> Can you provide some evidence? Germany, the country being discussed, is exceptionally productive, as is Japan and other countries with a wide variety of corporate governance.

Japan is actually exceptionally not productive. The Japanese people have a reputation for industriousness, but their businesses are actually managed quite poorly. You can see this in their GDP (per capita) growth. Let's look at some plots:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?end=2017...

These are all the countries we're talking about. Japan's GDP has been flat for a couple of decades now. Since the mid-90s, when they misinterpreted their credit expansion as evidence of their success and over-leveraged themselves buying foreign assets they couldn't afford. Germany has been more responsible, but you can see quite clearly that their productivity growth has been spiky, unstable, and plateauing for the last few years. Yes, overall their GDP per capita is quite high, as is Japan's, but I would attribute that more to a cultural bent towards work ethic and education, to generate consistent growth takes innovation, and innovation requires more than an educated populace and work ethic. It requires a friendly regulatory environment and an incentive structure that rewards people for innovating.

On the other hand, look at the US and China. Those are almost impossibly smooth curves. Ya, China is still much lower in absolute terms, but their growth is steady and substantial (notably, since the introduction of capitalist reforms). China is still very much a mixed economy, but you have to look at what they regulate, and how. The Chinese government doesn't regulate their labor market very much, and they certainly don't attempt to impose any sort of co-determination with workers. They want Chinese companies to align themselves with the interest of China as a country (which generally means censorship, and sometimes arbitrarily telling them to stay out of or get into certain markets). But they don't try to tip the scales in favor of labor over capital, at least not in terms of decision making about the businesses themselves.

Now, this is all a fine narrative i've constructed, but it's really quite difficult to prove something like this. There's lots of confounding variables, and lots of stuff going on. China and the US both have much larger populations, for instance. China does have some labor regulations that I would consider draconian and a drag on productivity (you have to give 30 days of notice to fire someone, you can only fire people for certain legally specified reasons, and you have to pay severance). But in my view at least, that's a substantially smaller drag than something like work councils, but it's important to state that it is really hard to prove these things.

A possibly better measure of productivity is something called 'Total Factor Productivity'. Which sort of says: take the stuff your country produced, subtract the stuff it bought and the difference is your total factor productivity, i.e. how much value is your labor force adding to stuff. Here are the plots for the countries in question:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=lbGq

In this chart, actually China isn't even growing. Only the US is. This might be due to weakness of their currency, but i'm not sure. It's complicated.

In summary, I think growth is super important, it really does lift people out of poverty, and I think these sorts of regulations will stifle it. When people look at say, Jeff Bezos being worth 160 billion, they think: How is that fair? We should take some of that money and give it to the poor and needy. But most of these attempts to do that aren't going to end up taking Bezos's money and giving it to anyone. They're just going to delete it from the world. The operation isn't a move, it's an erase.