[makomk]

Wealth is indeed power rather than simply a collection of material goods, and most of all the wealth this article talks about is the power to run specific large businesses in the way those specific wealthy people want. That is, the way capitalism works in this case is that control over businesses and the ability to dictate how they allocate resources is given to individuals who are in some sense "successful" at running those businesses in that they manage to make lots of revenue and convince investors they'll do a good job of continuing to do so going forward.

The reasons why this system might be attractive may become more obvious if we consider some alternatives. For example, in Russia currently the power to control big businesses is given to politically well connected "oligarchs", and anyone whose business success exceeds their political influence tends to find that business is taken off them and given to someone much less capable but better connected. This does not lead to a functining economy. (There's a popular idea on the left that capitalism has oligarchs too which we just don't call that, which misses this important difference.) We could also imagine a system where this power is distributed democratically, and everyone in the country gets a say in how all the businesses are run. The problem with this is that in order to make decisions that are as well informed as even just some dude who happened to be in the right place at the right time, every member of the public would have to dedicate as much time to informing themselves as all of those random dudes collectively do already. That is, it's structurally impossible to just distribute this power out to everyone.

Also, most of the things that populist campaigners claim that wealth redistribution will achieve are about more material goods for everyone which relies on those material goods or at least the capacity to produce them being there already and just horded by the super-rich - just handing out power will not satisfy people's expectations for wealth redistribution and wealth taxes.

[lapcat]

You seem to be presenting some false dichotomies here. I'm not calling for the abolition of privately owned businesses. I'm an entrepreneur myself.

It's crucial to note a couple of things:

(1) The world's wealthiest people accumulated their wealth from publicly owned corporations, not from privately owned businesses. In fact, there are famous cases where a publicly owned corporation ousted its own founder, e.g., Apple and Uber.

(2) The world's wealthiest people get even wealthier after they stop running businesses. Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, et al., are wealthier now when "retired" than when they were CEOs! Gates even claimed he's giving most of his money away, but somehow that's having the opposite effect. Gates can't give money away faster than he makes it, despite "retirement".

The point is not necessarily to "socialize" businesses. The point is to limit the size of businesses and of individual accumulations of wealth, for the good of society as a whole, to prevent them from accumulating too much power over society. One of the ways to do that is via progressive taxation that heavily taxes higher amounts of income and wealth. It's not confiscating the business or individual wealth as a whole; it's just trimming off the edges, so to speak.

I personally feel that publicly owned corporations are a problem and should be discouraged. They're effectively the tragedy of the commons. I prefer privately owned businesses. And it's more difficult for privately owned businesses to become huge, because there's never an influx of public capital.

> control over businesses and the ability to dictate how they allocate resources is given to individuals who are in some sense "successful" at running those businesses

You've got cause and effect reversed. The control comes first, the success comes later.

> Also, most of the things that populist campaigners claim that wealth redistribution will achieve are about more material goods for everyone which relies on those material goods or at least the capacity to produce them being there already and just horded by the super-rich - just handing out power will not satisfy people's expectations for wealth redistribution and wealth taxes.

My point was that the ultra-wealthy are motivated by power rather than material goods, because all of their material desires are already satisfied.

Of course non-wealthy people are motivated by material needs, because theirs haven't been satisfied. Indeed, wealth inequality results in hunger, homelessless, lack of health care, situations that we would not tolerate if everyone were equal and in the same boat.