Also, the priorities of rich stockholders are quite different from those of us at the fiftieth percentile of incomes. The very wealthy seem to play with their holdings, buying and selling, buying and selling in an attempt to squeeze the last possible percent of profit out on a continuous basis. The period of time in which a wealthy "stock-player" is interested in the performance of a particular stock is only at most a year; sometimes a week.
But I don't give a damn what my stocks are doing today; it materially affects me only imperceptibly if the Dow went up 380 points Tuesday and down 150 Wednesday. (Except I cruelly enjoy the anxiety of the investing class in all their confusion; it's always a cheery thing to think of a millionaire in panic despair.) First, I am only investing a small but steady trickle of money into the market at a time, so a difference in this week's stock price might mean I'm buying 1.25 shares of XYZ Corp. out of this week's deduction as opposed to 1.23 or 1.28. Second, I don't intend to take any money out of my investments at all for another twenty-five years; the only price I am truly interested in will be the price of my investments at that far-off moment. So my self-interest alone, translated into a political goal, would lead me to want to establish long-term stability in the economy, whereas a "stock-player's" interest is to set up an overheated, volatile, "bouncy" economy where he might be able to grab a lucky opportunity and make a big killing.
Even if you spread out the ownership of stock from exclusively the very wealthiest classes to a wider range of incomes, that still doesn't mean that now, all those middle-class stockholders will be pulled by self-interest into adopting political positions identical with their fellow stockholders among the very rich. Our self-interest still is very different from the rich folks's, even though both groups own stocks.
Yours WDK - Wkiernan at concentric.net
..."bourgeois Bill," shit! they've co-opted me, AGGGGH!...