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Improving any institution - and a business company, whether sole proprietorship, partnership, or some form of limited liability entity, is an institution - begins with examining the institutions basic structures, its core values, and its code of ethics. Without the groundwork laid by all participants in the institution coming together in solidarity on shared principles, goals, and vision, the institution will simply revert to its former mode of existence, or fall into decay.

The basis for coming together in a business enterprise, just as it is in the wider economy and the political realm, is participation in the natural right to, and the defined rights of private property in the means of production. As Benjamin Watkins Leigh of Virginia stated in 1820, "Power and Property can be separated for a time by force or fraud - but divorced, never. For as soon as the pang of separation is felt . . . Property will purchase Power, or Power will take over Property."

Improving all aspects of a company thus begins at the most basic level, empowering everyone in the company with the means of acquiring and possessing a meaningful and significant direct ownership share in the company. They thereby cease being dependents, and become co-workers or partners in a mutually beneficial, cooperative enterprise.

A number of techniques and mechanisms have been designed to achieve this end. Although none of them are perfect, many of them have merit and can be employed to great benefit even with their flaws - as long as the people involved in the effort recognize those flaws and join together to overcome them so far as their reasonable efforts can do so. In this category we find such things as the Employee Stock Ownership Plan or "ESOP," the traditional cooperative, and various other ownership- and profit-sharing arrangements.

One of the best efforts ever developed (yet still one with flaws) was Abraham Lincoln's 1862 Homestead Act. Problems involved setting aside any claims by Native Americans, the limited nature of land and natural resources, and the failure to extend the concept to other forms of productive assets, such as industrial and commercial enterprises. Nevertheless, the Homestead Act created millions of owners of land, the most important productive asset of that time, at no cost to the State. A similar concept has been developed for implementation in a developed economy, called "capital homesteading for every citizen," from the book of the same title, that solves many of the problems

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