Quote:
Originally Posted by sholomar
I believe in keeping power from concentrating too much into too few hands. I'd make it harder for entities like Blackrock to buy up large amounts of residential real estate by imposing higher taxes on anything under their ownership.
It's natural for power to concentrate upward and small entities to merge with large ones to form huge organizations... when they get too big they collapse and the cycle starts anew. It's almost a basic law of nature and can be seen in the animal kingdom. It's better to try to manage that as it's happening rather than wait for the bad results that come from a strong concentration of power or wealth.
Wouldn't socialism be the opposite? The large entities own everything? These large corporations essentially become wings of the government in time. There aren't that many vocal socialists on this forum. You might try reddit with this question except most of them are welfare dependents with not a lot of intellectual expertise on the subject but more like emotional rants that lack any historical factual basis.
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I think the bolded part is a major assumption, that I don't see as true. When's Amazon gonna fall? Facebook? Google? No, absent regulation, a "free" market eventually eliminates all competition and monopolies emerge, which are bad for consumers and small businesses alike. Our antitrust regulators have been asleep at the wheel for 40 years. They broke up the Bells, but the Bells are just coalescing all over again! And AT&T is arguably bigger!
We need to better enforce antitrust laws. Amazon needs to be broken apart. Cloud services is one company, the marketplace is another, the goods producer/wholefoods is another. That would be a start.
And I don't know if OP is asking the question to
actual hammer & sickle socialists (not going to find many of those) or just regular liberals chided as socialists on conservative media. As a regular liberal, of course I believe in property rights. Like most Americans (left or right) my property is my biggest asset, at my young age. That's how this system works. No actual liberal policy conflicts with that. I'd argue current liberal policy of upzoning is better for property rights. Why should the government tell you that you can't build a duplex on a single family lot? If I can put my property to more productive profitable) use, why should the government stop this? It's a major form of oppression most just happily accept.