What if we got rid of stocks?

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

Why don't you think taxing the super rich is great?

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.

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?

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?

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.

I would be happy of your stocks got a new basis every year. The delta between the old basis an the new basis is ordinary income and you owe taxes based on that income.

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.

I read this as "socks" and thought "What the hippy shit is this?"

Then I realized my error but still wondered the same thing.

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.

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 stock market shouldn't exist. Fight me.

Why not instead have public and/or worker 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.

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.

Our beef supply would vanish overnight

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.

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.

I think you just invented communism?

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.

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.

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.

Had to read twice. My gut reaction was "Getting rid of socks? Why, you monster? Blisters and smelly shoes everywhere!"

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?

I don't get how you can think Taxes aren't the answer but removing stocks are. Billionaires exist because they have a lot of money in some form and are able to reinvest that money to get more money. If you remove stocks, they will find another way to have a lot of money, whether that's owning a lot of business, buying up properties etc. Start applying a sort of wealth tax, disallow financial influence in election (putting actual limits on spending), fix the loophole for passing on wealth to children with little to no tax, etc. There really isn't a simple solution, but a wide range of changes that need to be done in my opinion.

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 have a lot of money.

Upvote for blue-sky thinking.

I would very much like to see this happen.

How about no financial products, period. No loans, no mortgage, only rent-to-own or rent. Obfuscating financial products into more complex combined financial products is half of the economy crashes. Obfuscate the numbers, steal, grab, pillage while no one can understand what the frickel you are doing and BAM: profit on the backs of normies who are tOo dumb to understand what a margin call is or why CDO's are here to violate you. All financial products are a scam waiting in ambush, waiting for another bank-bro to think of a way they can leach from society without giving anything back.

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.

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.

unable to be sold or owned

So what incentive is there to start a company? Who funds it? People are expected to start a company, take all the financial risk, for what exactly?

People being billionaires is not the issue people like to think it is. Public servants becoming millionaires by trading and taking bribes/kickbacks and cushy jobs upon leaving politics is the problem.