Giving Ordinary People the Same Tools Corporations Use

You’ve probably donated to a charity before. Maybe it was $25 to a disaster relief fund, or $50 to an organization a friend shared on social media. You felt good about it. You moved on.

But have you ever stopped to wonder what actually happened with that money? Not in a cynical way, but genuinely. Did it go where you hoped? Did it change anything? Would you even know if it didn’t?

The honest answer, for most of us, is no. We donate and we trust. That’s the entire relationship. There’s no report card. No vote. No mechanism to say “hey, this isn’t what I signed up for.” The organization you gave to has no legal obligation to you whatsoever. You’re not a stakeholder. You’re a line item.

Now contrast that with how corporations operate when they want something changed. When airlines realized they could save half a billion dollars a year by keeping bag fees exempt from federal excise taxes, they didn’t start a petition. They hired aviation tax attorneys, retained federal lobbyists, and built a sustained, professional campaign to protect that loophole. And it worked. It’s been working for years.

The difference between you and that airline isn’t passion, or even money. It’s structure. They have a system that pools capital, hires professionals, and holds those professionals accountable for results. You have a donate button and a prayer.

This post is about a different kind of structure. One that gives ordinary people the same tools that corporations already use, with real accountability, real control, and a system that is legally required to work in your interest.

The Collective Action Problem

There’s a concept in economics called the collective action problem, and it explains a lot about why the world feels so persistently unfair.

Here’s the basic version: when the costs of a bad policy are spread thinly across millions of people, and the benefits of keeping that policy are concentrated in the hands of a few, the few will almost always win. Not because they’re more powerful in some abstract sense, but because the math works out in their favour.

If an airline saves $500 million per year from a tax loophole, it makes complete sense for them to spend $10 million defending it. That’s a 50x return. Now look at the other side. You personally lose maybe $40 a year to bag fees. Even if you were furious about it, how much time and money would you rationally spend fighting it? A few dollars? A few hours? The individual calculation never adds up, so nothing happens, and the loophole survives indefinitely.

This isn’t a new problem. Economists have understood it for decades. And it explains not just airline bag fees, but pharmaceutical pricing, financial industry regulations, environmental policy, and basically every other area where corporate interests consistently beat out the public good. The corporations aren’t necessarily smarter or more motivated. They just have a coordination mechanism that ordinary citizens don’t.

The interesting thing is that the math actually does work out for citizens too, if you could solve the coordination problem. If you could get 20,000 people to each put in $100 toward fighting that loophole, you’d have $2 million. That’s enough to hire real professionals and run a serious campaign. The problem has never been that citizens lack the money in aggregate. The problem is that there’s no reliable, accountable structure to pool it.

What People Already Do (And Why It Doesn’t Work)

People aren’t passive. When something makes them angry, they do try to act. They donate to nonprofits. They sign petitions. They give to political campaigns. They share things on social media and hope it reaches the right people. These are all genuine attempts to create change, and it’s worth taking a moment to understand why they keep falling short, not because the people behind them are naive, but because the structures themselves have real, built-in limitations.

Charitable nonprofits and 501(c)(3) organizations are the most common recipient of civic dollars. They do important work, and many of them do it honestly. But they are legally prohibited from making lobbying their primary activity. They can do some advocacy, but if the core strategy requires sustained lobbying of legislators or regulators, a charity isn’t the right vehicle. More importantly, when you donate to a charity, you give up all control over that money. The board answers to itself, not to you. If the organization drifts from its original mission, or spends money on things you disagree with, your only option is to stop donating in the future. The money you already gave is gone.

Political campaigns and PACs are election-focused by design. Even if you give to a candidate because of a single issue you care about, you have no guarantee that the issue will be prioritized, no mechanism to enforce any promise they made, and no way to get your money back if they don’t follow through. Politicians have no fiduciary duty to their constituents. They can act against the interests of the people who elected them, and in many cases they do, with no legal consequence whatsoever.

Petitions and social media campaigns are good for raising awareness, and occasionally they do generate enough pressure to move the needle. But awareness is not a strategy. Without professional execution, sustained funding, and real legal or political leverage, a petition is ultimately just a list of names.

The common thread running through all of these is that the money flows one way. You give it, and then you hope. There’s no accountability loop. No legal obligation running back toward you. No mechanism to verify that what you funded actually happened.

A Company That Works for You, Then Closes

What if instead of donating, you invested?

