The public corporation is, in a sense, capitalism's answer to the socialist firm. The socialist firm is owned by the state. In concept if not practice, to socialists this means that all citizens are owners. This may be debated when it comes to exercising control over what the socialist firm does, but there is not much to debate about when it comes to bearing the consequences of the firm's operations; all citizens of a socialist country bear some of the cost consequences because they are compelled by taxation or other means of government use of resources to share in these costs. The capitalist public corporation is potentially “everyone's” firm in that any member of the public (even citizens of nations other than that in which the corporation is based) can purchase shares in its equity; yet, unlike the socialist firm, no one is compelled to do so, and, empirically, it has never been the case that all people do so. The number of independent simultaneous owners of shares, whether persons, joint owners, or institutions, is limited by the number of shares outstanding; however, there is no technically or externally imposed upper limit to the number of shares outstanding, and, since privately organized groups of people can arrange voluntarily to jointly own a share, say through some form of investment club or mutual fund, there really is no upper limit to the number of persons who can have a position in the equity shares of a corporation.