The Elysian

If 120 million workers became owners in the companies they work for, the impact on wealth ownership would be seismic. Here's how it could work.

We should create more US States. A growing separatist movement aims to do just that.

What if US states had the same autonomy as EU countries? Theoretically, Vermont could become a social democracy just like Malta—after all, they have the same population size and GDP per capita. California has the same population as Spain and is twice as rich by GDP per capita—they could afford to subsidize childcare, healthcare, and education just like Spain. Despite being our least populous state, Wyoming is richer than Sweden or the Netherlands on a per capita basis—it could establish a sovereign wealth fund just like Norway does, investing its surplus oil revenues for the benefit of its citizens. We don’t need to talk about secession to make this a reality, just taxation.

That’s why we need to build better ones.

Read the essay and join the discourse at https://elysian.press/essays/companies-are-the-new-city-states

Get every essay by email at https://elysian.press/

A century after Karl Marx argued for a more fair and just society, José María Arizmendiarrieta started building one. Here's the story of the Catholic priest that inspired the world's biggest worker cooperative.

This cooperative could be its own country.

Read the essay and join the discourse at https://elysian.press/essays/mondragon-as-the-new-city-state

Get every essay by email at https://elysian.press/

There are 47 millionaires working for Central States Manufacturing and they’re not all in the C-Suite. Many of them are drivers or machinists—blue-collar workers for the company. This is a blueprint for the future of all companies.

NATO is a pact between countries that if one is attacked, all will defend. Is there a future where eventually the whole world is part of NATO? If so, then all countries would be joined in a pact of not harming each other and defending one another. If one country decided to break the pact and attack another country they’d have the military might of the entire world against them. In this case, NATO would become a “world government” that protects world peace.

The United States and other federal governments should decouple federal governance into several independent government layers that city-states can join ad hoc. Think: A human rights layer, a military layer, an economic layer… A world of city-states could join those federal governments à la carte, rather than be stuck with the whole menu.

Plato, Thomas More, and Aldous Huxley all place utopia on an island—a small city-state that self-governed. For a long time, the city-state was our best and only form of government. But eventually, they went wrong where the state in Plato’s Republic did: they grew, consuming more land and more people and requiring an even bigger body of government to manage them all. Eventually, they were no longer city-states, they became nation-states. Maybe that wasn't a good thing.