No one can earn
a million dollars honestly.
William
Jennings
Bryan, 1860 – 1925,
an
American lawyer, statesman, and politician, three times the Democratic
Party nominee for President of the United States.
The decadent
international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found
ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not
beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn't deliver the
goods.
-----
Capitalism is the
astounding belief that the most wickedest [sic] of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of
everyone.
John Maynard
Keynes, 1883 – 1946,
a British
economist whose ideas, called Keynesian economics, had a
major impact
on modern economic and political theory, as well as on
many
governments’ fiscal policies.
So far, we have noted
many deficiencies in the capitalism which we practice.
The purpose behind such a look is to encourage thought and
action about how to make capitalism work better.
We now begin looking at possible solutions.
One problem with
capitalism is that a shareholder’s understanding of the circumstances of,
as well as sympathy for the privations of, others is debilitated because his
primary motivation is profit and, more often than not, he is far from the
others who are being harmed.
CalPERS, the California
Public Employees’ Retirement System, invests money on behalf of employees.
CalPERS has a reputation for raising the bar of business
responsibility. Yet, CalPERS has
a conflict because one of its goals is to maximize the return on investment.
CalPERS, at best, provides a partial solution;
furthermore, not every investment firm or organization is as
conscientious as CalPERS. As a
result, we periodically have large problems, the latest of which is
happening to homeowners.
Can businesses operate
without shareholders? Startup,
expansion, and modernization are necessary and only in a few instances can
these happen without any investment at all.
So, for the most part, shareholders are needed.
The key question is not “Why shareholders?”, but, rather, “Who
shareholders?”
In that regard, consider
the following, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee-owned_corporation
:
Employee-owned
corporations are corporations owned in whole or in part by their employees.
Employees are usually given a share of the corporation after a certain
length of employment or they can buy shares at any time. A corporation owned
entirely by its employees (a worker cooperative) will not, therefore, have
its shares sold on public stock markets. Employee-owned corporations often
adopt profit sharing where the profits of the corporation are shared with
the employees. They also often have boards of directors elected directly by
the employees. ...
...studies
in Massachusetts, Ohio, and Washington
state show that, on average, employees participating in the main form of
employee ownership, employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), have
considerably more in retirement assets than comparable employees in non-ESOP
firms. The most comprehensive of the studies, a report on all ESOP firms in Washington
state, found that the retirement assets were about three times as great, and
the diversified portion of employee retirement plans was about the same as
the total retirement assets of comparable employees in equivalent non-ESOP
firms. Wages in ESOP firms were also 5% to 12% higher. National data from
Joseph Blasi and Douglas Kruse at
Rutgers
shows that ESOP companies are more successful than comparable firms and,
perhaps as a result, were more likely to offer additional diversified
retirement plans alongside their ESOPs. The data is also available at www.nceo.org.
While ESOPs have
drawbacks, it seems as if, generally, they would be good for employees.
But what about the communities where they are located and the
consumers whom they serve?
March 27, 2008