What if we got rid of stocks?

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I was also wondering if this is a continuation of the socks as a social construct thread.

Unlike you, however, I don't consider the idea to be "hippy shit" at all. In fact, I've often thought that we might be better off without corporations. Entrepreneurship is what we need, not impersonal investment.

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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.

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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.

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I wish I could live the rest of my days without socks.

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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.

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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.

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Mutual funds....you probably own some and definitely someone you know also has mutual funds that probably own those stocks too...but I like the thought and see potential.

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NASA did a lot of work no doubt they then made all that work public for the private sector to iterate on and improve and bring to market. Eg the accelerometer in ur phone was a NASA invention but it required someone in a private company to decide to put it in a phone and mass produce it.

NASA isn't held to more stringent safety requirements NASA literally defines the safety requirements which they apply to spacex, and any other space company as well as themselves.

NASA blowing up a rocket on takeoff is seen differently than a private company, which just costs more.

Tell me u know nothing about an iterative development and testing cycle without telling me u know nothing about an iterative development and testing cycle. Spacex falcon 9 is statistically safer than literally every other transport method on earth including walking. Its safer than all NASA rockets. Perhaps them blowing up so many rockets taught them how to not blow up rockets?

Now here's the kicker NASA doesn't actually do that much they design some parts or requirements then let private companies take bids to actually build it.

Independent speculative analysis thinks that the commercial launch fees are enough to cover the rocket price. Not to mention that starlink is a profitable service that is funding most of spacex costs as of now. Plus their are other launch companies that offer similar/cheaper(depending on launch profile) launch costs that due to free market completion will keeps costs far lower than NASA launches.

That's how the government works they fund things with taxes that are distributed to all citizens equally. The citizens then use those things to generate value which is taxed and continues the cycle. Every dollar spent at NASA has a 27x return in terms of GDP from the private sector. Ie NASA spends 1$ and releases research/technology then the public uses that research/technology to generate 27$ of value. I never said it more efficient to do everything privately its just more efficient to do most things privately.

Healthcare is a great example its more efficient for the government to negotiate prices on behalf of everyone then let the public market compete to fill that service requirement. Its called socialised healthcare yet still takes advantage of private institutions competing in a free market to fulfill the collective service requirement. If the government runs everything u get the NHS which has gone to shit and cant afford to service all the people. If the government runs nothing u get the american system where the poor get fucked. If the government performs collective bargaining between the people and the provider u get the Australian system where everyone gets healthcare almost instantly of world class quality. U need both private and public working hand in hand. The governments purpose is to ensure free unrestricted competition between private entities and to negotiate with those private entities on behalf of the people that the government represents. That's how a government works it doesn't build a road it negotiates with a bunch of contractors who are competing with each other and pays the cheapest one to build the road.

U say socialist yet u describe communist. I like the socialist policies my government has free healthcare, good roads, cops, firefighters, national defence etc etc. These things cannot function without leveraging the private capital and competition of the free market.

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I don't, I have no stock portfolio at all. You're probably right there's a lot of bullshit that goes on in the financial world that I would put a pretty swift end to. Hell, "money market" bank accounts and such are probably somehow attached to the stock market.

If I understand correctly, a mutual fund is basically a bunch of people invest in a bunch of stocks managed by a professional stock guesser such that it's almost certainly going to do at least kind of okay. Yeah I'd either outright end that practice or heap a LOT of liability on the stock guesser and a bit on the members.

You invested in a mutual fund, and one of the 60 stocks in the portfolio was Locktheon, and Locktheon just released a chemical weapon killing an entire small town? Your stock broker is now a slave of the state and will die in the mines, you and everyone else who is a member of that mutual fund owe 1000 hours community service each. We're going to have a highway system so clean you can eat off it.

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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.

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I think a more effective idea would be to remove all profits (and maybe executive income and bonuses) from the company for a fixed period of time instead of a fixed fine that's less than the profit from doing the illegal activity.

Investors won't be happy if they're getting nothing, so they'll be more careful with their investments, and no-one will have to pay to house thousands of unwitting investors in prisons.

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You'd need to rollback the last 70 years of pensions being replaced by 401k plans and/or limit responsibility to the brokers. If you hire a licensed plumber that ends up flooding your neighbor's place, the plumber is the one getting sued.

It would probably also be good to restructure retirement incentives away from the stock market, but that's not going to happen overnight either.

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No I think it's going to have to involve large numbers of perforated colons. Consequences should be physical.

Who said we're paying to house prisoners? The US constitution permits enslaving convicted felons. They're all going to the mines. They will WORK or be mutilated.

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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.

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Frankly there are probably a lot of people who need to see their retirements go away and they need to spend their golden years in the mines. They need to have their elderly assholes penised apart for voting for this shit for decades.

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Honestly, I'm on the opposite end of the spectrum. Completely deregulate markets. This would make the stock market a constant churn of volatility and pump and dump schemes. It would gain a reputation for being a scam. People would be forced to once again invest in local businesses where they actually knew something about the owners and the conditions on the ground. Large financial collapses would cease to be a thing, since a small collapse in one city wouldn't affect the next city over

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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.

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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.

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aLl ThE rIsK

The owners are risking their fuck-around money. The workers are risking their shelter.

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Poor people are poor just because they don't know how to participate in the stock market. Fight me.

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What if we got rid of stocks?