America's corporations need their owners back.

In 1965 a chief executive earned 21 times what his workers did. In 2025, 325 times. What changed?

The chart answers the first objection a conservative should raise: isn't this just what markets produce? The market produced the flat line — 21:1 to 31:1 — for as long as the modern record runs before 1978, through the most productive decades in American history. What produced the runaway was not the market. It was the rules inside the company — who sets executive pay, how it is paid, and what the board does with the profits: consultants benchmarking every CEO against every other; pay moved from salary into stock; a 1982 SEC safe harbor that opened the way for buybacks, which went from rare to more than half of earnings at the largest companies; a 1992 disclosure rule and a 1993 tax rule that each backfired; and boards nominated by the executives they were meant to restrain.³ Each of those is a rule. Rules can be rewritten.

Who controls the modern corporation?

If you hold a 401(k), a pension, or an index fund, you are a beneficial owner of hundreds of America's largest companies. You bear the losses. You have almost certainly never cast a vote in one. Follow the capital down and the control up, and the structure explains the chart.

Four things are easy to confuse here, and the current arrangement depends on confusing them: economic ownership (who gains and loses), legal shareholding (whose name is on the certificate — usually a fund's), the vote (cast, for most shares, by the fund's manager), and control (exercised by management through a board it shapes). In 1790 all four sat in one person. Today each sits somewhere else, and the one with the least ownership has the most control.

Where this breaks conservative principles

Three reforms, and why they restore private ownership rather than replace it

A limited-government conservative will ask the right question first: by what authority does the law reach inside a private company? Because the public corporation is not private property the way a farm or a shop is. A farm is owned. A corporation is chartered — granted limited liability, perpetual life, and the right to raise capital from strangers, by a legislature, on conditions — and conservatives have never doubted that a legislature may attach conditions to a privilege it created. The only question is what the conditions should be. These three answer: that the people who own the enterprise control it, and that the people who control it answer for it.

• Pass-through voting returns the owner's vote to the owner. It ends a delegation most savers never knowingly made, and returns the vote to the person whose money is at stake.
• Tenure-weighted voting rewards the owner who stays. A share held for a decade counts for more than one held for a minute — and the extra weight goes to the saver, not to the officers, the directors, or the funds.
• The binding vote on executive pay is the owners' vote, not a regulator's. The ladder is not a cap and not a price control; it is scrutiny that rises with the distance from the historical equilibrium.
• The one hard mandate — employee-elected directors — is a remedy, not a regime. It binds a company only after its own governance has failed, above 75:1, and a Utah company only if it wants the incentives.

All three put the owner back in charge of what he owns; none puts the government there. None nationalizes, seizes, or rewrites state corporate law: the Utah bill attaches its conditions to the state charter, and the federal bills attach theirs to the privilege of listing on a national exchange, as Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank did before them. Where that is not assurance enough — and for some readers it will not be — every title carries a mandatory review, most carry a fifteen-year sunset, and the Utah prototype is voluntary, so the reforms must prove themselves on data before they spread. That is reform in Burke's sense: change in the service of conservation, made in time.

What this argument concedes

The full versions of these objections, with the strongest sources on each side, are in section VIII of the argument. The site is built to be tested against them, not accepted despite them.

The American System, and its fifth pillar

In 1824 Henry Clay gave a name to the program Alexander Hamilton had proposed and Abraham Lincoln would carry out: the American System — protective tariffs to build home industry, a national bank to supply credit, and roads, canals, and railroads to bind the country into one market. It built the United States into the largest economy on earth, and it is being revived now in four modern pillars, which The New American System follows in detail:

The first four act on the conditions around a company — the industries it competes in, the wages it must pay, the energy it buys, the currency it is paid in. None of them reaches inside the company to decide who keeps what it earns: the people who work there and own it, or the people who run it. That is decided by the company's own rules — who votes, who sits on the board, how executives are paid, what is done with the earnings — and those rules are what this site is about. Lincoln's Congress did not leave that question to chance. Alongside the tariff and the railroads it passed the Homestead Act, so that the ground the system was built on went to the household that would work it, not to whoever could buy the most of it. The modern Homestead Act is not 160 acres. It is a share in the enterprise, with a voice in how it is run, for the household whose work makes it productive. That is the fifth pillar — keep it in the household — the one not yet built, and this project is its legislative arm.

Ten sections, every claim sourced

Everything on this page is argued at length, with thirty sources, on the full argument: property as the founders meant it; the corporation in plain English; who loses what; where stewardship was hollowed out; the historical equilibrium and the twenty-four-century tradition behind 20:1; how it broke; the constitutional argument through Locke, Smith, Burke, and the fiduciary law; who keeps the productivity dividend; the three instruments; and reform before it breaks. The numbers and the twelve ways a pay rule gets gamed have their own page.

