Commons Trustees

Peter Barnes: Capitalism 3.0 — Chapter 3: The Limits of Government (pages 33-48)

Does this mean there’s no hope? I don’t think so. The window of opportunity is small, but not nonexistent. Throughout American history, anticorporate forces have come to power once or twice per century. In the nineteenth century, we had the eras of Jackson and Lincoln; in the twentieth century, those of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt. Twenty-first century equivalents will, I’m sure, arise. It may take a calamity of some sort — another war, a depression, or an ecological disaster — to trigger the next anticorporate ascendancy, but sooner or later it will come. Our job is to be ready when it comes.

What constitutes readiness? Three things, I believe.

• First, we must have a proper view of government’s role. That role isn’t to run the economy, or even to manage the commons directly; it’s to assign common property rights to trustworthy guardians who will.
• Second, we must have a plan to fix our economic operating system, not just to put patches on symptoms.
• And third, we must recognize that the duration of any anticorporate ascendancy will be brief, and that we must use that small window to build institutions that outlast it.

Laws, regulations, and taxes are easily rescinded or weakened when corporations don’t like them. Property rights, by contrast, tend to endure, as do institutions that own them. So we should focus on creating such institutions and endowing them with permanent property rights.

Make no mistake: it will take more than a few wand strokes to bring capitalism into harmony with nature and the human psyche. This is a thirty- to fifty-year project. During this time, we must be locked on a steady course. For this reason, I wouldn’t place much faith in slim and fickle majorities in Congress. As we’ll see, I would place it in the hands of commons trustees, empowered with property rights and bound as much as humanly possible to generations hence. ... read the whole chapter