The only 'solution' is for everyone to be equally poor, because wealth will never be distributed evenly. Those that generate wealth will not stand to lose it, and they have the options to make sure it doesn't happen.
This is true. However you got the following conclusion wrong.
People with power will continue to concentrate it. The solution isn't to prevent people from gaining power (or wealth) - the solution is it have an opposite force always pushing to distribute power again.
So in relative terms people with good ideas, or financial success can gain wealth or power relative to their peers as a reward for success, but the overall system must ensure that on absolute terms that power or success doesn't continuously consolidate and become to heavy.
That is why antitrust, term limits, and yes progressive taxation are some of the most important things a society can do. Checks against power consolidation are the only ways to keep a society functioning with any sort of efficiency.
It's the old school mario cart approach. Yes someone can win the race, but the system also says the further ahead you get, the more headwinds you face and the further behind you are, the more likely you get a tail wind. It's the same reason why sports leagues have hard salary caps and specifically draft picks are distributed in reverse order of success/performance. It's the only way to get actual competition. The same holds in business and society in general. Otherwise you end up with a monopoly or oligopoly stamping out competition.
The only form of free-market competition is enforced free-market competition.
(In tech we are relatively lucky that people's careers tend to be longer than the relevant oligopolies)
Its personal computing operating system has had a 80%+ market share since at least the early 90s.
No bailouts. No special treatment.
The tricky part is special treatment isn't always obvious. High minimum wage, insurance requirements and regulatory compliance are all things that are easy for large corps to follow but very costly for cash strapped startups. Often it is the large corps asking for more rules which is a ladder pull of sorts. There are many businesses that just haven't started because they don't pencil out with the high cost of compliance.
This is the natural end result of the system we are currently stuck with. It just takes time. Every year, we are inching closer to a world where one person owns everything. I don’t expect to see it in my lifetime or the next generation’s lifetime, but maybe within a century or two, if we continue down the track we are on.
That is of course the other extreme end. Very few people want fully even distribution of wealth, just a reasonable and fair distribution. What exactly is "reasonable and fair" is a whole different discussion.
People who are unsuccessful despite working hard and doing good work recognize the unfairness of the situation… And people who are successful tend to like believing that luck didn’t have that much to do with their success.
Wealth as in "having a lot of money" is only as old as money itself. Most of human history has everybody being "poor" in that sense. I'm no primitivist, but there is something nice about the idea of removing the kind of wealth you can calculate with a calculator from the world. Hard to argue i think that it wouldn't be better, even if you don't think the logistics of it will work. It's a utopian thought we should certainly strive for though. What other beautiful future can one even imagine in the long term?
But unlike our money, these tokens have some naturally occuring soft limits. There is only so much grain anyone will find value in at any given time. Therefore, the amount one could influence another individual with it had some limits. And the amouny of tokens one sloshed into "the market" quickly erroded their vakue.
What this meant was, yes society owed you a debt of commodities but how much that debt waa transactable to different areas was limited and how much you could lean on it at any given time was limited as well.
A well off plantation owner could work very hard, hit a lucky year and dump a ton of grain into the silo. The tokens he got from this would certainly buy him some influence. He could buy a lot of things certain goods would still be unavailable to him. He could pay a lot of bribes but a lot of people would only need so many grain tokens. This farmer contributed a value of surplua grain and the silo tokens can pay him back in many benefits but the further the dealings get from grain, the more limited his power. Ultimately the silo owes him a debt of grain.
Our modern conceot of money obliterates those limits. A clerk at a desk earns the same tokens as a pastor or a soldier or a CEO. Those tokens are then convertible into anything no matter how disparate: food, housing, healthcare, etc. So instead of a commodity debt, owed by a silo, each worker earns a social debt. Effectively carried by all of us. Money is debt.
This means that accomplishing something which leads to a high indebtedness in one area means society owes you a lot in all areas. Again, this seems normal to us but if we think about a distribution of goods that is proportional to the amount and kinds of work people do, it doesn't make much sense. Or at least it seems quite strange and prone to manipulation.
Can the richest person on earth in a free society, get a personal armed forces with the state of the art platforms directly under their control today? They will be unable to indulge in this aspect as a splurge, because their money is restricted.
The article speaks about how it might finish in blood bath of the starving crowd decapiting anything presumably on the side of the rich.
It doesn't speacks about a scenario of richest using drone army to make genocide of superfluous plebeans, or using more soft long term means like birth control, great assistance to euthanasia for those who are suffering extrem economical misery as sole alternative and so on.
With great powers comes ability to make great atrocities.
The article also fails to mention biodiversity collapse as it is being crushed by the human species oligopoly.