Does anyone know if there's a term for structuring a corporation where one person can own no more than a certain percentage of the company?
I believe that the central cause of wealth inequality isn't so much about taxation or regulatory capture etc, as it is about individuals going to great lengths to maintain control of their companies. So someone can be worth a billion dollars with a 51% share but not be able to convert any of those stocks to cash, for fear of losing their power.
That's why they resist even a modest property tax on their stock, while the rest of us must pay property tax on our homes. This is self-evidently unjust and one of the major loopholes which allows the accumulation of extreme wealth while countless millions of people spend the entirety of their lives working to make rent under a negative net worth.
A possible solution to that might be to limit individual ownership to something equitable, say less than 1/3, 1/5 or 1/7 (my preference) of the total.
So a worker-owned cooperative could be thought of as ownership not exceeding 1/N employees.
That would give us a spectrum of possible structures rather than having to choose between the extremes of public and private ownership. Apologies if this concept already exists or is commonplace.
> I believe that the central cause of wealth inequality isn't so much about taxation or regulatory capture etc, as it is about individuals going to great lengths to maintain control of their companies.
I’m not really sure what you’re basing this on? Most of the richest people in the world don’t have controlling ownership of their businesses. Zuckerberg is the most notable exception here, and he took a lot of risks to get there. But companies knocking on trillion dollar valuations that aren’t public and don’t have diluted ownership structures are the exception rather than the rule as far as i can see.
One of the chapters in Radical markets* talks about doing this, but primarily as a means of stopping the anticompetitive actions of active investors like Blackrock, which have an interest in coordinating the actions of their investments.
In a lot of countries it is possible to simply change the way share based voting works.
By default 1 share equals one vote. But quite a few jurisdictions allow companies to define a different voting scheme, allowing to f.e. limit a person's votes to at most 20% of the total amount of votes, regardless of their share ownership.
This of course depends on the jurisdictions in question.
I believe that the central cause of wealth inequality isn't so much about taxation or regulatory capture etc, as it is about individuals going to great lengths to maintain control of their companies. So someone can be worth a billion dollars with a 51% share but not be able to convert any of those stocks to cash, for fear of losing their power.
That's why they resist even a modest property tax on their stock, while the rest of us must pay property tax on our homes. This is self-evidently unjust and one of the major loopholes which allows the accumulation of extreme wealth while countless millions of people spend the entirety of their lives working to make rent under a negative net worth.
A possible solution to that might be to limit individual ownership to something equitable, say less than 1/3, 1/5 or 1/7 (my preference) of the total.
So a worker-owned cooperative could be thought of as ownership not exceeding 1/N employees.
That would give us a spectrum of possible structures rather than having to choose between the extremes of public and private ownership. Apologies if this concept already exists or is commonplace.