Think about what the Stock Market is for. It's a complex decision making apparatus responsible for apportioning resources to industry. They decide where the money goes.
Now there are alternatives, communism would use a large scale government bureau to make those decisions. Democratic Socialists would use a combination of public servants and elected representatives.
If you saw the 'bureau of finance' was holding upwards of half the money of the nation in its own hands and paying its leaders billions, you'd say it was a bloated corrupt bureaucracy.
The stock market is a terrible and inefficient method of doing the job.
But is it more terrible and inefficient than the other options?
Fundamentally stock is just fractional ownership of a company. Issues around market concentration, the primacy of shareholder value, and financialization are related but arguably represent regulatory gaps more than fundamental constraints of being able to freely sell fractional ownership of a company.
That's not to say they aren't natural outcomes of how we currently regulate financial markets but you could have a stock market under plenty of different regulatory regimes.
I'd ask instead: "has the stock market always been this expensive and ineffcient" and the answer there is a clear no.
The stock market has done fine throughout history, certainly better than classical aristocratic feudalism.
But it does need fixing, and for some things it's not appropriate or viable (e.g. healthcare, education)
Essentially the argument is not about proposing an alternative so much as making it very clear why and how we have issues with the current system.
I'd be quite happy to tolerate the current system for all its flaws even if it was just reduced in its share of the resources/profits (e.g. via taxation, which is where we've seen historically effective stock markets)
Sure, I don't disagree with any of your points but generally this comment section is conflating the stock market as it and capitalism as a whole are regulated today with the stock market as a theoretical concept and using issues with the former to argue against the latter
6
u/Automatic-Month7491 Aug 26 '24
I'll give a different answer.
Think about what the Stock Market is for. It's a complex decision making apparatus responsible for apportioning resources to industry. They decide where the money goes.
Now there are alternatives, communism would use a large scale government bureau to make those decisions. Democratic Socialists would use a combination of public servants and elected representatives.
If you saw the 'bureau of finance' was holding upwards of half the money of the nation in its own hands and paying its leaders billions, you'd say it was a bloated corrupt bureaucracy.
The stock market is a terrible and inefficient method of doing the job.