13. Opening up privatizations to returnable joint-stock companies.

• The privatizations in question are those of commercial activities, or of activities that can be made such without alienating a sovereign power. The provision of relief and of economic securities is not a sovereign power, with what that implies in the way of exclusivities, including that of the use of violence by the public force.

Monopolies on the sale of services or goods can be privatized without there being any need to end them. To be sure, a whole current of doctrines maintains the contrary. But it does so by leaving out of its view the fact that the legislator has the power to require an enterprise entrusted with operating a monopoly not to :

• grant its staff privileges relative to the ordinary rules of wage law;
• allocate part of its earnings to its self-financing ;
• deliver a chronically excessive or insufficient rate of return to its shareholders;
• dispense with the reduction of its gaps in internal rates of return of the same systemic level ;
• endlessly postpone, where applicable, the reduction in its capital of the proportion of quasi-capital.
• The reforms of the capital market, when they are those advocated here, have the effect of opening privatizations and enterprise restructurings to companies with refundable shares. This effect appears clearly, however, only by keeping in mind the entire content of chapters3, 5, 6, 7, 11.

Opening to companies with refundable shares does not imply closing to companies with negotiable shares. It is for the boards of directors of each to put forward the characteristics of their respective offers to the public authority and to opinion, it being understood that objectivity requires keeping clear what is specific to contributions of capital, according to whether they are refundable or negotiable, only the latter grantingco-ownership shares whose liquidation can provide increases in private wealth through capital gain, latent or realized.

• A privatization to a company whose shares are all refundable remains a collective property. The legal entity that holds this property has members, but these are not co-owners: in the event of the dissolution of this legal entity and if, all things considered, its net position is ultimately positive, the bylaws must require that its last act of management be the gift of this remainder to another legal entity.

Questions of great importance are thereby raised. Between two enterprise properties, one exercised by the public authority and the other by a company with refundable shares, which is the more authentically collective? The less easily captured by an oligarchy or a bureaucracy? The more open to the participation of every citizen by means of a small minimum, duly remunerated placement in capital? The more capable of helping the population — including its largest part, which is inevitably the least wealthy — to come to have as much retirement-quality capital as it feels the need for? The more extensive of the common good while being the least reductive of individual freedom and responsibility?