The economic environment is becoming less favorable for large Western companies

Property rights fundamentalists, like all fundamentalists, have the emotional benefit of experiencing low cognitive dissonance. But if inequality keeps increasing, they're going to be very surprised when they discover that when push comes to shove, most people value other things over property rights.

anyway, it's pretty damn obvious you didn't grow up in one of those marvelous "socialist/communist" societies that look wonderfully on the paper, yet fail miserably and consistently in real life. I've been there, and still getting to position of understanding naivety of some otherwise clever people in this topic (popular in western europe among young who grew up in a different systems, not sure about rest of the world). All these regimes do is bring out the worst in people in it, get into very ineffective modes of rule and centralized management, gradual (or sudden) loss of various freedoms, etc.

Hard work, innovation should be rewarded, not corrupt allegiance to current ruling elite. This mode brings the best out of people in matter of contribution to mankind. What we can improve is the ruleset/boundaries in law, punishing usage of loopholes, off shore taxation and similar. But people on that list didn't get there by avoiding taxes.

it would be nice if some Star Trek utopia would work, but we as humans and mankind are just not there yet, for various reasons. Maybe you are, but according to what you wrote, in contrary.

Now go throw a rock on some McDonald franchise, that will surely make you feel like contributing to well-being of all of us a bit. or even better - move to Russia, it's a fine example of a country sliding back to where it came from, or even better, true communist paradise - North Korea (let me guess, you don't have something important for that, do you)

Waltons might not stack shelves, but they invented vendor managed inventory, which transformed the global supply chain and lead to many, MANY other things coming to reality. They also manage a multi billion dollar company. Perhaps one of those shelf-stacking employees can substitute them for a day. I'm sure it's not a big deal.

I do know several people worth several hudrends of millions tho. They are CEOs of their own companies or companies they helped grow. I don't think anyone works harder than them in their companies. If there is someone, it probably is someone from the upper management.

>What they're good at is business, which is organizing and capturing the value of other people's labor and innovation.

You say that like it's easy-peasy. Everyone can do it, right?

Anyway, his theory on capital accumulation is based on a completely flawed framework, and completely useless for understand what's happening today. (Not a hard criticism of Marx, as most economists were using the same framework by the time - but a hard criticism of anybody that insists on pushing his theories around today.)

As for Jerome Kerviel, take it up with the folks pushing this silly statistic. It's their methodology that counts him as the poorest person in the world.