It’s actually insane knowing that so many people on this planet live in extreme poverty, in slums, have no safe access to food and water and yet we have many single humans buying 15 cars, villas worth 15 million, yachts etc.
At this point I shouldn’t take me out of the equation because even though I am not rich I still buy useless stuff I might not need and someone else needs the money more than I do.
But I just can’t wrap my head around that a lot of individuals have so much money. No human should have 10x more than an average person needs. What justifies someone making albums and selling them for 15$ and that person earns 20 million $ cause so many people buy the album for 15$. At some point the money should flow to programs or other things that benefit society.
Sure the album is great, thats why it is selling, but why a nurse for example is doing hard work and just will never earn that money. I’m pretty sure most nurses have done a lot more things during their career that SHOULD be worth millions. But thats not the point. Even nurses shouldn’t have more than 10x what they need. No one needs it. It’s great to have but no one needs it.
So if everyone in the US stops buying publically traded companies, it would bankrupt the top 10%?
Only if you’re including the top 10%. The vast majority of retail investing makes little difference even when combined, in comparison to institutional investing.
tax. every. trade.
Abolishing the stock market in general would be nice, or at least moving towards that direction gradually. The wealthy don’t typically get their money from great trading, but parking their money and letting it grow.
The stock market itself isn’t the problem either though, it’s that the wealthy have money and the poor do not. If you want to buy a house and you don’t have the cash for it, you need to borrow from someone…and that means someone who has a lot of money. And you’ll pay interest for the privilege because there is a time value of money. That doesn’t go away without a stock market.
The real solution is to tax the wealth itself, either directly or through taxing the step-up in value after the owner of a stock dies, or a massively increased estate tax.
The stock market shouldn’t be abolished without also abolishing other aspects of Capitalism, yes. Workers must currently take advantage of everything they can within the current system. However, people should be striving towards worker ownership of the Means of Production, and keeping the stock market would allow Capitalism to resurface.
