(FORTUNE Magazine) – of Economic Democracy It now turns out that we were under a bit of a misapprehension during those 15,586 days, and that economic democracy is actually a good idea. We started down the wrong road on this issue as a result of personally watching the Vice President of the United States vouchsafe an amazing proposition in New York City on November 8, 1942. Proposition: ''Russia, perceiving some of the abuses of excessive political democracy, has placed strong emphasis on economic democracy.'' As you might imagine, analyses along this line would be instantly off-putting to your average anti-Communist teenager, although we should possibly add that Henry was lucky that night and the supply of persons bearing these demographic characteristics was extremely short and, aside from the present writer, consisted mainly of a few pimply persons who had paid their way into Madison Square Garden expecting to see a basketball game and not a Soviet Friendship Rally. For quite a few decades thereafter, economic democracy continued to sound like a dumb idea. Turning around on an average day, you could observe Tom Hayden's Campaign for Economic Democracy (CED) being supported by Jane Fonda while proving along the way that ED's quintessential meaning was more rent control. Martin Carnoy and Derek Shearer hint in their 1980 book, Economic Democracy, that the stock market better watch out when the authors come to power as the meaning of ED definitely embraces ''democratic control over investment.'' Barry Commoner also pushed the term whilst running for President on the Citizens party platform in 1980 and denouncing corporations that got their profits by inciting people to buy big cars and demand plastic olive stabbers in their martinis. The Catholic bishops' pastoral letter on the U.S. economy also yearns for an ''experiment in economic democracy,'' proclaims that the experiment requires a ''preferential option for the poor,'' unsubtly implies that all this is called for in the Bible, and then earnestly argues we need a level of welfare benefits that does not ''leave recipients poor,'' although to be sure they never exactly tell you where the Bible states the correct level of benefits. As you are possibly noticing along about here, not everybody preaching economic democracy means the same thing by the phrase. Oddly enough, however, the thinkers who get drawn to it tend to have one characteristic in common: none of them like it when people do what they want with their money. They get all depressed when people are allowed to vote their own greenbacks, and they all have arguments to prove that the government would vote them better. But if words mean what words mean, then economic democracy should mean consumer sovereignty. Why did it take 43 years for this noble thought to smite us between the eyes? Hint: we never liked the new Coke either.