>>> as Adam Smith envisioned it. IOW, kill off the corporations (or, rather, revoke their permits - they aren't a service to the society anymore) and reinstate the direct ownership. What was wrong with any system of socialism so far is equally wrong in the corporate capitalism: there's no direct ownership, therefore no responsibility.
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>You have hit it square on the head.
>Power without consequences.
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>The exact same thing is wrong in our government - Power without responsibility.
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>People are free to join or create the sort of worker co-ops you describe, and they usually end badly.

The reason for this is that they are an island in ocean of different relationships; they don't know how to do it. They are a product of a culture which knows about four millennia of hierarchy and subordination, and has never seriously tried to function as a group of peers. And when it did, it took care that the experience gained was quickly lost (just note the bent history of early pilgrims' communes - there were other communes later, some of which went into the next generation, but that isn't in the curriculum). The circle is vicious, and as any such cycle, it takes a nimble player to break out of.

An example of this mindset is the false premise A. Huxley puts forth in the "Brave new world":
Mustapha Mond smiled. "Well, you can call it an experiment in
rebottling if you like. It began in A.F. 473. The Controllers had
the island of Cyprus cleared of all its existing inhabitants and
re-colonized with a specially prepared batch of twenty-two
thousand Alphas. All agricultural and industrial equipment was
handed over to them and they were left to manage their own
affairs. The result exactly fulfilled all the theoretical
predictions. The land wasn't properly worked; there were strikes
in all the factories; the laws were set at naught, orders
disobeyed; all the people detailed for a spell of low-grade work
were perpetually intriguing for high-grade jobs, and all the
people with high-grade jobs were counter-intriguing at all costs
to stay where they were. Within six years they were having a
first-class civil war. When nineteen out of the twenty-two
thousand had been killed, the survivors unanimously petitioned
the World Controllers to resume the government of the island.
Which they did. And that was the end of the only society of
Alphas that the world has ever seen."
This is somehow supposed to show that if everybody was highest class, they would soon kill each other. The fallacy is in "orders disobeyed" - in a society of supposedly all equals, there are still those who command and those who are supposed to obey; there's "low-grade work" - so, it's still stratified despite being nominally a society of equals. And, the permanent knowledge of it being an experiment, so if it fails we'll all be returned to our proper high positions in the real outside world. Nevertheless, this fallacious argument (that even in a pretend-all-equals society the citizens will still have a command structure and hate it) was used over and over as proof that it can't work.

>Most people don't want that much responsibility, and are much happier to just get their paycheck without worrying about running a business.

Because they learned the lesson: every time they tried to think, to speak up, to change something for the better, it hurt. In each of the systems mentioned, for different reasons. Actually, for the same reason - preservation of status quo (it just stood differently).

>Corporate Capitalism does have a rough sort of responsibility: If management is poor enough, the company fails or somebody buys the stock cheap and makes changes. Either way, the bad managers lose their jobs. It does not happen nearly often enough.

That's not the only kind of loss. There's a wealth in intellectual labor of employees, people who know their jobs and see clear paths to improvement - but are forbidden to think, because each such initiative is seen as a threat to the position of the incompetent boss. And the boss doesn't necessarily know the job of the worker/engineer/whichever specialist it is, he knows bossing. He's not serving the business, he's serving the hierarchy. The hierarchy is supposedly a system by which to manage a business, but it has its own laws and quickly becomes a goal for and to itself. Money is lost, productivity isn't achieved, but the hierarchy goes on.