Why is 2 a direction to be avoided? Is it really so bad to prevent an individual from having majority voting rights over a corporation which has power on par with most nation states? I’m not sure a billion dollar cap is the answer here but surely there must be some kind of reasonable ceiling. Is it so bad to think that one individual shouldn’t have majority ownership over a company dominant for the US space program? Or control over major international internet access that’s useful during conflicts? Or major social media platforms which provide algorithmic dials to tweak what information is visible?

I think there’s really only a few solutions to it which all involve some kind of divestiture, it just depends on if you want to target corporations or individuals:

1) a new wave of anti-trust ala Lina Khan and breaking up most major tech companies.

2) passing laws limiting the behavior of, and allowing for the punishment of corporations and group agents as a whole. There’s a lot of philosophical work about how to hold a group accountable for their actions, try searching List and Pettit Group Agency. There’s been a lot of development since then but I’m less aware of it.

3. Caps on decision making power (potentially measured via some weighted stock ownership, or wealth more generally) like suggested above. I agree there would be a lot of second order effects here which are beyond the scope of this comment but I think we’ve clearly gone too far in one direction where single individuals are now essentially funding national party midterms, have increasing power over real world conflicts, and any other of the myriad of corruption issues you can find out in the wild.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't see much wrong with any of the options above. Most of my assets aren't liquid either, yet I'm still taxed at a much much higher rate (when compared to total assets) than the top. I have to make decisions like "how much will I need good health care coverage next year?", which I shouldn't have to say isn't "ideal" either.

How would losing ownership be a bad thing?

Isn't that exactly what we are trying to achieve by re-distributing the wealth, and avoiding that few people have such huge ownership that they have more power than governments ?

We are still living in a middle-age system, where the lords don't own lands but stocks and companies, but they still dictate the laws.

A nice idea I heard is to introduce a minimum tax rate based on wealth. Let’s say the magic number is 0.5%. Then you say, every individual (over some threshold etc) needs to pay max(normal tax calculation, 0.5% of wealth) .

What I like about it is that it doesn’t penalize people who already pay taxes. It’s a lower bound, not an extra.

What makes me weary about any such tax is that in practice, it seems to target the broad middle class - people who have enough assets to be interesting to the tax man, but who don’t have enough to hide it or avoid taxes.

They can pay with shares into a state fund and the state could even return the voting power. It can be done if we want it. That was in a proposal in French legislation for example, so it's not 100% crazy and to me it seems completely natural.

How is that not the obvious comeback to the argument "wealth is stocks so we can't tax it"? Is there an obvious downside?

You didn't really highlight how any of this is a problem? Yes, if you sell some of your assets, whatever kind, to pay for taxes then you'll have less assets in the end. That's literally how taxes work.

> This would mean that you lose some ownership year by year.

What's the problem? It's not like you'll have to sell over 50%. Even then the are schemes for non-voting shares. But when close to 1% of population works for Amazon, maybe forced sharing of ownership isn't a bad idea.

I don't understand the problem.

Besides any argument about fairness, wealth inequality is highly destabilizing and historically has only been corrected by revolutions, wars, crises etc.

If a few billionaires need to sell stocks to avoid such an outcome, that seems quite desirable to me.

Why is 2 not ideal? That is exactly what should happen.

Wealth concentration is a problem because wealth concentration is power concentration.

Why should a few dudes have autocratic control of entire industries?

If you force them to sell off their stakes over time through a wealth tax, you make the economy more democratic.

Um, tough, if you want to be a billionaire, you get to sell a tiny fraction of your assets to pay taxes. If they don't want to sell assets, they can pay themselves a larger salary or something. Or, like you said, take loans which is literally what they do to afford their lifestyles, just use that for taxes. I don't really care which.

"Taxing the rich" is literally solving the thing that is a problem today.

You know what is actually not ideal?

Having hordes of people in poverty while we bend over backwards to not inconvenience the rich with "selling stocks" to pay taxes".

The primary benefit of massive wealth is power. It's an intangible, but it's very real. It can't be dismissed as paper wealth.

And it's not like taxes destroy wealth. Distributing from the person who owns the ice cream machine to the person buying ice cream puts the money in the hands of the person far more likely to spend it quickly. On ice cream, making the business case for owning ice cream machines better, not worse.

> a country can't exactly tax the poor.

Reality would like a word with you...

> If you take real resources away from the person who owns the McDonald's ice cream machine in real terms I have a hard time seeing how it won't come out of the lifestyle of the dude buying icecream.

What you're describing is called "Trickle Down Economics", and has led to 50 years of economic failure.

a country can't exactly tax the poor.

Tell me you've never met a modern Republican without telling me you've met a Republican.

You'd probably want to have it be dynamic in some way, as most monetary systems that mostly work tend to have some level of inflation to keep things moving.

But yes. Something like that.

Can we just get rid of these bots?

Taxing the rich tends to do that. Or, at least when we did tax the rich, wealth distribution was better (though still far from ideal, IMO).

Or educate, promote or even mandate that a share of a company must be given to the employees of said company.

If you "fool" a hundred thousand individuals to work for a company on a wage and through their work the company ends up been valued at a billion, you become a billionaire. Wouldn't they deserve a bigger cut of the fruit of their labor?

The fastest way to distribute wealth isn't taxes on wealth, it's a better distribution of the wealth generated by labor on the contract that the employee signs.

Taking a bit more money from the ultra wealthy is not going to stop Tesla and SpaceX. That's just ridiculous. Particularly for those two who only exist due to government subsidies.

It's not confiscating a fraction of Tesla, it's forcing Elon to give up some of his share of Tesla. He doesn't give it to the government, he sells it. To whoever wants to buy.

Could also take dividends, that would be more of a tax on the company itself which is what people usually object to in this discussion. Now the company basically can't grow as fast because it has to satisfy the tax burden for the owner. But that's a choice the owner makes.