Europe’s Potential for a Systemic Answer to Wealth Distribution
Recently, someone on LinkedIn called me out. My perspective on cross-border collaborative structures and my opinion about tech investments, they said, was “too socialist”, and “too slow”. I was told I didn’t understand the true value of investment, the freedom that American venture capital creates, and I was told why the EU’s caution holds Europe back. The implication was clear: I was advocating against entrepreneurship, against growth, against capitalism itself.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
I’m not against investment. I’m not against shareholders, profit or growth. But I am against a system that is structurally designed to concentrate wealth to the point of collapse. I’m against legal frameworks that make equitable collaboration across borders nearly impossible, forcing even the most cooperative ventures into extractive corporate models designed in the 19th century. And I’m increasingly convinced that if we don’t redesign the plumbing of modern capitalism — not through ideology, but through pragmatic structural reform — we’re headed for systemic failure.
This isn’t a socialist argument. It’s an engineering argument.
The plumbing of modern capitalism is broken. It doesn’t matter how much water you pour in (investment, innovation, effort) if the pipes are designed to leak. The solution isn’t to ration the water. It’s to fix the pipes. Concentrating wealth at the top and leaving everyone else parched is not a sustainable situation.
An Almost Impossible Collaboration
Let me illustrate the problem with a real example: my own attempt to build something better. I wrote about this in an earlier article, but this is the short of it:
Over ten years ago, I started LMNS. This collaborative venture brings together service professionals from the Netherlands, England, Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland. We work as equals, share value equitably, and operate across borders within the EU’s supposedly unified Single Market. We, at one point early on, explored the EEIG (short for European Economic Interest Grouping), a legal structure designed precisely for this kind of cross-border cooperation.
It was a nightmare.
The tax regulations didn’t align. The legal requirements were impossibly complex. Every country wanted its piece, but no framework existed to make this simple or viable. We discovered what countless freelancers, consultants, and distributed teams learn the hard way: despite decades of “EU integration”, the only legally and fiscally viable structure remains the traditional corporation: a single entity, with a single boss, at a single address, designed to funnel profit to centralised ownership.
Even if your intent is collaborative and equitable, the common business practice forces you into a model built for extraction.
This isn’t just frustrating; it’s a design flaw in the economic operating system, and it may be pushing us toward collapse. When it’s geared toward return on capital, it drives concentrated wealth. Not a bad thing? Let me explain why it might be.
The Piketty Problem: When Capital Outpaces Everything Else
Thomas Piketty’s research gave us the description that defines modern inequality: r > g. The return on capital consistently exceeds the rate of economic growth.
This isn’t a moral judgment. It’s arithmetic.
When wealth derived from ownership grows faster than wealth derived from labor, and when our corporate structures are designed to maximise returns to capital owners above all else, you get a compounding effect. The rich get richer not because they work harder or innovate more, but because the system is structurally wired to accelerate capital accumulation at the top.
The consequences aren’t just about fairness. They’re about stability:
- Economic vulnerability: Concentrated wealth means concentrated risk. When capital is pooled in fewer hands, market shocks ripple more violently.
- Political fragmentation: Extreme inequality erodes trust in democratic institutions and fuels populism.
- Innovation stagnation: When capital chases speculative exits rather than long-term value creation, productive investment suffers.
The EU, with its fragmented legal landscape and bias toward traditional corporate forms, doesn’t just fail to mitigate this dynamic; it actively reinforces it. The very structures that should enable modern, distributed collaboration instead force us back into ownership models that concentrate wealth by design.
Limits of Post-Facto Solutions
The traditional response to this inequality is taxation. Progressive wealth taxes, capital gains taxes, corporate taxes; these are the tools governments use to redistribute wealth after it’s been concentrated.
Piketty himself advocates for a global wealth tax. It’s a powerful idea, and perhaps necessary. But it’s also reactive. It attempts to correct the problem after the damage is done, through political processes that are increasingly gridlocked and contested.