Not in the stock market sense, where you’re hoping something grows. The opposite, actually. Imagine investing in a company that is explicitly designed to spend all of its money on a single goal, and then dissolve once that goal is achieved or the timeline runs out. A company whose entire existence is to accomplish one specific thing and then close its doors.

That structure already exists. It’s called a Benefit Corporation, or B Corp, and it’s a legal entity that can be formed in most US states. Unlike a regular corporation, a B Corp is legally required to pursue its stated mission, not just maximize profit for shareholders. And unlike a charity, it can lobby freely, hire professionals on performance contracts, and issue shares to the public.

Here’s how it would work in practice. A parent platform forms a new B Corp for each specific policy goal. Say the goal is closing that airline bag fee loophole. The B Corp is chartered with one mission: lobby Congress or the IRS to extend the federal excise tax to ancillary airline fees. The success criteria are written into the corporate charter. The timeline is set. And then ordinary people buy shares.

When you buy a share, you’re not donating. You’re becoming an actual shareholder. That means you get voting rights. You elect the board of directors. The board hires the professional team, sets the budget, and reports back to you quarterly. If the campaign stalls and you think the strategy isn’t working, you and your fellow shareholders can vote to dissolve the company and recover whatever capital is left.

The company is designed to spend its capital pursuing the goal and then wind down. That is not a bug. That is the whole design. It’s a tool with a lifespan, not a growth stock. And because it’s a for-profit B Corp rather than a charity, it can do the full range of things needed to actually win: lobbying, litigation, coalition-building, public pressure campaigns, and more.

Unlike a Politician, They Can’t Break Their Promise

The word “accountability” gets used a lot in politics. It usually means very little in practice.

When a politician campaigns on a promise and then doesn’t deliver, what happens? Maybe they lose the next election, maybe they don’t. But there is no legal mechanism that compels them to follow through on what they said. No fiduciary duty runs from an elected official to their constituents. They can vote against the interests of the people who put them in office, and the most anyone can do is try to vote them out in a few years.

The B Corp model is different because it uses corporate law rather than electoral politics to create accountability. Directors of a corporation have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders. That duty is legally enforceable. If the board of your B Corp starts spending money on things unrelated to the stated mission, or makes decisions that clearly harm shareholders, you can sue them for breach of fiduciary duty. That is not a metaphor. That is an actual legal remedy that has teeth.

Beyond that, shareholders in this model have a set of concrete rights that don’t exist in any charity or political donation:

• Voting rights. You elect the board members. You vote on major decisions like budget changes or mission amendments.
• Financial transparency. Quarterly reports are required. You can see where every dollar went.
• The right to dissolve. If the campaign is going nowhere, a supermajority of shareholders can vote to wind down the B Corp and distribute whatever funds remain.
• The right to sue. If directors breach their fiduciary duty, you have legal standing to take action.

None of this exists when you donate to a charity or give money to a political campaign. Those are one-way transactions built on trust. This is a two-way legal relationship with enforceable obligations on both sides.

The other key protection is the B Corp structure itself. Because the mission is written into the corporate charter, the company cannot legally pivot away from it without shareholder approval. Mission drift, the slow transformation of a focused advocacy organization into a sprawling institution that mostly perpetuates itself, is one of the most common ways that civic organizations lose their purpose. Here, that drift is legally blocked.

The Money You Were Going to Lose Anyway

Most people who invest in anything, whether that’s stocks, mutual funds, index funds, or a retirement savings account, will accumulate capital gains over the course of their lives. When you eventually sell those investments, you owe tax on the profit. That’s just how it works.

Here’s where the B Corp model offers something genuinely interesting. Because your contribution is an equity investment rather than a donation, it’s treated differently by the tax code. When the B Corp spends its capital pursuing the mission, your shares lose value. That loss is a capital loss, and capital losses can be used to offset capital gains. If you sell stock at a profit and also hold shares in a B Corp that has depreciated, the loss from the B Corp reduces the tax you owe on the stock profit.

More usefully, capital losses can be carried forward. If you don’t have capital gains this year, the loss doesn’t disappear. It sits on the books and applies against future gains. Over a lifetime of investing, that’s a meaningful benefit.

Compare that to a traditional charitable donation, where you might get a deduction worth about 20 cents on the dollar if you itemize. The B Corp investment, even when it fails completely, gives you a tax benefit that accumulates over time and applies whenever you need it. The money you put in was going to face taxation eventually anyway. This redirects some of that future tax liability toward something you actually chose.

