Under that standard why not just strip you of all your wealth and property and redistribute it? You’re not deserving of anything at all.

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Thrymr a day ago | parent [-]

The argument is that the shareholders who own the majority of a company's stock (by value, not voting rights) should be able to control the company, not a minority owner. It is the corporate structure that allows guaranteed minority control (e.g. Zuckerberg owns something like 13% of Meta, but controls 60% of the voting power). In a free market, why should publicly traded companies be allowed to sell "shares" that are not ownership in the traditional sense?

	▲	monideas a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		In an actual free market the distinction between “public” and “private” company would be really just some transparency/accounting standard or set of standards set by the particular exchange(s) that the shares were traded on. And just to be clear in practice, stocks are not priced based on their voting rights but rather expectations of their future cash flows (dividends) or simply how much the stock is expected to go up or down by. A lot of modern financial activity is nonsense. If you really want to actually understand what a company is you should go look up when corporations became a thing and why. It had to do with various legal protections to stimulate economic activity and tax revenues. All of these modern notions and principles that you’re invoking or basing your arguments on about ownership are most likely just contrived nonsense. These aren’t necessarily eternal principles of anything.
	▲	deaton a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Same reason people should be permitted to buy those same non-voting shares. Because nobody is forcing anyone to.