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Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
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?
Our beef supply would vanish overnight
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
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.
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.
Just go back to needing futures to actually be fulfilled in kind.
And maybe limit/outlaw complex financial products.
These would be a solid start to fixing the issue of the unsustainable, and irrational, not to mention unconstructive economic growth of the last 60 years.
Honestly, I'm on the opposite end of the spectrum. Completely deregulate markets. This would make the stock market a constant churn of volatility and pump and dump schemes. It would gain a reputation for being a scam. People would be forced to once again invest in local businesses where they actually knew something about the owners and the conditions on the ground. Large financial collapses would cease to be a thing, since a small collapse in one city wouldn't affect the next city over
scam=people stop investing
Crypto, blockchain products, NFT's, magnetic bracelets, alkaline water, magic crystals...you are severely underestimating the average human's ability to be constantly scammed
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'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.
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.
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.
Well that would eliminate the whole point of corporations, which is to make it easy to raise money.
Let's start with an understanding of why corporations suck in the first place. The root of all good and evil in a corporation is limited lability. This allows investors to not have to worry that they're going to lose more than their investment, so they don't need to think too hard before putting their money in some company they just heard of. This is great for investors and for the corporation.
But this comes with a cost to everyone else. There's the direct cost that if the corporation ends up owing people money through excessive debt, negligence, or illegal activities, they can declare bankruptcy and the investors don't have to worry any paying for those (other than their losses on the stock). But I suspect the more pernicious effect is that the investors' lack of concern over their investment as anything but a vehicle of profit basically leads them to pick sociopathic CEOs and demand profit maximizing behavior at the cost of social good and even long term stability. And since all this sociopathic activity is really great at amassing money, it's kind of a big power boost for sociopathy overall.
However, the ease of investing can be a good thing for society too - basically it allows a lot of people to retire at some point, and allows for rapid funding of new ideas. So is there a way to get corporations back under control without throwing out the baby? I tend to think we should tax corporations higher if nothing else, as it is we do the opposite thanks to Trump's last tax cut plan.
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.
i think an easier way would be to limit stock trading to once per fiscal quarter.
stocks were invented as a way for people to invest in things they believe in, and get some money back as thanks. with the advent of rapid trading, the economy has become hopelessly slaved to the ticker; the business is no longer what makes value, value is what makes value.
it's all turned into speculation. eliminating that part would go a long way.
Value was making value as you put it, long before rapid trading. Speculation and arbitrage are like the first two things that develop in any economy. Any entrepreneurial grade school child trading candy, baseball cards, pogs, hotwheels, or whatever the hot new thing is has probably seen both first hand.
If I’m not mistaken, the US has the beginnings of this in place already in the form of taxes on short-term investments. I’m by no means a tax expert, but this could be a starting point, maybe.
Yeah make minimum holding periods.
I read this as "socks" and thought "What the hippy shit is this?"
Then I realized my error but still wondered the same thing.
I wish I could live the rest of my days without socks.
I was also wondering if this is a continuation of the socks as a social construct thread.
Unlike you, however, I don't consider the idea to be "hippy shit" at all. In fact, I've often thought that we might be better off without corporations. Entrepreneurship is what we need, not impersonal investment.
Even if we ignored the immediate collapse of the world economy, if you were starting from scratch how would you get anyone to take risks and put money/time into creating a business?
Even if people did decide to do it, no banks would be able to lend to you (what banks? They need a massive amount of money to start) as they would have absolutely nothing as collateral.
How would you get anyone to take risks and start a business
People create things all the time without a profit motive. Assuming they have a good safety net behind them that allows them to start up there ideas people will create. Case in point the app were on right now, it's developed open source with no profit motive, no stocks, no company. It's built by a bunch of hardline communist who believe in an open social network.
What banks
There are credit unions that function as co-ops with no stock ownership
they would have absolutely nothing as collateral
Co-ops can have collateral just like any other business, property of a store or factory, stock ( in the product sense ) etc. Yeah we wouldn't have silicon valley with vcs betting millions on unproven tech, but do we really need that?
Also this is all assuming there's no state involvement or planning. The state has a great credit line that it can use to backstop loans for small cooperative enterprises or just create the enterprises itself, eg. City run grocery stores like zohrans been pitching.
With a proper UBI and social safety net they’d be raking much less of a risk.
The stock market shouldn't exist. Fight me.
Poor people are poor just because they don't know how to participate in the stock market. Fight me.
I fully agree!
However, participation requirements for winning include:
The stock market isn’t the root of all evil - it’s just one way for companies to raise money and for regular people to invest in those companies. Without it, businesses would still need funding, but the money would come from a much smaller circle of the ultra-rich and private investors. That would make the system less democratic, not more.
If we got rid of the stock market, we wouldn't get rid of corporate greed or wealth inequality. We’d just move them into darker, less transparent places - behind closed doors instead of in public view. Ordinary people would lose what little access they have to ownership and wealth-building. Rich people would still get richer, just in ways even harder to regulate.
So if the goal is to make the system fairer, abolishing the stock market isn’t the answer. Reforming it might be - but killing it outright would probably just make things worse.
This is called a cooperative
Except not just control but ownership too, there is no division between owner and employee.
And yes I agree with you, it would be a good idea. The economic system I advocate for the most is cooperatives in a free market.
What your describing is a socialist revolution. Marx referred to it as the abolition of private property, which he said is the goal of communism. Private property doesn't mean your phone or car or home or whatever, that is personal property, it's stuff you own to use. Private property is something you own to make money from, stocks, bonds, rental properties etc. That type of property is based off power and exploitation, the power to kick someone out of there home if they don't pay rent, or the exploitation of the working class by extracting there surplus value (profit) which goes to pay a stocks dividends, or to be reinvested in the business thus raising the stocks capital holdings and the stocks value.
In Marxism private property is the justification given to the working class for there exploitation, and abolishing it will free the working class and allow them to organize horizontally like you said with voting, without bourgeoisie property relations.