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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s fair.
Didn’t think about coops, I assume that if they went completely underwater their creditors would still own them though.
Could all still work, but could be clunky, would probably all get worked out in time.
if they went underwater
Bankruptcy would work the same as it does with a stock company. Since Bankruptcy is just liquidating all a companies assets then forming a queue of people with claims to that money, with secured debt holders at the front of the line and stock holders at the back, you’d just remove the stock holders at the back, maybe replace them with the employees to give them a sort of “severance”
But why would people take loans out to start businesses if there’s no way to pay the loan back? Where is any profit from the business going?
Without ownership of a company there’s no reason for anyone to start a company and take on all the risk.
why would anyone take out loans to start a business if there’s no way to pay the loan back?
The co-op would pay the loan back and treat it like any other cost of doing business, like buying components / ingredients or paying rent.
where is any profit from the business going
It would go to the employees. There would be no profit in the typical sense of revenue - costs - payroll, any excess after costs just goes to payroll
without ownership of the company there’s no reason for anyone to start a company and take on all the risk.
People start companies / organizations all the time where there main motivation isn’t profit. Your average restauranter is not doing it for the money, if they are they’re delusional. They do it because they like cooking / food or want to create a space for people to gather. Sure some people are motivated by making a profit and we’d miss out on there businesses, that’s the cost of a more equitable society. Marx himself praised the dynamism and creativity of capitalism but didn’t think it was worth it for the working class who could get far more of the pie if they weren’t giving a cut to the owners. This is becoming more true as that dynamism and creativity is going towards AI garbage and crypto and financial schemes
As for the risk, most of the financial risk of owning a business is shed when you create an LLC. The other risk of making no income while the business is getting off the ground can be mitigated by a social safety net that allows people to pursue these enterprises without worrying how they’re gonna eat or pay rent.
So every business is a co-op, but only one person takes out the loan to start the business? So only 1 person is on the hook if it fails, but everyone benefits if it succeeds?
It would go to the employees. There would be no profit in the typical sense of revenue - costs - payroll, any excess after costs just goes to payroll
But this is the same as all of the employees having stock in the business. It means if the business turns into the next amazon, all these employees will be - get this - billionaires! Isn’t that precisely what OP is saying they don’t want?
Your average restauranter is not doing it for the money, if they are they’re delusional.
They absolutely are, because they want the restaurant to provide for them. They don’t open a restaurant with the dream of working another full time job as well as running the restaurant so they can pay their bills.
The reason people start businesses is so they can be their own boss and be financially independent. It is always about money, unless they already don’t need the money.
Marx himself praised the dynamism and creativity of capitalism but didn’t think it was worth it for the working class who could get far more of the pie if they weren’t giving a cut to the owners.
Cool, now show me the communist countries where everyone is equally wealthy and there is no poor underclass and no super rich upper class rulers.
As for the risk, most of the financial risk of owning a business is shed when you create an LLC.
It absolutely is not lol.
by a social safety net that allows people to pursue these enterprises without worrying how they’re gonna eat or pay rent.
Ok so now you’re talking about a UBI, correct? That’s fine, I think a UBI absolutely needs to be trialled and explored - but that’s got nothing to do with the absurd notion of getting rid of stocks. Even with a UBI, loans from failed business startups would bankrupt you and make you lose everything.
only one person takes out the loan
No, a group of people would form a co-op, just like how people form a company, and the co-op would take out the loan. Entities can take out loans just like people can
but this is the same as all of the employees having stock in the business
No, stock is transferable and sellable, and not equal. If every employee got stock then one of them could / would sell it to someone with cash upfront. Now that new person is now getting money from the business without contributing any labor. They can then use that money to buy more stocks and make a passive income off the company. This leads to capital accumulation and a class of people making money off other people’s labor just because they have more money, or had more money at the start.
