It's not just about that. Perhaps there are benefits in having control of the company that make the shares more valuable than just the profit would make it out to be. Perhaps there's prestige in owning these shares.
Shares are often a much more tax efficient way of rewarding employees and having an actual share has numerous advantage's in term of morale retention and so on.
Also shares keep on producing income after you have left a company.
This is similar in motivation to why Google separated out its shares - sometimes you want to let people invest without any associated political power of traditional stocks. While there's different types of stocks beyond even these like preferred, restricted, common, etc. it's nice to be able to separate those that have strictly economic concerns from those that have more business investment with shares.
Are shares assets that can be used as security in economic transactions? They sure are. Does that give such owners of shares massive economic leverage? It sure does. Do people without such assets find themselves worse off in economic transactions? Of course. I think you understand those things quite well.
As a minority shareholder, you still have voting rights. And it's much easier to build a diverse share portfolio to hedge against mismanagement from any particular company.
And shares tend to not require maintenance unlike real estate. But unlike real estate, shares can disappear if many companies tank. But land you own won't ever disappear unless war or catastrophic natural disasters happen.
Taxes and corporate governance is certainly complicated, but the basic concept of a share is not.
If you work through some common scenarios, you'll see how the concept of owning a 'percentage' breaks down really quickly, and the concept of owning a 'share' actually keeps things very simple.
There's nothing about it that's for the purpose of fucking people out of money, but like many things in life, it's perfectly possible to achieve that effect.
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