A hundred million dollars buys you a life of comfort and luxury. Anyone with a billion has too much influence, imo.
A hundred million dollars buys you a life of comfort and luxury. Anyone with a billion has too much influence, imo.
If you make them cut their assets down to $100 million each then they don't own South Park. And someone else gets to tell them what to write. Or they retire.
So I wonder if the government could levy a stock tax, in which every public stock was diluted by 1% per year, with non-voting stock going into a sovereign wealth fund. This would make for a gradual transition of companies from capitalist-owned to public-owned.
I believe that the best amount of processes for revoking ownership not zero. Revoking not as in "we take n money from you because...", but as in "we stop respecting any of your accumulated ownership rights, but you are free to accumulate new ones". A reset like the one called bankruptcy, just for positives.
Currently, in countries that do have the death sentence, ownership is even more untouchable than life. A (hypothetical..) rich person on death row you could still write their will and it would be respected. People will argue "don't punish the children!", but where's the difference really, between "don't gamble it all away, for the sake of your children" and "don't end up on death row, for the sake of your children"? Apparently, ownership is more sacred than life itself and I find that quite hard to stomach.
Note that I'm not advocating for a world where it's common for rich persons to get stripped whenever the masses get a little envious, or whenever redistribution seems convenient. Just for ac world where there is some last resort process defined and accepted that's less bloody than an all-out revolution. Ancient Rome had certain forms of exilation that went with complete property forfeitment as punishment (in reality: as the price for losing a power struggle I guess)
But once you have that kind of fuck off money and insist on abusing your power, or kowtowing to other people to get more power, and other BS, then you are an evil asshole. There’s a good reason why Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk etc rub people the wrong way. It’s not their wealth.