Dan Barrecchia

The paper says redistributing the wealth of the 735 richest people would “only” give every single person $14,000. But that would be amazing. filed 12 April 2022 in EconomicsUncategorized The Wall Street Journal has a new editorial that makes a very compelling argument that we should seize the wealth of America’s billionaires and give it to the poor. Of course, this is not what the WSJ thinks it is arguing.

Michael Hiltzik is a Pulitzer Prize-winning business columnist at the Los Angeles Times. His latest book is Iron Empires: Robber Barons, Railroads, and The Making of Modern America. He attracted controversy for a recent column and tweets arguing that the COVID-19 deaths of anti-vaxxers should be publicly mocked. He recently joined Current Affairs editor in chief Nathan J. Robinson on an episode of the Current Affairs podcast to defend his stance.

Who owns a corporation? According to elementary students of economics and Wall Street financiers alike, the answer to this question is as simple as it is intuitive: the shareholders. The standard narrative goes like this: a share is a “piece of a company.” Accordingly, the holders of those shares are the company’s collective owners.