> If a corporation does well, the owners of that corporation have demonstrated their merit.
> [merit is defined as] Successfully taking on risk and navigating from that risk to a successful and sustained outcome
I'm not looking for perfect, I'm looking for well-reasoned. This is not a causal relationship, it is definitional. A tautology. You provided a definition of merit here and then claim that anyone who meets the definition has merit. But so what? This is a circular argument because you have not proven that those people are responsible for the success of the corporations they own. In order to prove a casual relationship, you will have to control for all other factors, including the efforts of other employees and even random chance. And this better be a very robust analysis because if you want to put these people in charge of our lives due to their supposed "merit", they better damn well have it.
Because successful and sustained operation of Amazon is achieved by all workers collectively. The owners of Amazon are not necessarily doing the work of Amazon. They are not even directing that work in many cases. I'm an owner of Amazon and I don't do anything for them. So which owners were responsible for the success of Amazon and how do you determine that? What is the threshold for being attributed merit for Amazon's success? 10% of the company? 20%? A majority? A plurality? You have offered no way to objectively figure this out, and instead defined merit in vague terms. What is "successful"? What is "sustained"?
> Simply working at a company is not risky.
Thanks in large part due to workers having a say over the economy! Travel back to the early days of America or even the early 20th century, and you'll be in a world with no worker protections on the job. Unsafe work environments, no regulations, long hours, child labor, no breaks, no leave, no healthcare, no paid sick days, 6 day work weeks, indentured servitude, private corporate armies, company towns, company stores ... I could go on and on. Oh and let's not forget to mention slavery. Keep in mind the same logic and reasoning you are applying here could have been used in the 1800s to put slave owners in charge of the economy. ("Look at how successful their business is! They should be running the entire economy!"). Here is a taste of the climate created by the very same kind of "meritorious" business owners that you want to put in charge today:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...
"Because the doors to the stairwells and exits were locked[1][7] – a common practice at the time to prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks and to reduce theft[8] – many of the workers could not escape from the burning building and jumped from the high windows."
These are the kind of thing that happens when you let "meritorious" owners of corporations do whatever they want. These are the kinds of ideas they come up with. So if you want to put these people in charge of our lives and our economy you will also need to somehow assure us that this kind of violence against workers will not happen again. Would it interest you to know that "CEO" is the job title of a disproportionate number of psychopaths? Take a look at the psychological profiles of a board room and a prison cell block -- you won't find much of a difference in frequency of psychopathic tendencies between the two groups. If we define merit as running a successful corporation, and we select people from that pool to run our economy, you're going to be selecting a disproportionate number of psychopaths in the process. My fear would be that they would go right back to putting chains on the doors and conducting violent attacks against striking workers given the first opportunity.