Who Shall Own America? (Demo)

“For some great purpose of His own, the Creator put into visible nature only the germ of what nature ultimately could do for men, leaving it to man himself, by the application of intelligence and industry, to bring out of the germ the ripened fruit.”

“We reached out for closer touch with the thought and heart of all the world. The breath of the Creator was put upon our lips, so that humanity everywhere came within our lowest whisper.”

“Were I to say that the corporation has monopolized nearly all that the intelligence and industry of man, through the two most fruitful generations of his existence, have created, my meaning would perhaps be misunderstood. I do not wish to be misunderstood. The fact that I wish to lodge in the mind of my readers is this: That utilizing an undoubted right to put into private property, in some form, the creations of the past two generations, the men who have obtained control of those creations have chosen to put them in the form of corporate as distinguished from individual, ownership, and that it is just in this inner fact, the new great fact of our time, — the corporate form given to the new domain of private property and its results on individual proprietorship, — that is to be found the social, the political, and the moral significance of our corporation problem.”

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The property of this country is owned by the many and controlled by the few. That is the essence of the corporation problem as Judge Grosscup showed in his article “Who Shall Own America?” in the December number of this magazine. On that foundation he now begins to build his positive doctrines. Instead of exploiting evils, he calls attention to the seeds of reform already being sown by a few well-managed corporations and shows how the true remedy for the trust problem does not lie in government ownership,but in public control through individual ownership.

— THE EDITORS.

In my article, Who Shall Own America? in the December number of the AMERICAN MAGAZINE, I endeavored to bring out the distinction between the thing called the “corporation” and the “property domain” covered and controlled by corporate ownership — the distinction between the actual property and its mere legal embodiment. To comprehend the national problem that confronts us, the keeping of this distinction in mind is vital. The corporation is no sin in itself. The corporation as the legal method of wielding large masses of individual resources to a common end, has been one of the most helpful agencies of modern life. But the corporation left to do as it pleases — emancipated from all care as to its character and birth, and all watchfulness of its conduct afterwards — is the cause of the great sin that has grown up within the vast property domain covered by corporate ownership.

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The General Thesis behind Capital Homesteading.

Through history, the very basis of the American Republic has been the ownership of the property of the country by individual citizens. They still own the property (?), or most of it, but the control of that property has passed into the hands of a few great corpora-tions, and the corporations which now control that property with complete control will come to own it, with an absolute ownership, unless something is done. The prevailing temper of the people of the United States is to ruin the domain of the corporations which have sought possession of their property. But the real problem before this generation is not how to ruin nor how to injure this new great domain but how to reclaim it honorably. To suggest a solution of the problem is the purpose of this wise and cogent idea called Capital Homesteading of, by and for Every Citizen.

This series of articles (below), articulates the fundamental foundation of thought for the advancement of the ideas behind Capital Homesteading, as they also provided for Employee Stock Ownership Plans and the other works of Louis Kelso (Binary Economics), and is considered a primer for those today pursuing a Just Third Way.

From a 21st century perspective, Grosscup can also be viewed as a visionary of the Just Third Way, a populist who understood the economic basis for the sovereignty of the individual. Readers can see in Grosscup’s words a philophical stream of thought that led to the binary economics of expanded ownership lawyer-economist Louis Kelso. Like Kelso, Judge Grosscup understood the role of the modern corporation in the economic process, and how ownership and governance of the corporation could become monopolized or democratized through its methods of finance. He, like Kelso, also understood the political consequences of direct corporate ownership by the few or by the many.This series of his articles expresses Grosscup’s keen understanding of the connection between powerand property, as well as of the corrupting influence of concentrated power. Grosscup also expresses in his essays the importance of universalizing access to productive capital to every citizen as an essential foundation for a just free market system and an effective political democracy.

(Or we the people can trust the power of the Monopolistic Political system DemGOPs / GOPcrats)

The Beef Trust Enjoined (1903)

How to Save the Corporation (1904)

Who Shall Own America? (1905)

The Rebirth of the Corporation

The Corporation and the People: Are We on the Right Track? (1907)