[Edmond]

This is a reductive take, there is the idealized model of the market that the efficient market hypothesis refers to and there is the real one, which can get quite messy.

The market does serve a real purpose, ie deploying capital and providing liquidity.

[VikingCoder]

It serves that purpose, but is the market as it exists today the best way for society to achieve that purpose?

K-shaped recoveries make me think "I wish there were a better way."

But I'm an idiot. So my best idea right now is, "When a business issues stock, they also have to issue an additional 20% to the government, and then we need to keep the tax rate low-ish on dividends, but increase the tax rate on capital gains - hopefully encouraging companies to pay dividends, which the government would receive."

I'd appreciate if someone could tell me why my plan is awful. Because I'm sure it is, but I haven't been able to figure out why it's awful.

[fennecfoxen]

You're proposing to make the market more efficient by giving the politicians more power to boss companies around and pick winners and losers. This is an excellent thesis if you believe central planning is the best way to allocate society's resources and is definitely never a vehicle for official corruption, and taxpayer funds are never ever misused for bailouts and other political favors. If not, such a move will only exacerbate the common complaints of today.

As it turns out, government is already entitled to N% of a company's profit, through corporate taxes. If you are greedy on behalf of the politicians and want N to be a bigger cut of that, that's one thing.

But if politicians want to boss companies around, they already have the option to go on record and pass neutral and generally-applicable laws to do that — and such laws are a fair sight better than the shady backroom deals that will go in when politicians start filling board seats with political apparatchiks. Do you want Donald Trump filling a board seat at Disney with someone like Jared Kushner? If you do, do you want Biden appointing his son Hunter to a board seat at Tesla? Can you imagine the insane conflicts of interest multiplied by the entire economy? It's bad enough already. We really, really don't need to glue together everything shady about big business with everything shadowy about government.

P.S. Oh, and the other thing is that people start raising capital and incorporating in ways that these confiscatory taxes and seizures of control that you propose just don't apply. More private equity, or just incorporating overseas.

P.P.S. Oh, it also favors the companies who don't need to raise capital on the markets: Apple can just take its cash hoarde and invest like crazy, while the next hot Silicon Valley player that would challenge them has to pay 20%.

[VikingCoder]

> You're proposing to make the market more efficient by giving the politicians more power to boss companies around and pick winners and losers.

I'd love to hear your analysis of how Norway is handling their oil reserves.

Huge companies are not paying taxes. That's a problem. You seem to think there's no good solution. I maybe agree. But I'm willing to move on to a bad solution. How about you?

> As it turns out, government is already entitled to N% of a company's profit, through corporate taxes.

If you think in practice that actually works, then you and I are on completely different pages.

> politicians start filling board seats with political apparatchiks

I'm proposing the government receive non-voting shares, or is just restricted from voting. I don't want politicians on boards.

In fact, if you're curious, I think that the major political parties should refuse to endorse anyone who doesn't 100% divest themselves of all future income, instead promising to receive all of their future income through their government pension. And elections should be publicly funded (each citizen gets $100 per year to allocate to whichever politician or party they want to, and that's it). Amend the Constitution to overturn Citizens United. Re-instate the Fairness Doctrine.

> everything shady about big business with everything shadowy about government

That you apparently believe they're not already 100% glued together already shows again that you and I are on completely different pages.

> More private equity, or just incorporating overseas.

Yes, we need a "Uniform Commercial Code" for taxation, around the world. We all suffer that that doesn't exist.

> Apple can just take its cash hoarde and invest like crazy

That problem already exists in many ways. We should never have allowed corporations to get as big as they are, and we should start to break them up. Competition is good.

[fennecfoxen]

Excuse me. You started this by saying you were trying to deploy capital more efficiently. You appear to have abandoned that premise.

[VikingCoder]

Yeah, you can't isolate one aspect of how our global economy works and talk about it in isolation.

And no, I didn't say "I want to deploy capital more efficiently."

I actually used the phrase "is [this] the BEST way" [emphasis added].

We went through a K-shaped recovery. Capital did AWESOME. I'm now asserting that the society should think about better ways to ALLOW capital to be deployed.

[fennecfoxen]

Right, if you want to push your populist agenda of state control in the name of the people™ you should really open with that.

[Edmond]

Well, not sure which country you're writing from but here in the US, private property laws should be enough to nip the idea of government taking shares of a private company.

Dividends and capital gains in general have an inverse relationship, ie dividend paying stocks typically are low growing and as such don't tend to experience much price increase (ie capital gains). You own such shares so you can get the consistent dividend (share of profits) as your return...There may be exceptions but in general this relationship holds.

In a non-bubble market, the capital gains are a reflection of company's growth and expected future profits, thus the stock price is based on present-value-of-future-cashflows model (ideally of course, the reality is often messy).

In other words dividends and capital gains are not inherently in conflict, they merely reflect life-cycles of companies. Of course there are a ton of unprofitable companies on the market currently with high stock prices, there is a larger debate to be had on why that is and how to curtail it.