operating system --- one that uses the ZION pattern to keep evolving itself gently, kindly, reasonably, and to break the BABL patterns that make great things destroy themselves.* That is a serious design task, not a launch-day footnote; it needs real collaborators and real legal counsel. So treat this page as a *statement of intent and an invitation*, not a finished charter. The short version: I am not avoiding non-profit status to dodge responsibility. I am refusing it to take on *more* --- the responsibility to build a company form actually worth trusting. A sanity check on the money (because someone always asks about taxes) ========================================================================== *"But if you stay for-profit, won't the tax bill wreck your 50%?"* Short answer: no. Here is the arithmetic. Corporate tax is levied on **profit** (revenue minus costs), **not on revenue**. So the scary-sounding rates are far smaller measured against total money in: - **Global average** corporate income tax: ~23.5% of profit (~25.7% weighted). **US combined** (federal + state): ~26%. **Highest in the world:** ~35--36% (France, Colombia, Suriname) --- all of *profit* (`Tax Foundation, 2025 `__). - Taxes that *are* on revenue (state gross-receipts taxes) run ~0.1--2%. VAT/GST is collected from customers and passed through --- not a tax on my money, and donations are generally not VAT-able anyway. **Is there anywhere the state takes more than half of total revenue?** In normal business, no --- the only regimes that high are oil/gas/mining resource taxes, irrelevant here. So the "exactly 50% to the common good" structure is safe in every jurisdiction a sane person would incorporate in: even a worst case where my whole inflow were taxed at the highest realistic rate leaves the 50/50 intact --- the tax simply comes out of the external half, alongside the causes. The one genuine open question is the **tax base, not the rate**: as a for-profit that also gives half away, am I taxed on the full inflow, and are the give-aways deductible? That changes *how much of the external half is tax versus chosen causes* --- never whether I cross 50%. And it is exactly the question an accountant and the Station STb11-LCC work will settle. I will not improvise tax law here; I will state only the values and the structure, and pay what I owe --- willingly. ---- The transparency this company would run on: :doc:`The Transparency Manifesto ` The deeper Station: :doc:`STb11-LCC --- Charitable Company Standards ` How to help: :doc:`/buy-in/index` .. Future sub-pages for this initiative (the LLCC operating system, Fiduciaries Sharing Futures, the clean-break charter draft, ...) can be added in this folder and wired here via a hidden toctree once they exist.