RE: OWNERSHIP: Trying to get back to ideas...

["Ed Dodson" <ejdodson@comcast.net>]

Ed Dodson responding...
John Medaille wrote:

This leads us, or at least it leads me, to the conclusion that any real
change in economic power relationships must involve some form of
expropriation. For example, if we look at the redistribution of land in
Taiwan, we find that it was a forced sale at below market rates. In other
words, a partial compensation and a partial expropriation. And that's what
it will always have to be if relationships  are really to change. ESOPs can
work if there is a "willing" expropriation; that is, if the current owners
are willing for altruistic motives to dilute their own ownership and not
insist on a market price. But if they get the market price, the sum of
power relationships in the society will not change. They may change within
one company, but only by giving the current owners power (cash) to worsen
them in some other company.

Ed Dodson here:
There are some within the top group of wealth holders who realize that much
of their gains are unearned (and generated to a significant extent from
"rent-seeking" opportunities created by privilege under law). Take, for
example, the involvement of William Gates, Sr. in the United for a Fair
Economy campaign to strengthen the estate tax rather than eliminate it. Yet,
Gates Sr. and those who support the estate tax objectives are a minority.
Our society employs an army of tax attorneys and tax accountants whose
livelihoods are dependent upon complexity and inequity. There are no more
powerful lobbying groups than these two; and, of course, the overwhelming
majority of our elected "representatives" come to the state capitals and to
the District of Columbia after working for law firms and a track record of
success in getting the law to serve their clients. There work is not about
justice; it is about manipulating law and bureaucratic process for immediate
personal advantage. Call me a cynic, but ...



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