I highly recommend you to read the paper billionare argument. The market can stand the liquidation of most of those companies without making them go bankrupt, we don’t want them to stop existing, just to make them smaller and not a threat to democracy.
For the whole scale of wealth I also recommend going through wealth shown to scale
Can billionaires liquidate their assets? Yes, it is theoretically possible
The real question is, who is going to buy the assets?
Let’s say we have a billionaire that owns a billion dollar company.
Could that billionaire sell all their shares, get a billion dollars in cash, and then give it away. Yes, it is possible.
But that billion dollars in cash has to come from somewhere. Either the citizens have to come with a billion dollars in cash or the government.
If the citizens spend a billion to buy the shares, then the government takes the billion in cash from the billionaire, then the government gives a billion back to the citizens. You just basically printed an extra billion dollars for the economy, which causes inflation. Because the citizens now have two billion in stocks and cash, compared to just one billion in cash.
Our fiat money system has flaws, one day it is going to crash.
But Besos’ 100+ billion in Amazon stock is money tied up outside of the economy until he sells.
Forcing him to sell and introduce that money into the economy has repercussions.
You don’t need to make him dump all of his money all at once. Make an investment plan so that sum of money doesn’t disturb the market, extend the dump for two-three years and you can put 100 million without destroying the system
I didn’t say you needed to make them dump it all at once, but no matter how you do it, you’re introducing more money into the economy.
Make an investment plan so that sum of money doesn’t disturb the market
Again, great the market isn’t disturbed and stocks are still worth a billion total. You’re still going to introduce another billion into the economy in “two-three” years by giving it to the poor.
The whole point of taking money from billionaires is to affect the economy. There’s no point in doing it if it’s not going to affect anything.
