So let’s talk about crowdinvesting instead.

Crowdinvesting is a lot like crowdfunding, but instead of getting cool swag or privs or whatever, you get a return on investment (ROI) just like folks used to get from stocks.

Back then, we called them dividends. They consisted of money given to shareholders just for holding shares. It was, believe or not, supposed to be the entire reason to own a stock in the first place. In theory, the whole corporation was devoted to generating profit to give to their shareholders in the form of dividends.

But then the jackals and hyenas of speculation took over and all people cared about was whether they would be able to sell the stock for a higher price at a later date.

The Internet made this effect exponentially worse because now, the stock market rules, and to it, a stock is just a name and a price. This has allowed the parasites who run these companies to turn profits into bonuses and other graft for themselves. Without the pressure from the stockholders to issue dividends, it all goes to line the pockets of the CEO and his cronies, and with that kind of money (and that kind of incentive to screw the workers and everyone else to get every penny they can for themselves), corruption becomes not merely acceptable, and not only rampant, it corrupts the entire system to the point where people can’t even imagine anything different.

And all the time, these mealy mouthed bastards justify every sociopathic atrocity they commit by saying they have a fiduciary responsibility to generate the most profits they possibly can for the shareholders.

All the while knowing that they have compromised the system to such a degree that the shareholders know nothing, get nothing, can do nothing, and don’t even have to be consulted before major decisions like mergers.

Can you believe that stockholders actually got a vote on what corporations did? Companies lived in fear of pissing off the stockholders because those stockholders could hold a meeting and fire the entire board of directors if they had a mind to do it?

These days, the shareholders couldn’t get a stockboy demoted.

So clearly, something new is needed, to get the people back into the corporate world. The old system is too corrupt to save. Too many people with too much money benefit from this very clearly and openly rigged system to change it with anything short of a coup.

The answer, I content,. is crowdinvesting, and it would work like this.

Say a company wants to raise capital. They need 100,000 in order to do a much needed expansion. But they don’t want to issue shares. They want crowdinvesting.

So they would put up the $100K on, what the heck, crowdinvesting.com and people would be able to contribute as much or as little as they wanted, and in return, they would get a piece of the profits of the company in exact proportion to the percent of the investment target they invested.

That sounds complicated but it really isn’t. Say someone invested $10K in our fictional corporation’s funding bid. That’s ten percent of the total offering, so that would entitle them to ten percent of the company’s profits for the term of the offering.

The term would be part of the offering. So our fictional company’s 100K would give the investor their percentage of the profits from their point of investment till, say, two years later. Fair’s fair, after all.

In fact, it might be limited by total payout instead of by time. In that system, once the investor has gotten a certain return on investment  – say double their money back – their investment would expire.

Or triple, or 4,3X, or if it was a more charitable type concern, perhaps people would be willing to invest simply to get their money back, like in micro-lending.

The beauty of this system is that these investments would be non-transferrable. Thus, they would be entirely independent of the stock market and all its slavering speculators. Our 10 percent investor would be the only one who could benefit from that investment. That may seem harsh and it certainly goes against the basic grain of a mercantile consumerist culture where anything you have, you can sell.

But it’s necessary in order to protect this unique and stabilizing form of investment from the whims and follies of the speculator class.

And because it works in a (relatively) simple mathematical formula, absolutely anybody can afford to invest. You could invest a penny if you really felt like it. Payback would be proportional, of course, but for someone with only $20 to invest, having it paid back double or triple or whatever could make a huge difference to their lives.

The best part is that it keeps investors involved with the actual company. How that company does relates directly to their return on investment, and that incentivizes potential investors to look for investment opportunities in solid companies with good business plans and some idea WTF they are doing.

That, in turn, will incentivize companies to be that kind of corporation. That will have a massive stabilizing effect on the economy. The right practices will attract the most money, and the economy as a whole will be far less volatile.

As for the management of the company, they will be free of the corrupting influence of having too much power over too much money. All profits go out the door to the investor as soon as they are made, and the management of the company has little or no say in it.

They are truly just there to run the company. The tail shall no longer wag the dog.

Hmmm. I know I had one more selling point and it was a good one, but I have forgotten it. Oh well. It will come to me eventually.

I know this whole deal is pretty dry and dull to most people. But we cannot, as liberals, afford to leave important decisions in the hands of dry and dull people simply because we are unwilling to deal with dry and dull things.

And honestly, all our liberal goals will be served if we simply reform the way business is done and bring the business world into the world of law and order with the rest of us.

The answers we seek lie in the world of numbers and math, and we betray our ideals if we do not listen to those who speak their language.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.