| 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. |