The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

> How very Marxist. How have those Marxist governments fared in the past?

One lasted about 70 years, turned a country from "agrarian" to "beat the USA to Earth orbit, put landers on the moon and Venus first, roughly equal nuclear capabilities".

The other big one went from "agrarian" to "makes most of your smartphones, e-readers, etc."

But more than that, if your standard for "marxist" is "Laborer coordination and workforce strikes", then the UK, France, and Germany are currently also Marxist. The UK and France brings the number of permanent UN security council members who are "Marxist" to 3 (not 4, because Russia doesn't have those things today), and those plus Germany are the economic backbone of western Europe.

Also India. They've got two different Communist parties, the split being because one wanted to be more Marxist than the other: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_India_(Marx... vs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_India — but by the standard you use here, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_National_Congress is also "Marxist", which will probably annoy all three parties for different reasons. Anyway, they also went from "agrarian" (when they kicked my parents' and grandparents' generations out) to "nuclear powered, industrialised, have a space program".

> They aren’t even aware wealth inequality is the problem.

"Wealth inequality" in the sense that there are several billion people and the net worth of each and every one of them is not exactly the same? That can't be it.

"Wealth inequality is increasing over time" seems like it could be a bad thing, but if that's the problem then what's the cause? Let's consider how that happens:

When you buy something for $100, part of that money goes to labor (the employees who made or distributed it etc.) and part goes to capital (the investors who own the company). Employees generally spend all of their income, so that's not an issue. As it turns out, so do most investors, by population count, because most businesses are small businesses. The owner of the local salon might be getting a dividend from the place but she's using that to buy groceries.

Then there's Larry Ellison. Screw that guy, am I right? Somehow that asshole has more money than it would take to buy the entirety of Boeing with enough left over to buy General Motors and Halliburton put together. And he's not spending it fast enough to make the number go down instead of up.

But wait, how did that happen? He definitely didn't end up with $200B by investing $100 in the Dow and letting it compound for 50 years.

His company did, however, get billions of dollars in government contracts and in general makes its money by selling copyright licenses to its 50 year old database software. In fact, if you look at the list of companies minting all of these billionaires, they're almost all tech companies, relying on a government-granted copyright monopoly that originally expired after 14 years.

And if you look at the ones that aren't tech, they're drug companies (another government-granted monopoly and an industry that has thoroughly captured the regulators) and finance companies (possibly the only industry with more regulatory capture than medicine).

From this we can notice a trend. You get billionaires when the laws impair competition in their industry and the industry consolidates into megacorps. So that's the cause. That's what you need to prevent.

It's like communism, but it's not communism, at least it's not the ultimate form of communism. IMHO, the key difference is that in communist theory, the workers own the means of production through a worker-class-ruled society, not as individuals, and it's still within the framework of a market-oriented economic system.

why don't work?

first, when equity dispersion is accompanied by the dispersion of decision-making power, it can lead to excessively high decision-making costs, reduced efficiency, and lack of competitiveness. However, when equity is dispersed but decision-making power is concentrated (i.e., a dual-class share structure), the interested parties with decision-making power tend to skew the benefits towards themselves.

it's not compatitalbe with the market-oriented economic system.

second, "Altruistic collectivization" is entropy-increasing.

For example, if a company does what you said, when a crisis occurs, it's hard for it to survive. Its products may fail to be sold, and the company may go bankrupt. Other companies can also go bankrupt, but their failure is part of the capitalist system. When they fail, the system as a whole doesn't necessarily fail. But when a "communist-style" company fails, it dies, and it won't come back easily.

More importantly, this is a world dominated by capitalism. It's not just an ideology of companies, it's an ideology of states. For example, when the IMF/WHO comes to a country that is suffering from a global capitalist economic crisis, the IMF will kindly offer its help, but with some conditions, such as requiring you to also accept its help in reforming your economic system.

Although there are still some similar commercial entities that are "owned" collectively, most of them are stagnant. They can survive, but they cannot expand.

What is "fair" is a complicated question (and i'm not sure what this question has to do with my comment)

You think China's economy runs on Marxist-Leninist ideas? It's capitalism with authoritarian characteristics.