At the moment, wealth in most western countries is concentrating upwards:
1) employees, especially low-wage employees such as Amazon delivery and warehouse workers, Walmart employees or "gig workers" get exploited (e.g. Walmart is infamous for workers being paid such pittances that they require food stamps to survive)
2) customers are exploited by having to bear the cost of bad products (e.g. getting hacked because Microsoft can't be bothered to do proper QA)
In the meanwhile of that, the companies rake in billions - and many of them are owned to a large part by extremely rich individuals and thus gain (depending on corporate structure) wealth by dividend payments or stock price growth: Jeff Bezos, the Walton family, Elon Musk, Bill Gates to name a few.
The average employee in contrast doesn't see anything from that paper wealth gain: the poorest class doesn't even have enough money to put in a 401k or other investment vehicles, 70% of all stock investments is held by the 10% top earner class (per https://www.forbes.com/sites/teresaghilarducci/2020/08/31/mo...), and wage increases have been scarce prior to the current COVID-resulting crunch.
An implicitly forced break-up would at least redistribute the wealth gain to a broader class of people, and if it were done by levying taxes against the super-rich, the government would actually have money to provide services to its citizens: a decently trained, competent police force, health care access, housing cost assistance, public transport, to name those where the last two years showed the worst issues.
Let's face the truth: Elon Musk alone is worth 288 billion $. Taxing off half of that would still leave him with more money than he can reasonably spend in ten life times and provide money desperately needed to fix a lot of issues. The usual counter-point is that this eliminates the control the owners hold over their company and with it, the driver for success goes away - however that can easily be bypassed by converting the sold-off shares to simple capital-interest-only shares without voting power.
1) employees, especially low-wage employees such as Amazon delivery and warehouse workers, Walmart employees or "gig workers" get exploited (e.g. Walmart is infamous for workers being paid such pittances that they require food stamps to survive)
2) customers are exploited by having to bear the cost of bad products (e.g. getting hacked because Microsoft can't be bothered to do proper QA)
In the meanwhile of that, the companies rake in billions - and many of them are owned to a large part by extremely rich individuals and thus gain (depending on corporate structure) wealth by dividend payments or stock price growth: Jeff Bezos, the Walton family, Elon Musk, Bill Gates to name a few.
The average employee in contrast doesn't see anything from that paper wealth gain: the poorest class doesn't even have enough money to put in a 401k or other investment vehicles, 70% of all stock investments is held by the 10% top earner class (per https://www.forbes.com/sites/teresaghilarducci/2020/08/31/mo...), and wage increases have been scarce prior to the current COVID-resulting crunch.
An implicitly forced break-up would at least redistribute the wealth gain to a broader class of people, and if it were done by levying taxes against the super-rich, the government would actually have money to provide services to its citizens: a decently trained, competent police force, health care access, housing cost assistance, public transport, to name those where the last two years showed the worst issues.
Let's face the truth: Elon Musk alone is worth 288 billion $. Taxing off half of that would still leave him with more money than he can reasonably spend in ten life times and provide money desperately needed to fix a lot of issues. The usual counter-point is that this eliminates the control the owners hold over their company and with it, the driver for success goes away - however that can easily be bypassed by converting the sold-off shares to simple capital-interest-only shares without voting power.