So if I’m reading this right, he’s basically advocating for a social wealth fund made up of all SOEs? This is a great idea imo. I’ve thought for awhile that social wealth funds would be a relatively easy way to get to collective ownership using the existing framework for private investment, assuming you could get it implemented in the first place. If anyone is curious, this is a proposal for a US social wealth fund that will almost certainly never happen, but it at least does a decent job of explaining them: https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/projects/social-wealth-fund/
I need to read more into it, then. It’s maybe not exactly what I thought it was.
Also:
There are definitely downsides to this. Like it is a socialization of the proceeds of SOEs, but not of the firm itself, and SOEs would be under more pressure to seek profit imo.
If it were a unified fund and people weren’t allowed to buy and sell individual stocks, I’d think there would be much less pressure vs trying to maintain constant growth to appease investors.
Great response, and I share your concern about something like this having the potential to be more profit driven. However, I’d worry much less if there was no speculation at all and just a dividend. I could be wrong, but I don’t think the dividend would be large enough per person, or unstable enough, to lead to public pressure to significantly increase the dividend by increasing profits. You could also set up the dividend to average out and maybe have some sort of reserve, so that way the expectation would be a steady monthly payment that helps augment existing income for people. Also, and again I could be mistaken, but I take it that the SOEs they are discussing are essentially private companies with large state ownership? In that case, it doesn’t seem to me that putting those assets in a fund like that would problems, but I still think the whole point should be the long term collectivization of private assets and not just those owned by the state.
kind of remind me of this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fonds_de_solidarit%C3%A9_FTQ
