Socialism: study the precedents and test whether the help matters

Add precedents.md: Mondragon's Caja Laboral, the US National Consumer Cooperative Bank, Italy's Coopfond and Marcora Law, each with what went wrong. Add a support lottery to the pilot (intensive help for a random half, advisers walled off from lending, all help counted against the bank), count distressed mergers as closures, and replace unsourced precedent claims on the bank and argument pages. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <[email protected]> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QWPs69B8nQZjtPEUXMKzZx
2026-09-23 16:02:27 -06:00
parent 4e686aaf72
commit 3e072dbd5d
7 changed files with 132 additions and 11 deletions
@@ -14,7 +14,7 @@ summary: A working model for building an economy where the people who do the wor
 This model doesn't buy, seize or convert anyone's company. Instead it builds new worker-owned companies alongside existing ones, then lets customers and workers choose between them.

 - **Workers own their company.** Every member gets one vote. A share of the profits grows with tenure until long-time members split them equally. Salaries still exist, and hard jobs still pay more. Part of each year's profit builds up in a personal account that's paid out when you leave, and part goes into a permanent reserve that keeps the business investing. [Worker Ownership](worker-ownership.md), [Member Capital Accounts](capital-accounts.md) and [Investing for the Long Run](the-long-run.md)
- **A small public bank lends to worker co-ops.** It charges market rates, so it only succeeds if co-ops can really compete. Its whole job is to be willing to lend to a kind of company other banks won't. [The Bank](the-bank.md)
+- **A small public bank lends to worker co-ops.** It charges market rates, so it only succeeds if co-ops can really compete. Its whole job is to be willing to lend to a kind of company other banks won't. Spain, Italy and the US have all tried versions of this, and the pilot is built around what went right and wrong. [The Bank](the-bank.md) and [Has This Been Tried?](precedents.md)
 - **Co-ops funded this way stay co-ops forever.** They can't be sold to conventional owners, and members can't vote to cash out what earlier members built. [The Lock](the-lock.md)
 - **It runs as an honest experiment.** A one-time $350 million pilot aims to fund about 400 new co-ops. The success measures are published before the first loan. If, after twelve years, co-ops stay open about as well as similar conventional firms while paying their members fairly, and the bank earned at least what Treasury bonds would have, Congress votes on growing it. If not, it shuts down automatically. [The Test](the-test.md) and [The Pilot, in Numbers](pilot-spec.md)
 - **Co-ops back each other up.** They pool part of their profits into a shared fund. If one fails, its workers are moved into others instead of being left with nothing. [The Federation](federation.md)