Did I say mandatory? I meant optional! You’re “free” to die in a cardboard box under a freeway as a market capitalist scarecrow warning to the other ants so they keep showing up to make us more!
Did I say mandatory? I meant optional! You’re “free” to die in a cardboard box under a freeway as a market capitalist scarecrow warning to the other ants so they keep showing up to make us more!
You absolutely can have unrealized gains without a stock market. Build a business. Someone wants to buy it from you for $150,000 this year, someone else wants to buy it from you for $250,000 next year, you have unrealized gains of $100,000 from last year to this year.
What we can do is apply an annual wealth tax of 1% of all registered securities, (stocks, bonds, etc) and exempt the first $10 million of each natural person. You don’t have to sell your shares; the SEC knows how much you’re holding, and will transfer them automatically to IRS liquidators, who will resell them on the open market in small lots, no more than 1% of total traded volume per month.
Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk lose 1% of their empires per year until they are worth less than $10 million.
They would shit themselves screaming despite how easily they could handle it
There’s your problem. Business shouldn’t be bought and sold either.
That’s not my preferred solution, but I’d take it over nothing.
What is your “preferred solution”?
The idea that businesses shouldn’t be bought or sold is not a solution at all.
A moratorium on IPOs, and purchasing of businesses in any form. Then, all the monopolies like Google, apple, meta, etc need to be broken up. And then, these companies need to be switched to being employee owned where possible.
Slowly over time all businesses will die off, but the ones controlled with stocks will never be replaced. After a few decades of this, the only businesses that will be left will be ones not controlled through stocks or personal ownership.
The economy needs to serve the needs of the people, not the rich.
Sure it is. The current system has led to a shell game designed to steal the worker’s wealth and funnel it to the rich. It’s led to extreme wealth inequality. It’s led to situations in which it is extremely difficult to tax the rich. It’s led to politicians who personally enrich themselves because they constantly have insider knowledge. It’s led to business that hoard extreme profits, just to hand them over to the already rich shareholders.
We don’t need businesses to be able to be bought and sold. However we do need strength to be given to labor.
You don’t seem to understand that the overwhelming majority of businesses are sole proprietorships.
You don’t seem to understand that the second most common type of business is a simple partnership.
You don’t seem to understand that what you are describing would require a prohibition on converting a sole proprietorship into a partnership, and vice versa. Once you organize a small, home-based business, you can’t later take on a partner, to share risks and rewards.
Worker-owned businesses are now prohibited, because workers can’t transfer their ownership to other workers when they join or leave. Co-ops are prohibited, same reason.
No, I’m afraid that you haven’t put much actual thought into this idea. In your zeal to tax the richest among us, you’ve just made it so that they are the only ones capable of starting a business with any chance of success.