No, scale means you have big corporations with millions of employees. It does not have to mean you have a small handful of people owning more wealth than the entire GDP of Russia.

perhaps russia should try to grow a bit :capitalist-laugh:

jokes aside, for my first point (how hard it is for expropriating) i have to point out that i see no difference between having a large amount of small companies owned by various individuals and having a small amount of large companies owned by larger groups of people - in the end, both mean "resistance from more people" at the time of expropriation, which is something i want to avoid as much as possible

for instance, i do believe that the homestead acts played a large part in making america such a rabidly conservative/reactionary/anticommunist country, once you give a huge amount of people petty bourgeois status you get yourself a dangerously large reactionary group

that's why i mentioned the collectivization, and i agree it's easier to expropriate in the case of industry, but that doesn't mean you won't have the same amount of discontent

so that makes this point for how i think it's necessary to have the smallest amount of business owners you can

naturally, a small amount of business owners doesn't mean they have to be billionaires, which leads to my second point:

If the CPC expropriated the wealth they wouldn’t have to worry about creating the right conditions for billionaires to invest, they would just spend the money.

as a quick note, they don't have to expropriate wealth to do any investment as they already use MMT for this - this is how they've financed infrastructure, where capital has usually been pretty shit at doing

the thing is, i agree with marx when he says capitalists are good at one thing, and one thing only: increasing productivity, obviously up to a point where it causes falling rates of profit and makes the profit motive unsustainable/obsolete

so my second point is: i do think these cunts are better than the CPC at doing the reinvestment on their own companies - again, up to a certain point, which places like america have already reached in many sectors (which is why you have aberrations like planned obsolescence - it's just a consequence of "excess productivity" as it relates to profit margins, and one of the reasons why they're migrating to the financial sector and relying on egregious shit like stock buybacks, though buybacks are a bit more complicated than that)

this is what the CPC means by "moderately prosperous" obviously - productive enough that the profit motive is no longer a necessary incentive. but they haven't got there yet, unlike other countries

so, 1) having a small amount of business owners is better, and 2) letting those business owners decide how to use their money is fine up to a certain point (which china hasn't reached yet), which leads to my third point:

letting independent entities control large amounts of capital creates more potential problems than it solves.

the CPC has an extremely tight grip on the financial sector. these guys control a large amount of capital, it's true, and having that capital means the CPC will normally try to negotiate with them rather than outright imposing anything unless their hands are forced (such as in the case of xiao jianhua)

but i think you're overestimating the danger from these guys having a lot of high value assets. it's obviously a tight rope, as is everything, but so far the CPC seems to be using capitalists and not the other way around

so, to sum it up:

1. the government doesn't need to tax billionaires to fund any investments, so having billionaires doesn't really mean anything here

2. i think at the current stage, and obviously the previous ones, heavy taxes on wealth would be counter-productive, though they've gone far enough that the need for heavy loans like in the 90s isn't there anymore (this is a criticism i have of how the party relates to the billionaires currently - though they have started to move away from this, they took a bit too long and still do it far too much)

3. i think you're overstating the power that their asset values give them in china, especially given how tightly controlled their financial sector is, but this is obviously hard to quantify and we'll have to see