I'm looking for some really lame super pragmatic minimal market socialism for the sake of giving imagination-gap terminally reform-brained normies a concrete thing they can work with.
Specifically I was looking for something which while maintaining distributed capital markets also gets rid of rewards for nonproductive actors. I didn't exactly find this, but I did find Roerner's Equal Shares proposal this follows:
>Every adult citizen would receive from the state treasury an equal endowment of coupons, that can be used only to purchase shares of mutual funds. Only coupons can be used to purchase shares of mutual funds, not money. Only mutual funds can purchase shares of public firms, using coupons. Prices of corporate shares and mutual funds are, hence, denominated in coupons; they will oscillate depending on the supply and demand for shares. Citizens are free to sell their mutual-fund shares for coupons, and to reinvest the coupons in other mutual funds. Finally, firms may exchange coupons with the state treasury for investment funds, and may purchase coupons from the treasury with money. This is the only point at which coupons exchange for money. These investment funds play the role of equity in the firm. (p. 20)
>A share of a firm entitles the owning mutual fund to a share of the firm's profits, and a share of a mutual fund entitles the owning citizen to a share of the mutual fund's revenues. When a citizen dies, his mutual fund shares must be sold and the coupon revenues are returned to the state treasury. The treasury in turn issues coupon endowments to citizens reaching the age of majority. (p. 20)
Anyway this proposal seemed to get reasonably close to what I was "looking for". I'm still not sure however if it's productive to advertise this sort of thing to others. Is it a useful strategy to build these sort of concrete programs. Further about this plan in particular is it really what anyone is after? Is there an effective even more reform minded solution that still removes rewards for unproductive actors - or at least as this one does makes such rewards equal?
/blog