Document Type

Article

Comments

Published in: Cornell Law Review, vol. 92, no. 5 (July 2007).

Abstract

Present-day advocates of an ownership society (OS) do not seem to have noticed the means we have already employed to become an OS where homes and human capital (higher education) are concerned. Nor do they appear to have considered whether these same means - which amount to publicly enhanced private credit markets - might be employed to spread shares in business firms, with a view to completing our OS. This article, the third in a series, seeks tentatively to fill that gap. It does so first by demonstrating how the Employee Stock Ownership Plan, or ESOP, in effect replicates our home and education spreading programs in piecemeal fashion. But piecemeal replication, the article shows, is not sufficient; a completed OS requires complete replication. So the article, second, generalizes from the ESOP along two salient dimensions - what it labels the patronage and credit dimensions - in order both to complete SOP-financing's replication of our federal home- and higher-education finance programs, and with that our OS itself. Our OS is, in effect, a three-legged stool that awaits its third leg.

Date of Authorship for this Version

7-2007

Keywords

Stock ownership plans

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