Ownership Revolution: How Working People are Buying Up Big Business

Introduction

For generations, and especially since the days of the Robber Barons a century ago, we've mostly believed big businesses belong to rich people living in mansions on hills. And, for a time we were mostly right.

But...

There's been a change. A change that makes the anti-corporate credo as dated as the mustaches of the Robber Barons.

You see, we working people - the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker (well, maybe a computer-chip maker rather than candlestick maker) - have been buying up big businesses.

Through our contributions to pension funds, mutual funds, life insurance policies that pay a retirement income and other retirement-savings vehicles, working people are investing as never before in public and private corporations.

As we invest to create retirement incomes, we're also becoming the new owners of more and more corporations. What's more, our pension, mutual, and insurance funds are also becoming a major source of loans to corporations (and governments).

In the process, we're part of an epic transformation, one in which working people replace rich people as the principal owners of corporations. This book explores how, and why, this transformation is occurring and why it's occurring now.

And, as we'll discuss later in the book, it's a transformation on par with the free markets revolution of centuries ago, and the more recent Industrial Revolution.

It's the third great economic revolution, the Ownership Revolution - - and you and I are part of it.

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Copyright Robert F. Abbott 2006