Why are you fixated on taxes? That by the way is a very American attitude. I did not suggest any new taxes. My proposal was to make the wealthiest people's actions more open to public scrutiny.
How open? More open than someone with a regular amount of wealth? How is it enforced? Are you suggesting that once someone reaches above a certain level of wealth that s/he be stripped of his/her human right to privacy? That's ok with you? That's not persecuting success?
Americans also foolishly thought their legal system would catch the criminals. It doesn't even catch the biggest crooks. How many trillions of dollars have been robbed from the American people in the last few years?
First of all, I don't agree with the term, "robbed." If you're talking about corrupt and crooked billionaires, then fine, nobody wants to defend them, but don't make it sound like anybody who's rich robbed their poor workers. These people saw a job opening, drafted up a resume, put on a suit, went to an interview basically begging for a job, and likely did a little dance too when they got the offer. So they have absolutely nothing to stand on when they try to say their employers "robbed" them just because they can't be as rich as their bosses working under them. Leave and go somewhere else if you don't like where you are.
Now then, to the actual point, yeah, these billionaires took trillions out of the US economy for themselves. And what did they give back? They created technology that gave America global supremacy. It's a good deal if you can afford it, otherwise, you can sit back and be a mediocre (or just low tech) irrelevant country forever. That's not what China wants.
What you say is largely true of the US.
Now that's something you admit under pressure LOL
However, is the Chinese Academy of Sciences owned by a billionaire?
Did you not read my post? Never said that it's either big government or billionaires and I didn't say that they compete with each other or that the private sector is the only one able to innovate. The Chinese government has worked miracles but China could badly use another boost from the private sector if it is to compete with the US, one that it's getting more and more as it is.
Even if we ignore China's state-owned universities, we have the example of Huawei, one of the most technologically innovative companies that is owned by its employees.
It's just another way to pay them. Make no mistake, Ren is not some OG commie who keeps $100K per year himself and splits everything with his employees. Ren Zhengfei's net worth is $1.4 billion USD, reinvests the lion's share of the profits back to research and tech development, then pays his employees (in shares) according to market value supply and demand for their skillset. Huawei is owned by its employees but it's still a billionaire on top.
Billionaires are not necessary for technological development.
Find me a technologically advanced country with no billionaires.
And it's technically true because the Chinese government can push technological development without billionaires, but it's not a yes no question rather a question of how fast technological development is moving. Moving too slow is moving backwards in the world of tech and there is no doubt that billionaires in the tech industry are an extra boost in speed of development that is sorely needed in the Sino-US competition.