Americans are 5% of the worlds population but pay for 75% of the commercialization of new drugs and procedures. As much as the rest of the world criticizes US healthcare we are fine leaching off it and accepting the new drugs it produces. In fact of the remaining 25% of bringing new stuff to market the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has been responsible for some of it. They don't spend a lot in global terms but they are very effective in what they do spend on.

You can have a social safety net. Tax those who consume more on themselves and divert that consumption to those who can't consume as much.
But don't distort the labor market to force some companies to pay more than the market value. That stifles innovation and the creation of better paying jobs.
Until 50 years ago the easiest way to earn more was to move to an area with better employment opportunities. Unfortunately there are many high paying jobs in places like California or New York that people can't take because of another market distortion called rent controls. These young people can't take a good job because there is no where for them to live.

Public ownership of the means of production is communism. Do you really think you could run a company? Do you think you could, along with your fellow citizens, elect someone among you to run a company? Also it doesn't matter who owns means of production. What matters is consumption. How much you get to consume. When farming efficiency massively increased did the extra farmers starve because they were out of work? No the price of food fell and the extra workers were freed to make other things. It's just that with regulations and rent controls human labor is less flexible than it was 500 years ago but we can fix that.
Also back to your public ownership idea. The poor spend everything they make and then some, the middle class invests a tiny bit, the super rich reinvest almost everything they make. Your government acts like the poorest of the poor, consuming more than they take in. Almost every democratic government would pull a Venezuela, not reinvest any profits and run their businesses into the ground.

Looking at the comments so far, a lot of people think they are entitled to a high paying job.
The most anyone, without coercion, will pay you is the marginal value you add to their product.
If you make something that can be used many times or by many people you are more valuable than someone who makes a single product. So a software developer who's code can run on many computers and be sold many times, or Taylor Swift who can write a single song that is listened to billions of times, is more valuable than someone does one off things like planting a tree.
If you make others more productive. Leaders make more because them being 1% more effective makes many people 1% more effective.
If you control capital you are more valuable. Accountants, bankers and stock brokers who move tens of millions a year are valuable because being just slightly better at these jobs can mean millions of gains.
If machinery, or automation has significantly changed your job recently then you are more valuable than you were before.
If none of those are true then don't expect the value of your labour to have increase.

Workers haven't been getting more productive but the value added by our machines has. When we first industrialized machines made humans more productive and the demand for human labour increased significantly. We moved most of the population from rural areas to cities so the workers could be concentrated around the machines. Even today, machines continue to make some workers extremely valuable. Software coders can write a piece of code and have it run trillions of times on millions of computers. Football players can be watched by hundreds of millions of people with disposable income. However most workers have seen their productivity plateau. House construction workers have seen their productivity decrease over the last 55 years. So it should be no surprise that companies that have very expensive machines that make very valuable products are profitable and don't spend a lot on labour.

https://www.getmonero.org/libr... Also if you have monero you are buying real world illegal stuff with it. So why would you need it on an exchange? That's like registering as a person of interest.

Hydrogen is very difficult to use and extremely dangerous.
At between 18.3% and 59% hydrogen in air the mix is explosive. No other flammable substance has that broad of a range of explosive mix. Hydrogen is extremely easy to ignite compared to even gasoline vapor.
Hydrogen requires either cryogenic or extreme pressure to store any meaning full amounts.
Hydrogen makes metals brittle and can leach through all but the best seals.
Hydrogen is a nightmare to transport and to transfer

Consider the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - It gets exponentially harder to change your delta and hydrogen gives the best impulse. SpaceX, the most successful rocket company ever, has chosen not to use hydrogen. It's storage is that difficult that it doesn't make sense in the most advanced rockets. There's no way it makes sense in a car.

Trains, even if they run on coal are so much more efficient at moving people than individual cars that anything that makes them less useful will lead to more cars being used. A full train can hold hundreds of people. If a fraction of those people choose to use cars instead because the battery train is too expensive or there are few of them then the reduction in pollution by using batteries over a fossil fuel is lost. Heck, even if the other cars are battery cars, over the lifetime the diesel train is better for the environment.

On the one hand, all crypto currencies are a scam (even the ones I contributed to)
On the other is banks lending out my money and paying me almost nothing

On the third hand is the stock brokerage firms lending out my game stop shares, paying me exactly zero interest and not letting me take my shares out.

I might actually have to side with the open scam.

I did security audits and the company that did the second best was a toy company. They did better than any banks, every governments agency we audited and all the defense contractors. The difference was that if this toy company got the security wrong they would lose large amounts of money. If a bank or the government f#$ks up security they don't bear the pain.

Private equity firms provide a service for the economy. If you built a midsize company and want to retire they often offer you more than any other entrepreneur will. They offer liquidity for the market in midsize companies and they offer liquidity in the housing market. As a home seller they allow you to sell faster and potentially at a higher rate.

But why are PE firms able to profit in these markets? Why is there a lack of liquidity that gives them an arbitrage advantage?

In housing it is the high cost of real estate agents, lawyers and the cost of navigating land transfer taxes plus the low risk on the investment because of zoning laws pushing house prices up faster than inflation.

In the midsize company market it is regulations and legal expertise that give them an advantage. In a sane world, a PE firm shouldn't be able to run a heating and cooling company or a small chain of coffee shops or any other 15 to 200 person operation better than someone with expertise in the market. But a PE firm knows how to run the accounting department, they know how to handle payroll and all the HR issues that come with having more than a few employees. They know how to write contracts to avoid high legal costs later. They will make the decision to cut staff to the level to support the lowest amount of work, not the hopeful most amount of orders.

If you want to get ride of most PE firms in the mid market cap range get rid of all the non-safety labour regulations. Eliminate the strangle hold realtors have on the housing market. Make local land registry offices do their f#king job and ensure clean titles with easy, low cost title transfers.

Thank you for confirming one of the causes. You don't want to live like that so you vote to not allow anyone else to live like that. You vote to only allow the housing you aspire to live in. And it is impossible for everyone to live in single family homes and still have functional communities. Sure you can live in a small, older rich neighbourhood near shops and near where you work but most people won't be able to. They will either have no home (and not be able to take a good job) or have to commute long distances to work stuck in traffic with all the other commuters. Public transit won't work because the density won't permit it. These people will get in their cars almost every time they want to do anything, shopping, work, school, entertainment. And then they will raise a generation by driving them to sports practice, crafting, entertainment, friends houses....

It was voters. Voter greed. The majority of voters live in owner occupied dwellings. In Canada that number is 67%. Homes shouldn't be a good investment. They should depreciate with time the way cars do. However through greed and ignorance, home owners used their majority to enact laws and regulations that would restrict the building of competing housing. Home owners feel entitled to house prices going up significantly faster than inflation. In Canada 44% of people plan on using the profit of their house to pay for retirement. The entitlement runs so deep that most non-home owners believe they have a right to buy a house and to also enjoy a huge profit in that house when it goes up in value. This leads to not only the 67% of Canadians wanting most new housing to be single family homes but a good fraction of the remaining 33% also are in favour of zoning that only allows single family homes. Heck, if you talk about allowing apartment buildings you will hear people people opposing it say "I don't want to live in an apartment". Implying that because they don't want to live that way no one should. Or maybe they mean I don't want any cheaper, more convenient housing to compete with my house. Rational thought goes out the window when people are talking about defending their most prize asset.

But that doesn't stop them from suing or doing things that they know will they will lose later in court. The time and money it takes to beat them is victory enough for them.

Who always seems to be right.