Gitarcarver,
it was actually unions I was thinking of when I mentioned companies being raped and pillaged into bankruptcy by their stockholders. I lived thru the destruction of the health car provider with a car company attached. Certainly that wasn’t the only reason the company went under – structural failings pervaded the business, but Unions had a lot to do with their unsustainable cost structure and their inflexibility, and their stock voting block gave them substantial influence over long term strategic decisions.

Sorry I was less than clear in that passing reference.

Where would they get the money to buy the stock?

As CarLitGuy says, you have a tremendous lack of faith in the worker and believe that you, people of your ilk, and the government are the only ones that can tell them what is in their best interests.

As you keep reminding us, there is another player in this game as well: UNIONS.

Why shouldn’t unions be able to purchase stock? With the amount of money coming in from forced dues, can’t the union by stock in the name of their members?

At least then the unions would have actual skin in the game.

History is also littered with the corpses of companies who have gone bankrupt where they were raped and pillaged by the stockholders.

And your point?

For every company you can point to, I can point to one where the company was raped and pillaged and forced to close because of union demands to the point where the company no longer could survive in the market.

“Where would they get the money to buy the stock? ”

My father was a union meter reader fro a publicly traded Electric utility. Part of his compensation package was stock options.

They could buy stock with their wages?

I refuse to believe that “labor” as you would have it is flat broke, completely without purchasing power, stupid, uneducated, and in all other ways unable to look out for their individual interests as employees, completely dependent on the State to protect them. Granted, some will individuals will be better at looking out for their own interests than others, just as some employers will be better than others – but I’m not so paternalistic as to set myself up as a god looking out for them for “their own good”. Somehow, I doubt you have the skill set either. All I hear from you, generally, is “more more more”, its never enough…

Treat employees like human beings, they may surprise you.

Carlitguy,

Where would they get the money to buy the stock?

History is also littered with the corpses of companies who have gone bankrupt where they were raped and pillaged by the stockholders. Also Ponzi schemes.

I do agree that there is no easy solution.

“Minimum wage laws do nothing to correct either the information/power imbalance or the problem of business owners who would deliberately cheat their workers.”

True enough. But because there is an information/power imbalance, perhaps we should think about ways to put both sides of the market on equal footing.

As for stealing for laborers, you keep hearing about it at the lower end of the wage scale. If you have 1,000 workers, saving $10/worker per day is kind of lucrative. What I hear about is anecdotal. It seems to me to be pervasive. However, that may just be my sources.

It is the result of an inefficient market. In your view, labor is too stupid to be entrusted with their own well being, and need the State to swoop in and protect them from themselves. Given that the State is in part responsible for some of the perversions in the marketplace that protect certain companies from meaningful competition, and given the history of State controlled production generally, I’m not so trusting of “the System” to do as you propose. In the State’s hands, the power to protect is often the power to destroy, and that is how the few most often put it to use – for their own benefit, of course.

Allan,
achieving your worker’s paradise seems easy. All they need to do is buy stock in the companies they work for. By keeping the stock closely held, they have nothing but their long term sustainability and profitability to concern themselves with, thus avoiding the short term profit taking of some of the larger traders. As well, as shareholders, they’d have a say in executive compensation, and potentially, their own. Of course, history is littered with the corpses of companies whose shareholding employees bankrupted their employers. It look an awful lot like public unions bankrupting the political entities they work for – when you bargain with yourself, short term gains tend to come to the fore.

There doesn’t seem to be an easy solution – inequality is the natural state of mankind, and every system yet tried to combat it seems to be quickly corrupted for the benefit of the very few. Capitalism, at least, is honest enough to try and encourage greed and self enrichment for the benefit of society as a whole. The alternative theories out there, mostly shades of Socialism, seem to pretend man is some benevolent being, and tend to rapidly collapse into some form of central planning run by dictators, oligarchs, or the like.

“18th to 20th centuries…” You are still way off.

The New Deal is entirely a product of FDR from the Great Depression in the 1930s. There were no living 18th century industrialists to oppose it..

“The object should be to make the industrialists richer. I believe that is best achieved by having a robust middle class”

Of course none of the economic policies you support are capable of either creating or preserving a robust middle class.

“The problem is the unscrupulous who steal from their laborers. And, yes, they are out there. ”

Yes, they are, However:

1. I do not believe that they are even half as common as you think they are, and I rather doubt that you can produce any evidence to support any claim that such unscrupulous business owners are that common.

2. Minimum wage laws do nothing to correct either the information/power imbalance or the problem of business owners who would deliberately cheat their workers.