The Seller’s Last Question: What Happens to the Employees?
Reference code: C26-05 La-Z-Boy, Foreign Competition, and the Succession-Planning Case for a CCE When the owner of a successful manufacturing company begins planning for succession, the discussion quickly acquires its own vocabulary. The advisers speak of valuation, financing, taxes, representations, indemnities, working capital, and the quality of the prospective buyer. Those questions matter. A seller […]
Why Commons Capitalism Matters
Why Commons Capitalism Matters Commons Capitalism is not important merely because it is non-confiscatory and non-cohort-limited. It is important because those features may make Commons Capitalism capable of doing what most alternative enterprise systems cannot: correct or ameliorate capitalism’s largest structural defects — concentrated wealth accumulation and the reduced distribution of enterprise wealth to workers […]
Calvinism, Capitalism, and Commons Capitalism: Moral Legitimacy, Surplus, and the Politics of Accumulation
Reference code: C26-02 One of the most important historical contributions of Calvinism to capitalism was not merely economic discipline or work ethic. The deeper contribution was moral legitimacy. Calvinist moral psychology helped construct a framework through which private accumulation could be understood not only as lawful, but as morally justified. That distinction matters because markets alone […]
Why Commons Capitalism Took So Long to Emerge
Reference code: C26-01 Most people assume that, if an idea is sound, someone would have built it already. Commons Capitalism invites that assumption because the core concept is simple: keep markets and competition, but forbid private capture of surplus. If that is all it is, why did it not show up decades ago, fully formed, […]
A Keynesian Critique of Commons Capitalism
Reference code: C25-20 Why Keynes Would Pay Attention John Maynard Keynes would not have approached Commons Capitalism as a moral manifesto. He would have approached it as a machine: Does it keep employment high, keep investment steady, and keep the economy from falling into avoidable slumps? From that angle, Commons Capitalism is immediately interesting because […]
Polycentric Governance Tends to Outperform Traditional Capitalist Governance
Reference code: C25-16 The Concentrated-Power Problem in Traditional Capitalism In a conventional capitalist firm, economic authority tends to collapse into a single dominant center even when the org chart looks more complex. Shareholders (or the capital markets that discipline them) set the value target, the board sets the strategic frame, and senior management controls the […]
How Reserves and Funds Protect Workers in a Downturn
Reference code: C25-15 This commentary is one of a two-part set of commentaries that examines worker precarity in down economies. What “Reserves and Funds” Mean in Practice Reserves and internal funds reduce precarity only when they operate as pre-positioned commitments rather than discretionary gestures. The practical question is not whether the system has money. The […]
Durable Worker Security in Economic Downturns
Reference code: C25-14 This commentary is one of a two-part set of commentaries that examines worker precarity in down economies. Why Downturns Turn Jobs into Precarity Economic downturns translate quickly into worker precarity because the employment relationship in the United States is often the gateway to stability rather than merely a source of wages. The […]
The Problem of Captured Surplus
Why A Commons-Based Enterprise Model Is Needed Now Reference code: C25-13 Historical Drift of the Postwar Social Contract In the decades after the Second World War, households in the United States could reasonably expect that diligent work would translate into stability, modest upward mobility and some measure of shared prosperity. Productivity growth, wage growth and […]
Projected Reach of Commons Enterprises in the United States
Reference code: C25-12 Recent data from the Federal Reserve and related analyses show just how concentrated wealth has become in the United States. The Federal Reserve’s Distributional Financial Accounts, summarized in a June 2025 article from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, report that the top 10 percent of households hold about 67.2 percent […]