Workers Of The World - Just Buy Stock in the Companies You Work For!
by RICHARD BRODIE
October 13, 2011
Has it ever occurred to a single “poor, exploited” worker or to a single socialist or Marxist, sick with loathing of the hated capitalist, that by simply taking a few minutes to open a brokerage account and buy a few shares of stock of the company he is working for he becomes part owner of that company?! Can such a basic truth have eluded whole nations of angry revolutionaries? Has such a simple thought slipped by generation after generation of capitalist-loathing leftists? Apparently it has.
For not only do stock markets, which have existed for centuries, offer the opportunity for every worker to nearly instantly become part owner of the company he is working for, but, even better, they allow the worker to become part owner of any company that is publically traded! He can even become part owner of a whole coterie of companies! In this way the worker can profit not only through the wages of his labor but also through dividends and capital gains as part owner of his company or companies. At stockholder’s meetings the worker as part owner can theoretically even have a say, however minor, in how his company is run. Historically the idea of stock ownership by workers is not new, as many wise American companies have given stock bonuses or paid part of their workers’ wages with shares of stock, with a resultant huge boost in worker loyalty and in the quality of employer-employee relations.
Why in God’s name did that disgruntled misfit Karl Marx have to urge world revolution with his “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!” Why didn’t he just say, “Workers of the world, stop whining! Just go out and buy some stock and become both workers and business owners, i.e., capitalists at the same time!” Think how many untold millions of lives would have been spared, and how many more untold millions of lives would have been spent in happiness rather than in a misery of resentment and envy.
This obliviousness to the simple options that life presents confirms to me something I have long thought. Namely, that although the average human being may be fairly intelligent, his capacity for independent thinking and for being able to see “the broader picture” is next to nil. Having grown up in a liberal environment and having gone to UC Berkeley, and also having lived in western Europe for five years (France, Holland, and Sweden), I am extremely well acquainted with the leftist mindset. And I must say that in no other environment have I encountered such blind and intolerant absolutist thinking. And let us not even talk about self-righteousness! Even the world’s major religions, with the notable exception of Islam, tolerate at least a certain degree of doubt among their members as to the validity of their doctrines. By contrast, socialist states, like Islam, do not entertain any such freedom of thought whatsoever. In the more totalitarian socialist states, most of whom have enslaved their workers, “doubters” or “non-believers” have been murdered: at least twenty million in the former Soviet Union and seventy million in Maoist China. Even in the mildest of democratically socialist states such as the countries of Western Europe the schools, universities, and radio and television stations are all owned and controlled by the government, with the few “right-wingers” in those countries tending to be socially ostracized.
Which brings us to the Occupy-Wall-Street demonstrations that are going on in America today. In the few outlets of the news media that air an honest cross-section of interviews (e.g., Fox News, talk radio, GBTV), the participants interviewed with few exceptions are not disgruntled workers at all, but are instead willfully unemployed, rambling miscreants and welfare freaks who have no intention of ever working at anything. In so behaving they manifest a direct spiritual lineage to the Hippies of the 1960s. But it would be a big mistake to dismiss the movement as this and nothing else. As history has so often demonstrated, more likely these losers are being used as “useful idiots” by much larger and more sinister totalitarian powers such as worldwide socialism and Marxism, powers that are increasingly allying themselves with radical Islam with the goal of bringing down their common enemy, the anti-totalitarian United States. The very fact that the demonstrators are demonstrating against Wall Street, the very vehicle that allows workers or any individual to participate in the ownership of big business, clearly suggests that the forces behind the demonstrators don’t have workers’ interests in mind at all, but rather some larger, far more sinister goals.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributor Richard Brodie graduated with a B.A. in English from UC Berkeley. For most of his life since then he has been a freelance artist and writer.
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