“The Empire, as a corporation sovereign, shall issue a number of shares of citizen stock equivalent to the number of Imperial citizens. Such shares shall be nontransferable, and issued to each citizen-shareholder of the Empire at the point of their becoming so, and shall confer the rights of citizenship with ownership. Such stock shall be purchased by the new citizen at the current floating market price, and shall be repurchased by the Empire from their estate upon the citizen’s death, or from the citizen directly should they renounce their citizenship on some future date.”
…if they cannot be traded and there aren’t any excess shares floating around… what market price?
Is there another class of shares in the Empire, tradeable and paying a dividend, but nonvoting?
Non-transferable doesn’t mean that there isn’t a market.
The citizen-share comes with the citizenship-shareholdership; thus, the market price floats at the point at which the Empire can fulfil all the obligations it has towards the new citizen-shareholder purchasing that share, which is to say, at the point at which the return on the capital paid for the citizen-share plus the estimated future income stream from (the average) citizen-shareholder ESF payments neatly balances the per-capita cost of providing for those obligations [i.e., the Citizen’s Dividend plus all governance functions], plus reserves.
(The demand side of this particular equation is dependent upon how many qualified would-be citizen-shareholders there are at any given time.)
The market-clearing price, therefore, is that at which the Empire acquires the largest number of new citizen-shareholders to which it can meet its obligations, and everyone’s a winner.