As for Amazon the average employee would be making a lot more then they are right now but they wouldn’t be billionaires. Billionaires never make there billions off working, they make it off capital gains, and since the shares aren’t sellable, and thus have no monetary value, there’d be no idea of capital gains for a worker in a co-op.
For the restaurant example I agree they may want to start a business for economic security, but thats not the same as getting rich. Economic security can be provided by a social safety net.
I also agree they may want to start one because they lack autonomy, but I’d say that’s largely the result of the alienation of working in normal stock owned companies where the owners make the decisions. If you are working in a co-op and get to have a say in all the decisions that alienation is partly ameliorated. If you want a hand in more decisions then you can “run” for a managerial position and get elected, administrative work would still be necessary in a co-op.
For the communist question most communist countries were more equal then the capitalist countries before the cold war ended. They were poorer, that’s partially due to inefficiency, but also due to the fact that most of them developed later then the capitalist countries there often compared to. If you look at one of the last hold puts in Cuba it could be argued that the quality of life for the poorest there is better then the poorest in the u.s. as they have better access to food, housing and healthcare. I’m not going to defend the oppressive political regimes of those countries, but the standard of living wasn’t as bad as a lot of people make it out to be.
Could you explain what financial risk is still there if you make an LLC? My understanding was the whole point of an LLC was to guard someone’s personal assets from risk if the company goes under.
Oh so now you need a group of people to decide they want to start a business and take out a loan? So right there we’ve now eliminated small businesses run by a sole trader, yay? So now you need a bunch of people to all put their livelihoods on the line, and as soon as they hire more employees their share of the co-op is diluted while their loan portion is not. Again - yay?
So if one of the original starters quits or is fired from their job, what happens? What happens to their part of the loan? Do they get a payout when they leave? If not, again, why would they ever take the risk?
For the communist question
So there are no communist countries that exist where everyone is equally wealthy and there is no poor underclass and no super rich upper class rulers? That’s what it sounds like to me. Hmmm, I wonder why communism has failed literally every time it has been attempted? But I’m sure this time communism would work, right? The others just didn’t do it right, right?
Could you explain what financial risk is still there if you make an LLC? My understanding was the whole point of an LLC was to guard someone’s personal assets from risk if the company goes under.
You can’t just make an LLC, take out a huge business loan, and then wipe your hands of it if the business the LLC runs goes bankrupt lol.
With a proper UBI and social safety net they’d be raking much less of a risk.
im definitely interested in not collapsing the world financial system, but its a tough problem to find a solution to.
there are other assets besides stocks banks could own - loans would definitely be a much bigger part of the pie.
As for starting a business, itd make sense to only hire on people you trust at first. Afterward you have to continue to show your worth not to investors but to employees.
As an alternative to trust, you could cut your own business a loan, so that if youre ousted as long as it doesnt go tits up you still get a payout.
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.
The stock market shouldn’t exist. Fight me.
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.
Agreed. Like so many things, I think law enforcement can help rein in the stock market. If there were a way to move the SEC under maybe the Fed(?) and require full funding of the agency as the cost of doing business on any stock market in the US (with similar institutions in other countries). Probably a flawed idea, but I think the goal is sensible: remove the SEC from political ambitions and whims and make the market directly fund its regulatory adherence.
Also more people need to suffer severe prison sentences for financial shenanigans. We also need to go back to separate deposit and investment banks.
I’m not saying it is. But everything that offers the chance will be abused. And the way it currently exists, it shouldn’t.
Currently it’s just a massive machine for people with massive money to get more, channel money / misdirect analysis / hide and exploit all others. On paper one might disagree, in reality though…
Investing in the stock market isn’t something exclusive to the rich. For someone like me, it’s pretty much the only realistic way to build any significant wealth for retirement. Without investing, I’d just be losing money to inflation by keeping it in a bank account. Now that I’ve got it invested, I’m already earning enough in returns to cover a few months’ wages each year. It makes no sense to want to take that possibility away from everyone just because you despise billionaires.
