The proposal that most threatened the capitalist class was the Rehn–Meidner plan. A 20 per cent tax on corporate profits would flow into wage earner funds controlled by the unions to be reinvested in the corporations. The effect would be to steadily reduce the significance of private ownership and to build towards collective ownership managed by the representatives of the workers. This amounted to ‘a frontal assault on the sanctity of private ownership’. However generous the terms of the buy-out may have been, the capitalist class was threatened with gradual annihilation as a distinctive
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