Ive often seen individuals on the left talking about how billionares shouldnt exist etc., but when probed on how that could be accomplished the answer is usually just taxes or guillotines. I dont think either is great.
What if instead, corporations were made to be unable to be sold or owned. Initially theyre made to default to popular election for their board, and after that they can set up a charter or adopt a standard one, ratified by majority vote of their employees.
Bank collapse would probably follow, how could that be remedied? Maybe match the banks invalidated stocks with bonds?
The “make every company a cooperative” concept has been proposed before. For certain companies it could make sense, but it gets a little tricky when it’s anything that needs significant funds to get off the ground.
Corporations were invented for a reason: it creates a mechanism whereby investors can put money in up front in exchange for a share of possible profits once the venture gets going. For example, that makes it possible to build a billion dollar nuclear reactor with 100 staff people who couldn’t each pay 10 million dollars.
The mechanism that creates billionaires is only sort of related. Elon Musk, for example, built up his wealth through tangential involvement with a series of really successful companies.
I still think capitalism is a useful tool. But by are we letting it use us rather than the other way around?
Government was arguably created to establish a market, needed for any economic system to work. You need consistent legal structure, money, a way to do business.
But our failure is government getting owned by the market rather than shaping it for the good of their constituents. Let capitalism be our tool in a market that factors in externalities, fairness and that rewards work.combine that with a progressive tax system like what we claim, and things are looking up, with what seems like minor changes.
- why does the market fail to account for environmental destruction in the cost of doing business?
- why is the market based on a legal structure that exploit individuals?
- why do the richest people have the lowest effective tax rate?
I read through almost the whole thing wondering how it would connect to “socks”. Is he a shill for “big footwear”?
You need a way to invest in companies, especially for any to grow, and you need to motivate people. A central economy might budget tax revenue, typically on a multi-year plan, but it tends not to be responsive to real world messiness nor motivating. Capitalism means anyone can invest in a company, getting partial ownership and partial benefit from gains and responding quickly to the whims of the market. People are motivated by profit. Are you proposing a third way?
Why don’t you think taxing the super rich is great?
answered this one here : https://lemmy.world/comment/17993835
Our beef supply would vanish overnight
You just reinvented a Co-Op.
However, at what level does this get enacted?
Does little Tommy’s summer lawn cutting “business” with his 3 neighbors as customers need an elected board in order to operate?
If I run a business and need a secretary to take care of some mundane things while I do the actual money making part of the business, doors that secretary suddenly get 50% vote over all decisions?
So to answer your questions
- Depends on how they have their business registered. I once worked at a company that had 7 people total working there, but because it was legally a corporation it had a “board”, which was just the 3 guys who owned the company.
- Not necessarily, going back to my previous answer, but there is no legal requirement to sell your stocks when you hire someone. And if you decide to sell stocks you can do a private sale of any amount of the company that you want.
Just because a company is a registered corporation doesn’t mean their stocks are sold publicly. But because they are a registered corporation, they have to have a board.
The op did not mention only companies that would be publicly sold. It said ALL OWNERSHIP of companies would be banned. So yeah, people can currently register their companies in whatever way they wish, but the op removes all the options that make the most sense for small companies. And I bet your example was just a partnership, and they wanted to feel fancy by calling it a board.
Maybe just give rid of the 2ndary market. You can only buy stock directly from the company, and you’re entitled to a % of profit share as a result of that. When you’re done, you can sell the stock back to the company
A return to pure value investing would be incredible harm reduction about, I dunno, sixty years ago. Nowadays the derivatives market is so much larger than the actual market that any attempt to unwind it might literally collapse the entire global economy
At least some of that is tax rates. A few tweaks to unrealized income and losses, capital gains and losses, treatment of dividends, and we can step back from the brink of “financial engineering” and get back to using the profit motive for actual engineering. Basically repeal most of the tax changes since Reagan
Whisper of a dream
Why do all solutions need to be destructive? The stocks and companies exist to make one thing - maximize the stakeholder value. So, to get rich, one just needs to - hold stocks, and the company works to make you money. Nothing more, nothing less. But why are so little people actually owning stocks? Because you don’t get tought in school about financial literacy.
Money is actually on the table for everyone to grab, just that majority of the people lack basic knowledge - where is the table and how to get to it.
Just teach people in school how to manage stocks, and everyone can be rich.
“Everyone can be rich” - no.
For one to be rich, another needs to be poor. Rich and poor are entirely relative terms.
Pardon my expression, everyone can have a lot of money.
A man who doesn’t want anything is rich, even if he doesn’t have money. I adjusted my comment accordingly.
It becomes very hard to form a company of any reasonable size without government intervention. At that point, corporations that form need tight relations with the government.
The solution proposed in “After Capitalism” is (with democratically worker managed companies):
A flat-rate tax on the capital assets of all productive enterprises is collected by the central government, all of which is plowed back into the economy, assisting those firms needing funds for purposes of productive investment. These funds are dispersed throughout society, first to regions and communities on a per capita basis, then to public banks in accordance with past performance, then to those firms with profitable project proposals. Profitable projects that promise increased employment and/or further other democratically decided goals are favored over those that do not. At each level—national, regional, and local—legislatures decide what portion of the investment fund coming to them is to be set aside for public capital expenditures, then send down the remainder, no strings attached, to the next lower level. Associated with most banks are entrepreneurial divisions, which promote firm expansion and new firm creation. Large enterprises that operate regionally or nationally might need access to additional capital, in which case it would be appropriate for the network of local investment banks to be supplemented by regional and national investment banks.
