I was really excited I got an email whose subject line was that I'd been accidentally underpaid due to a pay world error

I turned out I got an extra 61 cents coming my way

In total across three pp

And go buy some gum

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Weeds on the Vox Media Podcast Network on Matthew Iglesias. You're with Darryl Lind and Ezra Klein. We're going to talk today about co-determination, about capitalism. It's exciting. About the varieties of capitalism. I'm pumped.

And our inspiration is Elizabeth Warren last week did a new bill that she introduced. She calls it the Accountable Capitalism Act. This has a few different kind of moving points to it. But the main idea is she wants to say

Companies that have over a billion dollars in revenue. She wants to say that they should get a special federal charter of incorporation. And that this charter should do a few things. One is that it should specifically instruct directors that they should consider all stakeholders in a business enterprise customers employees communities in which they operate and not just the shareholders.

And then this is going to be made real by the fact that workers at the company will be able to elect 40% of the members of the board. Then she has some other provisions related to stock buybacks that I think are a little less interesting for our purposes. But also that she wants to say that the federal government can apply kind of like corporate death sentence and like yank the charter of a company that breaks the rules in sort of egregious ways.

And there's this corporate political activity provision where 75% of the shareholders and board members would have to authorize corporations spending much money on politics.

And in that case, because 40% of the board members would be elected by workers, you would need a kind of consensus inside the firm. And this is actually the area where I think you can draw like the sharpest conclusion as to what the result of this would be.

And it's that for I think businesses could still engage in fairly extensive political activity under that rule, but it would have to be pretty narrowly related to the industry that they are operating in right.

So like at a coal company, probably both the owners of the coal company and the people who work at the coal company want regulations that allow power plants to consume a lot of coal.

But a lot of the things that businesses do in the political world, at least they strike me as kind of like generic like what do rich business executives like, you know, sort of as a class lobbying for corporate tax cuts, things like that, which would be harder to do here.

So I think that that is probably true, but I think the reason that it's true isn't quite what you're saying. I mean, we have seen cases in the past of, you know, illegal or borderline legal coercion as we approach election days from like franchise owners of like fast food restaurants telling their workers.

The Republican is going to be better for you, essentially with the argument that because the under a Republican, the owner of the business will like not have to work it as much in taxes that like that will, you know, essentially trickle down to the workers or that will result in more business investment.

What that is to say is that business owners are telling their workers the same story about why the current system exists that a lot of economists tell, which is that it's important to have firm autonomy because that results in more business investment and more innovation and one of the interesting things I've seen about the debate around war and proposal is that we've kind of seen some holes in that narrative, right?

The idea, it appears to be a nice story that doesn't actually result in the kind of rising tide lifting all boats that the supporters of unfettered capitalism would lead you to believe.

So I'd like to zoom out here because if you read the commentary on this, Matt, you had a great piece. I believe it was titled Elizabeth Warren's plan to save American capitalism.

Yeah, then there are a bunch of pieces at the National Review and at reason and at right wing publications that tended to be titled something along the lines of Elizabeth Warren's plan to destroy American capitalism, Elizabeth Warren's corporate catastrophe plan.

All of them seem to be revolving first and foremost around two questions.

One is, is there a problem in American capitalism to begin with?

And the second is, if there is, then this charter, what does this charter actually do? Like how would it change away corporations or governed?

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