> One of the reasons I'd like this policy even more if the shares were sold to the government and the government is forbidden from voting outside of exceptional (e.g valuation crash over x years) circumstances.
So your premise is that the government gets the shares, but can't sell them and can't vote? To begin with this implies that they would never be able to spend the money, and then what's the point? Moreover, that's effectively taking those shares off the market, so if the policy applies to everyone (i.e. price goes up so all shareholders have a capital gain) it would be equivalent to a reverse stock split, which is a paper transaction with no real effect.
> But the reality is that companies play games with voting rights on shares all the time, so your scenario is easily worked around by founders themselves.
Those workarounds aren't free. VCs are wary about putting a lot of money into a company without a corresponding allocation of voting rights, i.e. the exact opposite of "the founders keep voting rights for themselves". Also, first time founders often don't know they can even do this and by the time they figure out it's important it's too late.
So your premise is that the government gets the shares, but can't sell them and can't vote? To begin with this implies that they would never be able to spend the money, and then what's the point? Moreover, that's effectively taking those shares off the market, so if the policy applies to everyone (i.e. price goes up so all shareholders have a capital gain) it would be equivalent to a reverse stock split, which is a paper transaction with no real effect.
> But the reality is that companies play games with voting rights on shares all the time, so your scenario is easily worked around by founders themselves.
Those workarounds aren't free. VCs are wary about putting a lot of money into a company without a corresponding allocation of voting rights, i.e. the exact opposite of "the founders keep voting rights for themselves". Also, first time founders often don't know they can even do this and by the time they figure out it's important it's too late.