The problem with post-facto redistribution is threefold:
- Political resistance: Wealth taxes are easily framed as “governmental overreach” or “punishment for success.” In individualistic, globalised economies, the political will to implement and enforce aggressive redistribution is often lacking.
- Implementation complexity: Coordinating tax policy across borders (especially at the global scale Piketty envisions) is extraordinarily difficult. Capital is mobile; enforcement is fragmented.
- Legitimacy concerns: Even when justified, taxation feels like taking from one group to give to another. It generates resentment and feeds anti-government narratives.
If we cannot reliably fix inequality through external policy intervention, we need a different approach. We need to prevent the exorbitant concentration from happening in the first place.
If we wish to find solutions, we need structural reform, not just fiscal correction.
A Possible Solution: Pre-Distribution Through Stewardship
The answer may be found in creating new corporate structures that embed equitable ownership and governance into their legal DNA. Rather than extracting wealth and then redistributing it through taxation, we can design systems where wealth flows directly to those who create it, right from the start.
This is the concept of pre-distribution: reforming the market’s internal architecture so that value is distributed fairly as it is generated, not corrected afterwards through political struggle. Not re-distribution, but pre-distribution.
The vehicle for this reform is what I would call the Pan-European Stewardship Statute; a new legal framework for enterprises that are owned and governed by the people who work in them.
How the Stewardship Model Works
- Ownership: Workers are default shareholders, ensuring economic returns flow to those who generate value.
- Governance: Mission locks prevent extractive takeovers, protecting the enterprise’s purpose and stability.
- Cross-Border Simplicity: A unified EU-wide legal regime eliminates friction from tax codes, VAT, and registration hurdles.
- Fiscal Incentives: Reduced corporate taxes for reinvested profits or worker-distributed earnings make stewardship the rational choice.
This isn’t charity or idealism. It’s structural rebalancing. I wrote about this in an earlier article, where I presented examples such as Bosch, Handelsbanken, and Mondragon, to name but a few.
EU’s Regulatory Superpower: The AI Act Precedent
If this sounds ambitious, consider what the EU has already accomplished. Consider the EU AI Act.
The EU AI Act isn’t merely drafted to regulate the products of artificial intelligence: it regulates the process. It establishes standards for transparency, accountability, and risk management that companies must follow if they want access to the European market. And because the EU market is so large, these standards can become the de facto global norms.
The EU proved it can use the scale and unity of its market as leverage to reshape an entire industry. It can set the rules not through military or economic dominance, but through regulatory leadership. The “Brussels Effect” can reframe and reshape our views on business ethics.
Now imagine applying that same power to corporate governance.
A Pan-European Stewardship Statute wouldn’t just change how companies may be structured within the EU. It could potentially create a new global standard. A model of capitalism that prioritises resilience, equity, and long-term value creation over speculative extraction.
Just as the AI Act exports ethics and accountability globally, a European stewardship framework could export a more stable, sustainable form of capitalism.
The question isn’t whether the EU has the power to do this. It’s whether it has the will.
Stability vs. Speculation
Here’s where my LinkedIn critic was onto something, even if they drew the wrong conclusion.
The United States thrives on a high-risk, high-reward investment culture. Venture capital is abundant, regulations are light, and the focus is on hyperbolic growth and rapid exits. The goal is to swing for unicorns: invest in 100 startups, expect 90 to fail, and hope for 10x or 100x returns on the survivors.
The EU, by contrast, is cautious. Capital is harder to access. Compliance is complex. Markets are fragmented. The result is slower scaling, longer timelines, and a perception that Europe is the “slow lane” of global capitalism.
This creates a real competitive challenge. Talented entrepreneurs and ambitious investors often look to the US, where the infrastructure for rapid growth is more mature and the culture more receptive to risk.
But here’s the reframe: What if the EU’s prudence isn’t a weakness? What if it’s a structural advantage, if positioned correctly?
Stewardship as a New Asset Class
The stewardship model doesn’t compete with US-style venture capitalism. It offers something fundamentally different: resilience over speculation, steady returns over boom-and-bust cycles.
