Nobody said anything about nationalizing Amazon. He's talking about people. So to use your Amazon example, if all voters decide Bezos is the worst scrooge in the world, Bezos' shares would be confiscated. All other shareholders still keep their Amazon shares. Amazon still exists and continues business as usual.
It wouldn't be impossible to create a trust that distributes the income it gets from the Amazon shares to UN healthcare and education projects worldwide.
Ok so technically it would be
partial nationalization, not
total nationalization. I maintain, though, that taking privately-owned shares and making them owned by the public is nationalization regardless of magnitude.
Also yes you could use a trust to manage those shares, but it sounds overly complicated to me. Now you have to ensure the trust is managing the shares appropriately, you'd have to deal with the fact that companies (like Amazon) that don't pay dividends you only get funds by selling shares, etc.
- - -
The real issue though is just one of scale. I mean if I sell lemonade in my neighborhood and make $0.20 profit on each $2.00 glass, nobody really cares. If I sell 100 glasses I make $20. Is that wrong? If I sell 100k glasses and make $20k what's the problem? (Incidentally this puts me in the "pay the lemonade sellers a living wage, $20k/year isn't enough on which to live! category).
Say I sell 100M glasses, and ok so I had to build a company to help, so I personally only get $0.02 per glass instead of $0.20 - but I still make $2M! Say I'm Amazon scale and I am selling $100B now, and only personally take a mere 1% of each dollar for myself. I have just pocketed $1B.
Is this unfair? When does it become a problem?
(I am of course playing devil's advocate here - partially because I myself, even though I don't like wealth concentration, I have a difficult time coming up with any kind of "solution" that isn't based on emotion, feeling, or arbitrary "that is OK, but once you get
that much, it's not" thresholds.)