While this doesn't answer your question directly, there's a good case to be made that Sears lost a lot of its value due to the way its current owners have run t

While this doesn't answer your question directly, there's a good case to be made that Sears lost a lot of its value due to the way its current owners have run the company. Brick-and-mortar retail is obviously a tough business to be in these days even under the best of circumstances, but Lampert arguably made Sears's circumstances much, much worse than they needed to be. I won't rehash all the arguments about that here -- you can look them up yourself if you're interested -- but he did a lot of things that seem to be shortsighted and stupid. To answer your question more directly, I think a more abstract case could be made that this is a failure of vision endemic to the way we currently implement capitalism: the whole value of running a company long-term -- to shareholders, employees, and customers -- may be greater, on a sufficient time scale, than the value of stripping the company for parts, but you can get a higher short-term return on investment by stripping and re-investing the income somewhere else, letting the full economic costs of the company's collapse (which, again, go beyond the cost to the shareholders) fall on others. I don't think this is good for society in the long run. I also don't think it's somehow required by merciless capitalist logic. However, I'm not sure how one can craft regulation to "solve" this without a high risk of creating more problems than one avoids. Sears may not deserve what's happened to it, but that doesn't mean it deserves to be saved, either, especially in its current state. It's easy to imagine well-intentioned laws creating zombie businesses rather than shielding salvageable ones.