this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2025
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Ive often seen individuals on the left talking about how billionares shouldnt exist etc., but when probed on how that could be accomplished the answer is usually just taxes or guillotines. I dont think either is great.

What if instead, corporations were made to be unable to be sold or owned. Initially theyre made to default to popular election for their board, and after that they can set up a charter or adopt a standard one, ratified by majority vote of their employees.

Bank collapse would probably follow, how could that be remedied? Maybe match the banks invalidated stocks with bonds?

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[–] bonus_crab@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Well, if you want to tax billionares out of existance u need a wealth tax, aka unrealized gains.

taxing unrealized gains is just going to force individuals to sell their business to liquidate the cash to pay their taxes. Institutional traders will buy them up, so youre universally taking control out of the hands of people and giving it to banks and hedgefunds, which will just end up owning eachother.

I dont think any billionares exist that made their money in some other way than selling stocks in a business they acquired at a lower value, aside from inheritance or divorce.

Maybe you do implement a wealth tax anyway though, but you do it after abolishing stocks, just to catch the loopholes.

[–] drmoose@lemmy.world 1 points 5 hours ago

You're overthining. There aren't enough billionaires for abstracts like this. Just create specific teams fir evaluating each individual billionaire's due.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

In theory, the banks and funds in question should themselves be owned by ordinary people. As it stands, ordinary-ish people own most things anyway; even as grotesquely rich as billionares are, there's only ~2000 of them known.

I do kind of wonder if you could have a group of companies that buy back all the shares external entities own in them. I can't say if it's ever happened, though.