Incentive vs. Punishment

Greed is a flaw in the human character, not a function of any political or socioeconomic philosophy. No matter what form of governance operates in a particular country, there will always be people who try to take as much as they can from the available wealth. In autocratic societies like Socialism and Communism, those people are mostly concentrated in the ruling class, while the non-ruling population usually struggles in poverty from which they cannot free themselves, because the government controls what they can and cannot have.  In a free-market society, those who control the economic output are usually those who have the most wealth, and generally control only what their employees can and cannot have, at least financially. In a free-market society it is the Law of Supply and Demand that operates in business, such that if an employing entity does not provide its employees with sufficient reward for the work provided, those employees are free to seek employment elsewhere. A business without sufficient employees cannot survive for long.

In any economy, wealth is generated by the entities who provide products and/or services needed or wanted by the general population. Wealth is not finite. The more there are entities providing products or services, the more wealth is generated. Government does not generate wealth, it takes it from those producing it. In autocratic societies under Communism or Socialism, the government owns most of the means of production. History has yet to show that these systems are in any way beneficial to the population: universal poverty and chronic shortages of materials are the usual result. In an ideal society, there should be incentives to encourage more people to generate wealth (ie, create new businesses), not punishments in the form of stifling regulations that prevent this from happening. The objective is to make use of the natural tendency toward greed so that all people who want to rise economically can do so. The more people who are generating wealth, the more the government can take if it so chooses, but there, too, the government has to weigh the benefits of taking wealth from those generating it against taking too much, which will cause the wealth generators to stop producing. It is the free-market system that has resulted in the greatest expansion of upward mobility and wealth generation in the history of the world. We need to nurture it and protect it, not punish it.