If you don't want to lose control of your company, don't issue public stock.

Once you do, and it is bought by someone else, it's not your company anymore. Why does it matter if it was bought by Berkshire-Hathaway, Vanguard, or by the government of Sweeden?

I think you are missing the point. That nationalization was not going to buy control from stock exchange. The point was effectively confiscating it from the owners.

But the social democrat government in Sweden couldn't perform it quickly enough to prevent flight of capital and people, nor quickly enough to consolidate political power to a dictatorship of the proletariat.

So they lost the election and the development was stopped.

> I think you are missing the point. That nationalization was not going to buy control from stock exchange.

Citation needed. From what I am gathering from this thread, wikipedia, and translated wikipedia, these shares were to be bought from stock exchanges.

If this is incorrect, then yes, I agree that it is nationalisation.

I think the idea from the beginning was to issue equity that diluted the current owners, but that was later revised to taxes on profit and payroll. The concept isn't radically different from a pension fund. But of course the purpose was still that workers could take part in the increased profits of companies. The funds weren't allowed to own more than 50% of the voting rights in any company.

There isn't that much in English written about them, but that is actually a good thing since most of it is of good quality.

http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ar... https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/sweden-social-democracy-m...

That's missing the point...

That's because the point seems ideological, without any backing in reason.

Why is a government buying a majority of a company's shares on the public markets bad? Why is one man, or an investment firm buying a majority of shares of a company any better?

An attack on this is an attack on the concept of public markets.

'Public markets' does a lot of work in this claim. There's an obvious difference between shotgun nationalization, and a hostile stock takeover. It's the difference between armed robbery of a grocery store, and buying a loaf of bread at posted prices.

This seems to be a common reaction when market proponents see their own system used against them. (See also: collective baragining on the side of employees vs collective bargaining on the side of management. For some reason, one is bad, but the other one is just the way things are. Management bargains collectively, but we have to bargain against them independently.)

That's not what's going on here. The government is saying: "give us Xkr" and then turning around and buying shares of the company. That's a two step process, but collapse the steps together and it's the same as the government saying "give us X shares of the company," which is nationalization -- the government taking control (even fractional control) of a company by force.

If nothing else, company officers and the board have an obligation to shareholders, which would would not want to see their shares diluted in that way. So no, it is not surprising that companies decided to relocate to jurisdictions that were not about to nationalize them.

> but collapse the steps together and it's the same as the government saying "give us X shares of the company,"

Great, you've just described taxation.

> which is nationalization -- the government taking control (even fractional control) of a company by force.

How is buying shares on the public market with government money taking control of a company by force? No current shareholder is obligated to sell their shares.

Ah of course, taxation is theft... [1]

> If nothing else, company officers and the board have an obligation to shareholders, which would would not want to see their shares diluted in that way.

Shareholders voluntarily selling their shares to the government does not 'dilute' shares of other shareholders. It doesn't matter if the government's money came from taxing the company, some other company, or individuals.

[1] I'm sorry, but if you want to take advantage of a country's labour force and markets, you are expected to pay taxes. What the government does with that tax money is up to them.

No, here the idea was not taxation, but eventual total confiscation.

Buying something that is voluntarily sold at fair market value is not confiscating it.

1. Government has money. This money is collected through tax revenue, resource royalties, etc.

2. Shareholders of company voluntarily put sell orders on a stock exchange.

3. Government places buy orders on a stock exchange.

4. Repeat #2 and #3 enough times, and the government becomes a majority shareholder.

No part of this involves confiscation, any more then Berkshire-Hathaway buying, and taking a public company private is 'confiscating' it.

That breaks already at step 1. Government does not have the money; instead it passes a new law to pass control of companies to governing party's proxies (in this case, LO) and expropriate the wealth from shareholders.