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Ownership Discussion |
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[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index] OWNERSHIP: Fwd: The New American Spirit
Hello All, Taking a respite from the warring-of-the-maybe-moderators on this elist, the below exchange occurred recently, initiated by Mike Greaney, which I thought was very interesting, and I wanted to share it with you~~Steve Nieman ============================ Begin forwarded message: From: Michael Greaney <mgreaney@cesj.org> Date: July 11, 2005 12:11:16 PM PDT To: Steve Nieman <stevenieman@mac.com> Cc: thirdway@cesj.org, dbrohawn <DBrohawn@cesj.org> Subject: Re: The New American Spirit Reply-To: mgreaney@cesj.org Dear Steve: As far as I can see, the only thing that's going to work is to convince workers that ownership — real ownership, with the full rights of property — is far more secure than any wage system job. You can fire a worker at virtually no cost (assuming you do it "right," i.e., toss enough dust in people's eyes to obscure what you're doing), but you have to buy out an owner. To get the point across means educating people primarily on what, exactly, property is (and, almost as importantly, what it is not), and why the vote — control — is an integral part of what Belloc called "the restoration of property." The way I see it (and watch out that I don't poke your eye out with my stone tablets as I come down from the mountain), people don't trust ownership via corporate shares for two reasons. One, the only way to make money with corporate shares is to engage in speculation. Most shares, as Kelso pointed out almost half a century ago in The Capitalist Manifesto, don't pay enough in the way of dividends to buy a cheap suit. Speculation is not the foundation of an "ownership society" because the only way to receive an income is to divest yourself of ownership by selling your shares. Two (and much more important), people don't trust corporate shares, per se. They don't trust corporate shares because they don't trust corporations. They don't trust corporations because they don't trust the people hired to run the corporations for the owners. They don't trust them because they don't trust the board of directors who hired them. They don't trust the BoD because they don't trust the people who elected them — the annonymous owners ... who usually don't trust the workers, and the circle begins all over again. So everything has to start all over again at ground level. People aren't ever going to understand property until they own some — we can't wait for people to understand property in order to want it (Chesterton said something about people in former days having respect for property probably because they owned some). Thus, although it was clearly not ideal, framing the ESOP as an employee benefit was probably the most politically feasible way to get the first ESOP legislation through. ("Ownership? Feh. More and higher benefits? .... let's talk.") Unfortunately, the next step has been slowed almost to a standstill — that is, going from the "beneficial ownership" of the ESOP, which allows things like voting as "prudential matter," to direct ownership (through capital homesteading) in which things like voting are inalienable rights. We have a chance to get something done with the social security crisis in concert with Mr. Bush's vague desire for an ownership society (give Norm fifteen minutes with Mr. Bush, though, and I think you'd see some clarity, not to mention action) — not because people think that a direct private property stake is what they want or need, but because it seems like the only thing that will work. Capital homesteading implies a reform of the corporation — a demand for which will grow, particularly with respect to voting and governance in accordance with Justice-Based Management (necessarily ownership-based) as soon as people have specific and definable direct ownership interests in corporations. If they don't get what they want individually, they will organize with others who want the same things — and with a lot of owners, there will be a lot of people interested in corporate reform. If those people are the workers, customers and suppliers of a corporation, they will have a double interest in cleaning things up. None of them will realize until much later that they were carrying out acts of social justice. All they will want is to fix the corporation so they get their rights. In conclusion (as if you didn't already know all of this), any time someone starts grousing about the evil corporation, you can either zing them with a quote from Edmund Burke (one of the few members of the British Parliament who tried to defend the American Revolution) that the only thing necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing (or something like that), or take a page from Norm's book and demand to know what they have that's any better than an ownership union to acquire and protect the rights to and of property. =============================== Steve Nieman wrote: Hi Mike,
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