Four things you can do

The Commonwealth Project

The Commonwealth Project is an initiative to restore stake, voice, and accountability to the people who actually own America's productive enterprise. It takes its name from Locke's word for a community organized to protect property, and its second name — the Zion Corporation — from the tradition of stewardship in Utah's majority faith, in which the two describe the same thing. You do not need to share that tradition to recognize the structure as sound; the secular argument stands on its own.

The project is the legislative arm of the fifth pillar of the American System described above: keeping the gains of a rebuilt economy in the households that produce them. It is currently structured as an informal initiative based in Santaquin, Utah, with paperwork toward 501(c)(3) status in preparation and a founding board being assembled. Endorsers, advisors, and collaborators are welcomed — particularly from the constituencies whose property the framework is designed to restore.

A note on method

Every figure on this site is cited to its source, and the CEO-pay figures follow the Economic Policy Institute's most recent release rather than the one that best suits the argument. Where a source is contested, the page says so. Where new evidence has corrected an earlier claim of ours, the correction is on the page, not buried in a revision. A reader who finds a number here that doesn't trace to its source should tell us.

1. Josh Bivens, Elise Gould, and Jori Kandra, "CEO pay has skyrocketed since 1978," Economic Policy Institute, September 15, 2026 — epi.org/publication/ceo-pay. Realized measure, top 350 firms by sales; 2025 projected. 20.6:1 (1965), 30.7:1 (1978), 407.8:1 (2021), 324.7:1 (2025); CEO compensation +1,316%, typical worker compensation +28%, net productivity +86%, 1978–2025.
2. Peter F. Drucker, "Is Executive Pay Excessive?" The Wall Street Journal, May 23, 1977.
3. Sources for each rule change are in the full argument: SEC Rule 10b-18 (1982); SEC executive compensation disclosure rules (1992); Internal Revenue Code §162(m) (1993); Bebchuk and Fried, Pay Without Performance (2004); Bizjak, Lemmon and Naveen (2008) on peer benchmarking; Lazonick, "Profits Without Prosperity" (2014).
4. Lucian Bebchuk and Scott Hirst, "Index Funds and the Future of Corporate Governance," Columbia Law Review 119 (2019); BlackRock Voting Choice, Vanguard Investor Choice, and State Street proxy-voting choice program disclosures, 2022–2026, on eligibility and participation.
5. Economic Policy Institute, The Productivity–Pay Gap, updated September 14, 2026 — epi.org/productivity-pay-gap: net productivity +93.7%, hourly compensation of production/nonsupervisory workers +32.7%, 1979Q4–2026Q2.
6. First Continental Congress, Declaration and Resolves, October 14, 1774; John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1689), ch. 5 and 9.
7. Aronson v. Lewis, 473 A.2d 805 (Del. 1984); Smith v. Van Gorkom, 488 A.2d 858 (Del. 1985); In re The Walt Disney Co. Derivative Litigation, 906 A.2d 27 (Del. 2006).
8. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776), Book I, ch. 10, part 2; Book V, ch. 1, part 3, art. 1.
9. Robert J. Larner, "Ownership and Control in the 200 Largest Nonfinancial Corporations, 1929 and 1963," American Economic Review 56 (1966): 84.5% management-controlled in 1963.
10. Frank Levy and Peter Temin, "Inequality and Institutions in 20th Century America," NBER Working Paper 13106 (2007); Carola Frydman and Raven Saks, Review of Financial Studies 23 (2010) on the composition of executive pay 1936–2005.
11. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Labor share at its lowest level, 52.8 percent, in second quarter 2026" — bls.gov; Martin Feldstein, NBER Working Paper 13953 (2008); Robert Z. Lawrence, AEI (2016); Anna Stansbury and Lawrence Summers, NBER Working Paper 24165 (2017).
12. Simon Jäger, Benjamin Schoefer, and Jörg Heining, "Labor in the Boardroom," Quarterly Journal of Economics 136 (2021).
13. Xavier Gabaix and Augustin Landier, "Why Has CEO Pay Increased So Much?" Quarterly Journal of Economics 123 (2008), for the firm-size explanation. The comparisons are EPI's (note 1): Table 1, 1978–2025, realized CEO compensation +1,316% against the S&P 500 +1,428%; and realized CEO compensation +986.7% against top-0.1% earnings +356.6%, 1978–2023.