I'm not sure what you mean by "government-enforced ownership." A main role of government is to HELP the rich everyone with police, judges and prisons so that the mob can't rush in and seize the rich's property.
FIFY.
Which is to say, when the mob rushes in and seizes the rich's property, who exactly do you think it is that winds up doing grunt work in Paris while going from salon to salon trying to convince anyone who'll listen to help restore them to their former riches, and who exactly do you think it is that's still trapped in Russia, starving to death in the resulting famine?
The way forward to reduce (not eliminate) income inequality is by
- Making tax codes more progressive. People earning $10 million annually should pay at least a slightly higher tax rate than those making do with just $1 million annually.
This is a popular sentiment. I find it incomprehensible except as an expression of unalloyed outgroup hostility, or else perhaps as a strategic attempt to divide and conquer by creating a conflict of interests. Why on earth should the government involve itself in interfering with the results of the market
specifically on behalf of those making $1 million a year, people who don't need the help, people who are evidently entirely capable of simultaneously standing on their own feet while also paying their full share of a citizen's obligation to help cover the general overhead of maintaining a functioning society?
The moral case for a progressive tax is two-fold. First, it's a way to correct for the economic insanity western civilization has gotten itself into of taxing workers on their
income instead of on their
profit: the excess of their income over the necessary expenses they must pay in order to maintain that income stream. We know better than to tax businesses that way. It's absurd. If we taxed a grocery store on its revenue and didn't first subtract out what it had to pay to get all that food on the shelves, we wouldn't have grocery stores. The custom of not having food, housing and medicine tax-deductible for regular taxpayers is idiotic. Progressive tax rates at the low end of the income scale help correct for that.
And second, a progressive tax is a compassionate way to give a break to the workers at the margins, those for whom paying the same tax rate as prosperous people
would be a hardship. Progressive tax rates at the low end of the income scale do that quite effectively.
But neither of those reasons has any bearing on people making $1 million a year. So what moral justification is there for progressive tax rates at the high end of the income scale?
Corporations should pay higher tax.
A corporation is a legal fiction. When you give money to a corporation you're actually giving it to the owners, the shareholders. Why should that income be taxed twice, as corporate tax and then again as a tax on dividends, just because of an accounting convention? There's a fair answer to that -- a corporation tax can be seen as a Pigovian tax, a payment for the externalities of limited liability -- but what's the right price for that? "Higher" is not a calculation; it's just another expression of outgroup hostility.
(In the global economy, taxes need to be "in sync" across countries, but the U.S. is dragging its feet.)
Actually the U.S. is pretty much in the middle of the pack.
- Improving public schools. It is a shame that the property tax revenue from rich neighborhoods is spent educating rich kids, while the poor kids who need a good education the most must make do with the property tax raised from their poor neighborhood. Those tax funds should be pooled city-wide, state-wide or even nation-wide.
Then again, what justification is there for treating public schools as different from the rest of government functions and paying for them with property tax instead of with a suitably increased income tax? Taxing people on their property instead of on their income (or better, their profit) is just a regressive way to screw over those, usually the elderly, who are income-poor but became land-rich when property values rose. Which is to say, it's a way to force people to give up their homes because other people want them more.
- I'm not a big fan of minimum wage laws, but that is one popular approach to reducing income inequality.
Like most approaches to reducing income inequality, raising the minimum wage is actually a way to split up the poor and reduce income inequality for some of them while increasing income inequality for others. Reducing income inequality is a difficult technical problem and if people really cared about it they'd hand designing the measures for it over to economists instead of leaving it up to politicians and popular opinion. We might as well design suspension bridges by Twitter.
It is a right-wing fantasy to think that progressives want to drag down billionaires rather than improving the lot of the under-privileged.
It's not a fantasy and it's not right-wing -- it's a fact that should be self-evident to every liberal who read your post. It isn't right-wingers' fault that
the very first item on your list was about how $1 million earners should be treated better than $10 million earners. That was not about improving the lot of the under-privileged.