US Venture Model
- Risk Profile: High volatility; binary outcomes
- Investor Value: Exit multiples; short-term flips
- Economic Impact: Wealth concentration; winner-take-all
- Capital Fit: Speculative funds; high-risk tolerance
Stewardship Model
- Risk Profile: Medium/low volatility; built-in stability
- Investor Value: Steady dividends; long-term cash flow
- Economic Impact: Wealth circulation; broad-based prosperity
- Capital Fit: Pension funds; impact investors; long-term capital
The EU’s advantage is that it can attract capital that is tired of volatility. Pension funds managing trillions of dollars need stable, predictable returns. Impact investors want to back enterprises that align with their values without sacrificing financial performance. Insurance companies and sovereign wealth funds seek resilience, not speculation.
By positioning stewardship as a distinct asset class, the EU isn’t trying to beat the US at its own game. It’s offering a safe harbor for sophisticated capital that values stability, sustainability, and structural integrity.
This is the ultimate leverage: turning regulatory “difficulty” into a feature instead of treating it as a bug.
The Bigger Picture: Preventing Collapse
Let’s zoom out.
Concentrated wealth isn’t just unfair; rather, it’s destabilising. When power, money, and resources pool in fewer and fewer hands, societies fracture. Political systems strain. Markets become fragile. History is littered with examples of civilisations that collapsed under the weight of extreme inequality.
The stewardship model offers a structural counterweight. It doesn’t abolish capitalism or eliminate investment returns. It redirects them. It ensures that the wealth generated by modern economies circulates back into the people and communities that create it, rather than accumulating in offshore accounts and speculative bubbles.
Again: this isn’t socialism. It’s systems engineering.
For workers, stewardship means a fair share of the value they create, and a voice in how their enterprise is run. For investors, it means predictable returns from enterprises that are resilient, mission-aligned, and protected from extractive takeovers. For society, it means an economy that reinvests in itself; one that builds stability rather than amplifying volatility.
The stakes are high: we’re watching wealth inequality reach levels not seen since the Gilded Age. We’re seeing the social and political consequences play out in real time: populism, polarisation, institutional decay.
We can continue down this path, hoping that post-facto redistribution will somehow keep pace with structural concentration. Or we can redesign the system itself.
A Call to Action: What’s Next?
A Roadmap for the EU
- Draft the Statute: The European Commission could convene a task force to design the Pan-European Stewardship Statute, with input from legal experts, economists, and worker cooperatives.
- Pilot Programs: Launch stewardship pilots in three high-potential sectors (e.g., tech, creative industries, renewable energy) to demonstrate viability.
- Incentivise Early Adopters: Offer tax holidays or grants to the first 1,000 enterprises that transition to stewardship models.
- Build the Coalition: Create a public-private alliance of policymakers, impact investors, and labor organisations to advocate for the statute’s adoption.
The Narrative
This isn’t about left vs. right. Or fast vs. slow. It’s about functional capitalism vs. systemic collapse.
Conclusion: A Capitalism That Works for All
The LinkedIn critic who called me a socialist was wrong.
I’m not anti-capitalist. I’m anti-collapse.
The current system, where corporate structures are designed for extraction, where wealth concentrates by default, where cross-border collaboration is legally and fiscally nearly impossible for most people, isn’t sustainable. It’s not even efficient. It’s a relic of an industrial era that no longer exists, perpetuated by inertia and vested interests.
The Pan-European Stewardship Statute isn’t a rejection of markets or investment or growth. It’s an upgrade. It’s capitalism with better plumbing; one that aligns economic incentives with social stability, that enables modern work arrangements, and that prevents the wealth concentration crisis from metastasising further.
The EU has the tools. It has the market power. It has the regulatory precedent. What it needs now is the courage to lead. Because the alternative — continuing down the current path, hoping that taxation and redistribution can somehow keep pace with structural inequality — is a gamble we cannot afford to lose.
The choice is clear: reform capitalism from within, or watch it collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/can-cooperatives-save-capitalism-democracy-boot-roland-biemans-hrnze
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