I understand and am happy for you that you see a benefit in this for you.
However, I came to the conclusion that it is trivial for those in power to simply fuck you over on occasion. If you’re a small investor and lose, we’ll tough luck you signed up for it. If you’re the bank, oh dear, we need to rescue it! There are various examples of crashes and closures but it really is fine to have a different opinion.
I just wanted to state I am not having mine simply for fun and did quite some research and also worked in a critical financial field once where made up money in a global scale was proven.
As you will also have your background for your opinion. That’s fine!
Fight you?
Brother, I’ve come to join you.
C’mon, surely we can find something to disagree over for some good ‘ol’ leftist infighting.
Maybe if you believe in woo woo shit like crystal healing. 🤣
where is the line between croud funding and a stock?
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.
Stocks are arguably one of the most important inventions in human history. Money/capital are an abstract thing that represents some quantity of anything. It is the universal exchange of value.
What a stock allows you to do is it allows for the collective to pool value to create something that cannot be accomplished by any members individually.
For example imagine ur in a desert with 1000people and your all dying of thirst and it costs 1000currencies to build a well to get water. But the richest person only has 100currencies. Nobody can afford to build a well and now everyone dies. With stocks that means that everyone can put a couple currencies in and in return get a shair of the water.
With ur proposal how in the hell would u build a well? Where do u get the 1000currencies u need to build it?
Their defiantly is an issue with the centralised ownership of capital and workers have no steak in the companies they work at. Their is a very interesting court case related to henry ford where he initially wanted to reinvest into his company and employees but the court rules that the purpose if a company is to make the shareholders happy which meant they got all the money.
Of course the way u fix this is you simply give workers a steak in the company. How you do this is difficult. One way would be to force everyone to be paid a certain percentage of their paycheck extra that they must have in a stocks for the company. Essentially all companies are giving everyone an pay rise but they get paid in the companies stocks. But if u do this everyone will just sell those stocks so u make it an account they cannot just spend until they retire but if ur gonna do this then ur gonna want to put it into a good index fund. And would u look at that u just reinvented Australian super funds. The Australian people through super funds own about 30% of the Australian stocks as well as a decent amount of international stocks. This is why Australians are so rich per capita, this also gives Australian government so much international leverage via directing where this capital goes. Australian super is about to die due to some bullshit new tax on unrealised gains in super so our country will collapse in 30years from that but that’s not really relevant.
The real issue is that trading is the most gate kept thing in the world. The only reason banks exist at all is because they get a good interest rate from the federal reserve give out slightly shitter interest rates to everyone else and pocket the difference. To trade on an exchange u gotta pay ridiculous fees that are not subject to free market competition cos legal shenanigans.
That’s not to mention private equity meaning the public can’t buy into something they believe in when its new and undervalued cos they literally can’t.
The real solution is to make it all open and free for everyone. A decentralised unrestricted free market of trade would be the great leveller. The advantages of the billionaires would be stripped away from them the market value of stocks would stabilise to represent their true value.
And now we are entering into conspiracy land so put on ur tinfoil hats. Their is a system that would have decentralised and equalised capital and that would have been to issue an nft that literally was the stock/asset that could be used to back a loan in a smart contract. Unfortunately nfts where adopted by some Nazis pushing monkeys that somehow mysteriously got into the mainstream via traditional celebrities known to push pro us government takes. Then it all fell down and died in the eyes of the average person completely poisoning the idea for perpetuity. I suspect crypto was purposely poisoned by billionaires and the us government as it threatened the USD as the international reserve currency (one of the only things that motivates the us to go to war) and threatened to remove the systematic advantage of the billionaire class.
For example imagine ur in a desert with 1000people and your all dying of thirst and it costs 1000currencies to build a well to get water. But the richest person only has 100currencies. Nobody can afford to build a well and now everyone dies. With stocks that means that everyone can put a couple currencies in and in return get a shair of the water.
With ur proposal how in the hell would u build a well? Where do u get the 1000currencies u need to build it?
