[igogq425]

> That of course depends on what you mean by "society".

Yes, that is the old discrepancy between society in the true sense and society as imagined by libertarians. A few strangers waiting together for the bus do not constitute a community. If the bus is canceled and they organize a carpool, then a community has formed. If you scale this up and replace personal relationships with institutions, you have a useful concept of society.

For libertarians, society is any large gathering of people who interact with each other in some way (or not), even if they rape and devour each other. If you understand society in this way, it cannot collapse (or is constantly collapsing).

[carlosjobim]

If we remove from life everything that people have access to by industrialization and mass production, then many or most people would say that "society" has collapsed.

That would be the consequence of taxing ownership in companies, since there would be no reason to invest to create big companies. And for industrial society you need big companies. You need giant companies, and taxing owners on the size of the company means that people will not invest their money or effort build industrial scale companies.

The other way to have industrialization is to instead have a command economy, where the government mandates what is to be done.

[ahf8Aithaex7Nai]

> If we remove from life everything that people have access to by industrialization and mass production, then many or most people would say that "society" has collapsed.

I agree.

But I'm not convinced by the next paragraph. You present it as if it were a matter of 0 or 1. But I don't see any good reason why taxation shouldn't be used to make adjustments without immediately collapsing the entire incentive structure for investment. Less profit is still profit. If this argument were valid, there would be no large industries in countries that tax companies more heavily than the US.