That’s for taking care of the investment part that stocks/shares fulfill for a large part right now.
And for getting there:
Legislation giving workers the right to buy their company if they so choose. If workers so desire, a referendum is held to determine if the majority of workers want to democratize the company. If the referendum succeeds, a labor trust is formed, its directors selected democratically by the work-force, which, using funds derived from payroll deductions, purchase shares of the company on the stock market. In due time, the labor trust will come to own the majority of shares, at which time it takes full control via a leveraged buyout, that is, by borrowing the money to buy up the remaining shares.
Along with legislation that if a company is bailed out by the government, it gets nationalized and turned into a worker self managed company. If companies get sold, they can only be sold to the state (according to the value of current assets, not stock market cap or similar). And if a firm is not sold, it’s turned over to the workers if the founders death. If there’s multiple founders, each can sell their share to the state or workers separately.
For stocks specifically, there’s the Meidner plan, where every company with more than 50 employees is required to issue new shares each year equivalent to 20% of its profits, these shares will be held in a trust owned by the government, and in an estimated 35 years, most firms would become nationalized (of course along side all newly founded firms having to be worker owned).
Not saying I fully agree with all of Schweickharts proposals, but at least the book is a relatively concrete proposal for an alternative that can be discussed, and how to possibly get there, so I thought it merits sharing.
We aren’t going to get to any of these policy reform ideas without the guillotines, actually. Why would any of the people who can’t help their greedy selves from accumulating absolutely everything, ever just willingly give up that power? We will never vote ourselves out of this hole we’re in. Even if we all went on a general strike, they would shoot us and enslave us.
Why not instead have public and/or ownership of stocks, as the Meidner plan proposed, or in the form of a Social Wealth Fund as Matt Bruenig at the People’s Policy Project has suggested? This give people both democratic control and socializes the profits. As long as we have corporations, having them owned either by the public or by their workers (in the form of cooperatives) seems like the way to go.
I think the people that built a company are better qualified to elect their ceo than the bulk populus. Gotta be democratically elected by workers imo, though a simple majority isnt always the best way.
I’ve got a better idea: Make stockholders criminally liable and eligible for prison/execution for the crimes committed by the companies they invest in.
Oh, PharmaCorp knowingly put a medication in to production that causes baby’s brains to catch fire? Every single investor in PharmaCorp is gonna serve three consecutive life sentences in Rapesburg-Asspain penitentiary.
Wipe out a few generations of the upper class by getting a couple mass first degree murder convictions to stick and the problem will sort itself out.
I think a more effective idea would be to remove all profits (and maybe executive income and bonuses) from the company for a fixed period of time instead of a fixed fine that’s less than the profit from doing the illegal activity.
Investors won’t be happy if they’re getting nothing, so they’ll be more careful with their investments, and no-one will have to pay to house thousands of unwitting investors in prisons.
No I think it’s going to have to involve large numbers of perforated colons. Consequences should be physical.
Who said we’re paying to house prisoners? The US constitution permits enslaving convicted felons. They’re all going to the mines. They will WORK or be mutilated.
Mutual funds…you probably own some and definitely someone you know also has mutual funds that probably own those stocks too…but I like the thought and see potential.
I don’t, I have no stock portfolio at all. You’re probably right there’s a lot of bullshit that goes on in the financial world that I would put a pretty swift end to. Hell, “money market” bank accounts and such are probably somehow attached to the stock market.
If I understand correctly, a mutual fund is basically a bunch of people invest in a bunch of stocks managed by a professional stock guesser such that it’s almost certainly going to do at least kind of okay. Yeah I’d either outright end that practice or heap a LOT of liability on the stock guesser and a bit on the members.
You invested in a mutual fund, and one of the 60 stocks in the portfolio was Locktheon, and Locktheon just released a chemical weapon killing an entire small town? Your stock broker is now a slave of the state and will die in the mines, you and everyone else who is a member of that mutual fund owe 1000 hours community service each. We’re going to have a highway system so clean you can eat off it.
You’d need to rollback the last 70 years of pensions being replaced by 401k plans and/or limit responsibility to the brokers. If you hire a licensed plumber that ends up flooding your neighbor’s place, the plumber is the one getting sued.
It would probably also be good to restructure retirement incentives away from the stock market, but that’s not going to happen overnight either.
Frankly there are probably a lot of people who need to see their retirements go away and they need to spend their golden years in the mines. They need to have their elderly assholes penised apart for voting for this shit for decades.
The stock market has been manipulated to the point where there is very little understanding of value anymore. We need a better way otherwise the “Pelosiism” will continue to drive down value and drive up prices. The only action available to us, in order to regain trust, is transparency. If it ain’t transparent, someone is diverting too much money somewhere along the line.
Idk, man. I paid my rent last year with some stocks i cashed out.
I’d recommend just researching companies to invest in for like 10 years, and then research information on ETFs to help your money grow with the market. I’m basically poor and the stocks i invested in helped when i needed it, and i am definitely going to invest again.
But I wouldn’t say get rid of the stock market. Just do some research, and only invest what you’re willing to not keep in a savings account for a rainy day.
