An interesting counterpoint to private equity’s stranglehold over the economy and society is a competing vision of how people’s pension funds could be invested.
In the 1970s, Swedish economist Rudolf Meidner , in collaboration with Olof Palme’s government, proposed that the trade-union backed pension funds in Sweden should gradually acquire a controlling stake in the nation’s businesses , in order to fund future pensions and social benefits. This would have used the rising pension savings of working people to take over and democratise the corporate sector, rather than leaving it to the psychopathic maxim of profit maximisation above all else.
