Theoretically, you'd need to raise less capital once the business is established.
Money paid out to some retiree who doesn't even know that they hold shares through their retirement or pension plan is money not put into company bank accounts to fund future business endeavors.
Actually, speaking of the retiree, I don't know what it is, exactly, that the modern shareholder brings to the table that justifies their returns, especially in situations where they receive a dividend. The vast majority of shares of most publicly-traded companies are held by financial institutions who have a fiduciary duty to account holders. That means that, at the drop of a hat, they need to be able to exit their position on a given equity and put the money into something that either earns more money or loses less of it. They have as little attachment to the stock, and thus the business fitness, of the company as is possible. This means they don't care how things are going at the company. In a society that puts a lot of essential services, goods, and infrastructure in the hands of publicly-traded corporations, this means no one cares how things are going at the institutions holding up massive parts of society. See Boeing and their QC woes over the last decade while also noting their importance to American national security.
I'm not saying seize the means of production. I'm saying "stop putting all of the money into places where it does no good". That's simple as giving a pay raise without a corresponding price increase to offset the costs to shareholders, who often have no real association with the enterprise.
The entire premise of an economy is people exchange money for goods and services. Instead of having money available for that exercise, we've locked a lot of the value produced into equities that are left mainly as unrealized gains. The unrealized gains must continuously go up while the ability for people to participate in the economy by spending money that they earned has gone down, because they receive less of the share of their labor.
