Philip Wood, while it is true that you cannot regulate or tax one company into profit, you can tax and regulate one company to make your entire economy more or less profitable. For instance, if one company is being destructive to your economy, you can stop the destruction done by that one company. Stopping the destruction is a net benefit to the economy overall.

Twitter is a pivate for profit corporation. Mr. Musk offered to purchase the company and the board of directors elected to sell it to him. Most people do not undrstand how business is organized. The purpose of EVERY business (whether for profit or non profit) is to make a profit. A for profit company distributes its profits to its owners and or reinvests it into the company-a non profit uses its profits to provide more benefits and upgrade its organization. Example: a senior center may offer more programs or upgrade its famicilities to better provide for its members. No matter which, it must make a profit or go out of business. I worked in both. You cannot regulate nor tax yourself into prosperity. An old indian proverb: Only the white man would cut off the bottom of a blanket and sew it on the top and think that he had a longer blanket.

Talk about avoiding issues. Where was the discussion of controlling abusive market power as a cause of inflation?

Professor Wolff expresses an important truth about the character of the socio-political arrangements and institutions operative in the United States. That truth is the existence of entrenched privilege and an inherently undemocratic structure. These problems can be traced to the “original intent” of the framers of the federal government and the state governments created following independence from Great Britain. It required a long civil war to establish that the sovereignty of individual states is limited, that under the federal constitution whatever rights were protected belonged to a larger segment of the population than white male landowners. It took another half century for the suffrage to be extended to female adults. And, it took almost another half century for the passage of a law that ostensibly guaranteed civil rights to all persons regardless of gender, ethnicity, race or religious beliefs.

The social and economic problems described by Professor Wolff are systemic. I am reminded of what the philosopher Mortimer J. Adler wrote about the quest to create the just society. By “just society” Adler meant one in which political and economic rights were universally enjoyed. This required the appropriate balance under law between rights to property and to human rights. Here, there is an essential connection between how under law classes of property are defined as societal versus individual.

Clearly, what we produce by our labor and with the assistance of whatever capital tools we possess ought to be treated as our legitimate private property. It is also clear (or ought to be clear) that nature ought to be treated as a commons from which private property is produced. What, then, is the just means of allocating to individuals access to nature (i.e., to land and to natural resources)? In a society that grants fee simple ownership to nature, the means has to be that of taxation. As every parcel or tract of land has a potential annual rental value that is societally rather than individually created, this rental value rightfully belongs to society. Justice requires that this rental value is collected to pay for public goods and services. This, I argue, is a system reform that should be at the top of the list for all those committed to creating the just society.