The argument is, why do we as a society allow people to amass wealth on the scale of nations. Instead, perhaps that wealth should be democratically owned, and then put towards what the society needs, rather than what one person decides.
Meaning when people start voting in policies that "tax the rich", you will probably be considered one of "them" by the average working class American.
Look no further than the new tax code that basically hurt the "rich" in places like CA and NY.
I don't know exactly what you mean by "social needs" here. you could be referring to a specific level on the mazlow hierarchy, if so, I'd like to know why you pick this specific level as the benchmark. or you might be referring to some more vague concept of societal needs.
the particular definition of "needs" is very important to the validity of the quoted claim. if basic or "social" needs are defined as some absolute standard of living, this will be increasingly easy to fulfill as society grows richer.
I very rarely see anyone talking about needs this way though. instead, the definition of needs seems to move as people at the top grow more wealthy. it seems more likely to me that, as long as billionaires exist and live lavish lifestyles, people will never agree that their needs are being met.
There's a huge number of examples (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_government-owned_compa...).
Essentially, if you think of government subsidies to private companies as assistance in making profit (which happens often when a government wants to promote a certain industry, even if it's only in form of a tax cut), having commercial companies to take care of common utilities is a way to assist the government paying for those utilities.
That was the key point of the original discussion about Gates' money and rising inequality, so the example is very valid.
Most of the time it's because these companies are government-approved monopoly (no other company can enter the market) or because they're heavily subsidised using taxes (no other company can enter the market practically because competing against someone who you fund at the same time is impossible and because the prices are below the actual expenses) and are actually losing huge amounts of money. Typically railways all around Europe are not profitable at all.
Volkswagen is a very special case, but you're partially right. I'd say it's an exception to the rule though.
If we only allowed people to do the things that everyone approved of, we wouldn't actually allow people to do very much at all. Freedom, art, society, and speech would all suffer.