Give wage-earners a stake in the system.

The same as American society as a whole, Halstead and Lind are also obsessed by what we can call the "stock market myth":

What would be the twenty-first-century American equivalent of the Homestead Act of the nineteenth, and the home mortgage interest deduction of the twentieth? Both were tremendously successful in democratizing access to economic wealth and opportunity, and both did so by broadening ownership of assets in the form of real estate. In the Information Age, however, it is the ownership of financial assets that most needs to be broadened. Those who have benefited disproportionately from the new economy are those with significant assets in the financial markets, not those who derive their income solely from wages. The most obvious solution for lifting all boats in the new economy is to turn all Americans into owners of financial capital. In the twentieth century, public policy cushioned wage earners against shocks from the economy. In the twenty-first century, public policy should go one step further, and give all wage earners a stake in the system.

(Halstead & Lind: pp. 98-99).

First of all, I find it quite interesting that the same people who criticized the concept of self-management that became popular among leftists in the 1960s are now proposing... well, a limited form of the very same idea. Or, to be more precise, self-management without the power. Actually, what they propose is more like sharing part of the workers' rents with the company in the form of purchases of stock (for that is what it amounts to in the end, let's be clear) without having any say whatsoever in the way the companies are run.

Who hasn't heard these wonderful speeches about how capitalism is becoming "more democratic" as of late because more and more Americans invest in the stock market? And how about the idea that companies themselves are far more scrutinized today because there are more stock holders who, supposedly, keep a close eye on the top executives? Let's be real. The vast majority of companies are still under the control of a bunch of capital owners. And, to make matters worse, the stock holders meetings are pretty much useless. Most of the decisions are made, as in politics, behind the curtains and by those who hold the higher stakes. It's not how many Americans hold stocks that matters, but rather the percentage of stocks that they hold that matters. Obviously, that little detail is ignored in the wonderful rah-rah rhetoric.

To put it a different way, it sounds to me as if Halstead and Lind have drunk the Cool-Aid of the stock market speculation that has been raging through the financial markets during the last twenty or thirty years. They have come to believe that the current state of affairs truly is normal.