Functioning governments exist to help manage pooled resources.
So the state is responsible for everything sounds a lot like communism. We have seen how effective communism is throughout history I’d much prefer our current system to that.
It is literally our current system where we pool taxes to pay for large projects like parks and sidewalks and plazas and public fountains and water utilities.
All the capatalist and socialist countries do it.
Yeah but ur proposing the removal of all private equity so the government is responsible for everything ie communism. My point still stands.
Plus if the government does everything what incentive is there for anyone to improve anything, or to innovate? In our current system if anyone has an idea and can sell it to someone with equity they can go build it and get rich.
People can work together without requiring stocks or formal governments. The ‘government doing everything’ requires citizen involvement, which would be spread among the community when centralized wealth isn’t overriding public influence. There are a ton of government agencies that improve things and innovate, have you not heard of the Large Hadron Collider that was built by the European Space Agency (ESA) and European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) which are both government agencies? NASA and other government agencies pioneered manned space flight. Government agencies improve and innovate all the time!
Honestly, the stock market is the real issue with stocks. The idea that people should get rich is another detriment to society, because accumulation of wealth to have wealth leads to negative outcomes.
OK so let’s say a bunch of people decide to work together without stocks or formal government. Each of these people can provide a certain amount of “critical resource” but each person only has so much and some more than others. So these people working together decide that they all put in what they can and whatever they build together will be distributed among the people according to how much “critical resource” they put in. Congratulations u have reinvented stocks.
The ‘government doing everything’ requires citizen involvement, which would be spread among the community when centralized wealth isn’t overriding public influence.
What are u saying here? The government dictates what the people do to achieve some outcome dictated by the government? That’s literally how the soviet union was run.
I’m not denying the government cannot do things (if they couldn’t why would they exist) just that the free market optimises and improves. For example the cost mass per kg to space.
SpaceX Falcon Heavy: Around $1,500 per kg. SpaceX Falcon 9: Approximately $2,720 per kg. NASA Space Shuttle (retired): $54,500 per kg. NASA Vanguard (early rocket): $1,000,000 per kg.
Who did it better?
But ur idea is also fundamentally flawed from a logical point as well. The ingenuity and creative problem solving capacity of the entire population is far greater than that of some inner circle of party members. Government agencies improve and innovate until some private company comes along optimises and improves till it is a market viable solution.
Ownership implies control of it if u own it you control it and thus can sell it hence a marketplace. Having wealth isn’t about having the wealth its about what u can do with the wealth. If u don’t get rich off doing something innovative what’s the point? For the good of the peoole? If it has no material benefit to you why do it? This is the foundational reason the USSR collapsed Ohh and all the starving dead people cos the government solutions where overpriced uncompetitive and not subject to free market pressures.
I do need to ask are you intentionally saying some of the dumbest shit I ever heard to troll or do u genuinely believe that communism would work? Please read a critical thinking book, a history book, an economics book, and a phycology book. Then u will understand how utterly untenable these ideas are.
Who did it better?
NASA did all the work to establish the concept of space flight. NASA is also held to more stringent safety requirements because they are a government agency, which drives up costs. NASA blowing up a rocket on takeoff is seen differently than a private company, which just costs more. Same as medical equipment vs similar non-medical equipment, getting from 99.99% reliable to 99.9999% is a cost multiplier.
Not to mention the cost to send stuff to space via private companies is subsidized by investors. It is a made up number, like all the cab 2.0 company pricing when they first started ignoring laws that applied to cabs.
It isn’t more efficient to do everything privately. It just looks that way if you ignore all the government funded research and investments hiding costs.
Also I’m not talking about communism. I’m just talking about government vs private, and if you can’t wrap your head around that then call it socialist.
Had to read twice. My gut reaction was “Getting rid of socks? Why, you monster? Blisters and smelly shoes everywhere!”
Just like the kid who asserts that socks are a social construct.