It’s not the main reason to do this. The main reason is the accountability and the collective leverage. But it’s a real financial benefit that makes the structure genuinely more efficient than donating, for anyone who invests in anything over the long term.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Let’s make this concrete with the airline bag fee example, because it’s a real policy problem that illustrates the model well.

Airlines unbundle bag fees from ticket prices specifically because the federal excise tax of 7.5% applies to the base ticket price, but not to ancillary fees. That tax structure creates a direct financial incentive to charge separately for things that used to be included. Closing that loophole would either reduce bag fees or force airlines to bundle them back into ticket prices, effectively eliminating the tax advantage. Airlines save roughly $500 million a year from the current treatment. That’s why the loophole exists. That’s why it persists.

Under this model, a B Corp would be chartered with one mission: lobby Congress and the IRS to extend the excise tax to checked bag fees. Success criteria are written in advance: an IRS rule change, a Congressional statute, or a court ruling requiring the same treatment. The timeline is set at three years. Shares are offered at $100 each, with a target of raising $2 million from 20,000 shareholders.

With that funding, the B Corp hires an aviation tax attorney at a base salary with a significant performance bonus tied to winning, a federal lobbyist on similar terms, a policy analyst, and a communications specialist. A portion of the budget is reserved for coalition-building and public pressure campaigns. A five-member board, elected by shareholders, oversees all of it and reports quarterly.

Now consider the three ways this could end.

If the campaign succeeds, Congress closes the loophole or the IRS changes its rules. The B Corp has spent most of its capital getting there. Whatever remains is distributed back to shareholders, and the company dissolves. Shareholders realize a capital loss on whatever they didn’t recover, which offsets future gains.

If the campaign partially succeeds, maybe the IRS issues guidance on partial tax treatment, the B Corp dissolves and distributes remaining funds. Same tax treatment applies.

If the campaign fails after three years, shareholders vote on dissolution. Whatever capital remains is returned pro-rata. Shareholders take the capital loss. The tax benefit still applies. And importantly, 20,000 people learned something about organizing, about the policy landscape, and about what a sustained professional campaign actually costs, information that improves the next attempt.

In none of these scenarios do shareholders walk away worse off than they would have been under a traditional donation, where the money is simply gone.

How It Compares

It helps to see this laid out directly against the existing alternatives:

The column on the right isn’t a theoretical improvement. Each of those “Yes” entries represents a concrete legal right that the other structures simply don’t provide.

The Honest Risks

This wouldn’t be a fair assessment without being direct about the downsides.

Most campaigns will fail to fully achieve their goals. Policy change is hard, slow, and often blocked by forces that outspend any citizen coalition. When a B Corp campaign fails, shareholders lose most of what they put in. The capital loss tax benefit softens that, but it doesn’t eliminate it. You should go in expecting that your investment will depreciate significantly.

Liquidity is limited. These shares won’t trade on any major exchange. If you need your money back mid-campaign, your options are restricted to whatever secondary market exists, which will likely be thin. This is not a liquid asset.

The comparison table above describes what this model can legally do. But the platform itself, the parent company that would form these B Corps, vet the campaigns, build the technology, and provide the compliance infrastructure, doesn’t exist yet. The legal frameworks are proven and established. The execution is not. Building trust in a new civic institution takes time and requires early wins.

And finally, even with fiduciary duty and legal accountability, professional teams can underperform. Lawyers and lobbyists don’t guarantee results. The structure makes failure less likely to be caused by fraud or negligence, but it can’t make policy change easy.

Getting Power Back

None of what’s described in this post requires inventing new law. Regulation Crowdfunding (Reg CF) already allows companies to raise up to $5 million per year from non-accredited investors without full SEC registration. Benefit Corporation statutes already exist in most states. Lobbying registration is routine. The legal infrastructure for all of this is already in place.

What doesn’t exist yet is the organizational layer: a platform that brings these pieces together, vets campaigns for feasibility, forms the B Corps, builds the technology for shareholder management and transparent reporting, and establishes the reputation that makes ordinary people willing to invest in the first wave of campaigns.

That’s a harder problem than the legal one. Trust is built slowly, through transparency and through results. The first campaigns would need to be chosen carefully, with achievable goals and clear success criteria, so that early wins create the credibility that attracts more participants to future campaigns.

But the underlying case is straightforward. Corporations solve the collective action problem every day. They pool money, hire professionals, pursue narrow interests with focus and accountability, and they win. Citizens have the diffuse costs, the genuine motivation, and in aggregate, the money. What they’ve been missing is the structure.

This is one way to build it.