What Kinds of Stock Ownership Plans Should There Be? Of ESOPs, Other SOPs and Ownership Societies

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\u27s 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