Public companies and private enterprise
This is far better than making insider dealing a criminal offence (if it is, then so must be insider non-dealing!), which merely serves to incarcerate non-violent people at huge taxpayer expense purely to satisfy macho regulators.
No doubt two “problems" will be raised to rule these wild notions out of court. The first is to parrot that “limited liability" status is a gift from government which needs a quid pro quo. But where’s the gift in a voluntary bargain clearly understood amongst all concerned? The second is a similar argument about tax. But the starting point must be why should a “company", owned by taxpaying shareholders, pay any further tax whatsoever? At the end of the day, however one wraps it up, all tax is paid by individuals.
Fascism as racism is a popular description of the creed of the British National Party – which may well be correct. But the word fascism applies also to a corporate landscape where companies are in “partnership" with government – the latter very much the senior partner. In that sense the UK is already fascist.
So, and increasingly so, is the United States. Indeed in their “Securities Analysis"(1987 edition) one of the classic investments books of all time, Graham and Dodd were able to point to some 75 years of Government-sponsored erosion of shareholder rights, which it called “the euthanasia of the shareholder". Pretty much the same “progress" over the same period, as in the UK. Nowadays, the most important quality of senior business executives is that of a lobbyist – often to promote a monopoly in the relevant industry, or something else that gives executive directors an easy life.
All this is light years away from solving Adam Smith’s “Agency problem" – the separation of ownership and control of a business. How could anyone think that this could be cured by the intervention of another agency – government. And don’t expect, Mr Kleinman, any help from the institutional investors and the major fund managers, both of whom are agents and often PLCs to boot.