Every 4 years, like clockwork, the Republican and Democratic parties will develop their party platform which will be voted and passed at the national conventions.

It is my hope that the Republican National Party Platform will once again support Employee ownership.  In the 2016 Party platform: Republicans believe that the employer-employee relationship of the future will be built upon employee empowerment and workplace flexibility. We therefore endorse employee stock ownership plans that enable workers to become capitalists, expand the realm of private property, and energize a free enterprise economy. Retrieved from

It is also my hope that with the number of Democratic candidates running for president, including both Senator Warren and Sanders.  Both supporters of ESOPs and Employee Ownership that the Democratic National Party platform will specifically include a party plank endorsing employee ownership.  This has not been the case in the past.  In 2016 the party platform included the following: That is why, working with business, labor, and other stakeholders, we will incentivize companies to share profits with their employees on top of wages and pay increases, while targeting the workers and businesses that need profit-sharing the most.

Louis O. Kelso said it best – Equality of economic opportunity, in the context of private property, means equality of opportunity for the millions of capital-less households of today to buy, pay for, and employ in their lives the non-human factor of production, capital.

Let’s make it easier for employees to share in the wealth that their labor produces by sharing the capital of the firm – in other words let’s share the responsibility and share the wealth.  In this way we can make the pie grow faster and distribute the new growth more equitably (Louis O. Kelso) rather than trying to use the ineffectiveness of governmental wealth redistribution programs to reduce the wealth inequality.