Your ideas for improving capitalism

A collection of responses to my writing prompt.

Thank you all so much for contributing your ideas to my writing prompt to “Fix Capitalism.” I recommend reading the comments section of that post for all kinds of interesting brainstorming! 👇🏻

Writing Prompt: Fix Capitalism

Here are a few of the ideas proposed (numbered so we can discuss them in the comments!):

1. I made the case for employee ownership and cooperatives

I established a case for employee ownership and cooperatives through five essays:

Mondragon as the new City-State

The Cooperatist Manifesto that inspired Mondragon

Every company should be sold to its employees

Founders will get much richer by exiting to employees

Do we still want the future desired by the past?

2.

Tom McNabb

also wants to guarantee jobs

In addition to employee ownership, Tom wants to guarantee work, even for those just out of high school.

In addition to Jobs for All as a replacement for unemployment insurance, we need to have a program for new graduates… Government start-ups of employee-owned enterprises [that] hire all the new workers graduating from high school.

"Fix Capitalism"

3.

Xavier Macfarlane

thinks we should protect housing like we protect utilities

Make it illegal for Large Corporations (e.g. Blackstone, Blackrock, Vanguard) and foreign parties (non-citizens, foreign counties, but not resident aliens) to create an asset class commodification out of things everyday people need to survive, especially housing.

We already do this with things like utilities to protect the essential services people need, but we allow huge companies to artificially inflate the price and demand for housing, all while have an unfair advantage in home purchasing through access to cash purchasing and lower interest rates due to billion dollar cash flows, vs. the retail interest rates everyday folks have to resort to.

A simple law could make it illegal for Large Corps to purchase residences (under the auspice of anti-trust precident), while still allowing mom-&-pop-type and local-level property management to exist.

4.

Jarrod Baniqued

wants to incentivize pro-social behavior

Here are a just a few of his ideas:

There should be a worldwide climate Superfund, into which the most polluting companies pay; this means it’s more distributionally elegant than a carbon tax. If a company wishes to opt out by investing in carbon capture and storage, they would be required to invest the same amount of money in renewables. This would create a powerful incentive for energy companies to transition from fossil fuels, while still buying down risk for a key technology to reversing climate change.

I’m convinced that replacing multinational corporations such as airlines and shipping companies with a mix of data-driven diplomats and citizens’ assemblies might also work without money, especially in an era of global resource scarcity. Buckminster Fuller had one such template for how this might go.

5.

Stephen Mackintosh

wants to redraw state lines according to environmental resources

Undrawn boundaries for new Western land should follow the lines of watershed boundaries. The idea is that when land is divided up into arbitrary lines, people have no incentive to treat their land as part of a larger ecosystem… No watershed state should be allowed to pull water or energy from another state, except in extreme cases of need.

How to Fix Capitalism

6.

Erskine Hawkins, Jr.

thinks we need to let companies fail

He says depressions and recessions are necessary economic corrections.

We speak of the Great Depression, but we don't connect the economic expansion that occurred afterwards. The depression made the expansion possible by eliminating an over concentration of resources.

Every so often our economy self corrects. This represents the end of a cycle. The stagflation of the 1970s begat the Reagan and Clinton era expansions. 2008 was a cycle end. Our government, protecting the interest of the finance crowd stepped in and blocked the needed correction. This is the issue-we refuse to let capitalism be capitalism. We neutered capitalism or rather George Bush, Barack Obama, and Ben Bernanke neutered capitalism by bailing out AIG.

7.

Joe Cook

thinks capitalism needs the same guardrails governments do

To avoid becoming oligopolies and oligarchies. As he says, “People die, animals die, plants die, but corporations don't die naturally… One idea might be to remove liability protections from corporations after a certain life-cycle is reached, making all officers and employees liable for products and services.”

He gives a few others:

Develop a framework to turn some banking institutions (TOO BIG TO FAIL) into mutual funds rather than leveraged private money creators.

Consider the creation of a public working capital bank for social goods where the profit motive corrupts human dignity. The immediate case for using such a facility could be tested in the healthcare sector, by funding nonprofits that compete to reimagine the delivery of affordable care, including health insurance.

Must the government borrow to get the money to transact for public benefit?… Must the government tax to spend? Constraints must be put on government (smaller is better). But consider a system that taxes land values and transactions (VAT), as opposed to income.

8.

Kevin Kohler

makes an interesting case for sentience rights

We have fixed this for humans, we still haven't fixed it for other animals… the median chicken is worse off in 2024 than in 1924, and there are a lot of chickens.

9.

K.R. Erichsen

says humans need more moral support

I think we'd be better off if we were all assigned a shrink from age 5 onward, or the cultural or relegious equivilent (who pays for these services is a different topic). The role of grandparents, a shaman, priest, mullah or rabbi on how to be a good human beinig living in a socieity with other humans would go a long, long, LOOOONNNNGGG way.

Thank you for contributing your ideas to this writing prompt, and for brainstorming a better future with me!

Elle Griffin