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>Many corporations formed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries... They structured their companies to make sure the business would provide good
by learc83 8y ago
>Many corporations formed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries... They structured their companies to make sure the business would provide good service at a reasonable price – not to maximize investment returns.
>Somebody tell the robber barrons this? They apparently didn't get the message.
Your ellipses left off the qualifiers. The author isn't talking about all companies. They are specifically talking about companies that were founded in part to provide services for investors as opposed to just return on investment--companies where people invested because they wanted the company to exist so that they could be customers. There's even a citation for this in the foot notes.
- CamTin 8y agoPre-breakup AT&T is a tangible example for people old enough to remember. AT&T shareholders certainly did well with their monopoly position, and the early days of the Bell System were certainly not public-spirited (the company directors were Yankee misers in the mold of Venderbilt, though not on as grand a scale), but eventually the Bell System became, as a regulated monopoly, not appreciably different from any other arm of government. The Bell System breakup was roughly equivalent to a privatization of a national industry ala British Rail rather than a trust-busting ala the Standard Oil breakup. There is an excellent John Books (of /The Go-Go Years/, among others) tome on the subject, published just before the breakup: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1323717.Telephone https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1323717.Telephone