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Great! You've convinced nobody of anything. Businesses are powerful tools for the common good and the fact they produce returns for investors is absolutely cri
by sorcerer-mar 1y ago
Great! You've convinced nobody of anything.
Businesses are powerful tools for the common good and the fact they produce returns for investors is absolutely critical to their continued existence and long-term viability.
But the point for businesses to exist at all is to produce positive externalities and they need to produce those externalities for more than just their owners.
It cannot be "either/or" and it's not immoral to pursue profits.
- egypturnash 1y agoYou can explicitly build the business to say "delivering shareholder value is not our highest goal, we must remember that we live in a society and upon a planet". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation
- monkaiju 1y agoTheir purpose is absolutely not "to produce positive externalities" (whatever that even means). What makes you say that? You can, and people do, run a business doing all sorts of heinous things
- sorcerer-mar 1y agoYou should read a history book about why corporations were invented and allowed to exist.
- moefh 1y agoThere's an old saying: The purpose of a system is what it does[1]. You can't (well, shouldn't) judge something by its intended purpose if what it ends up doing goes against it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
- sorcerer-mar 1y agoAnd businesses as a whole produce positive externalities, as intended, which is why we continue to allow them to exist.
- crawfordcomeaux 1y agoOnly when accounting is done without calculating ecological cost, including human quality of life.
- Nasrudith 1y agoHuman quality of life tends to be pretty shit without them though, and that is ignoring all of the competitively a necessity "choices" where not doing so is literally suicidal. Not adopting early agriculture and settling down leads to nomadic hunter gatherers being outnumbered and genocided by sedentary farmers sorts of necessity. Refusing to mine and pollute means bad things happen to you when you encounter metallic armed and armored foes.
- asdf6969 1y ago> we continue to allow them to exist Who is “we”? I can’t do anything about it. No more than peasants “allow” the king to exist..
- sorcerer-mar 1y agoSure you can. You can vote to get rid of corporations, and you'll get outvoted. Ergo: we. You don't understand how kings work if you think it's equivalent to your situation in a western democracy.
- asdf6969 1y ago[flagged]
- 1y ago
- throwawayoldie 1y agoYes, I've heard the party line too. The difference is, I realized it was horseshit.
- wat10000 1y agoIt’s pretty rare for businesses to produce positive externalities. Businesses create value and some of that value goes to others, but that normally happens through explicit transactions.
- _Algernon_ 1y ago>But the point for businesses to exist at all is to produce positive externalities and they need to produce those externalities for more than just their owners. I see little evidence that this is true. If anything, modern VC companies are "externality parasites". They produce positive externalities for some (ie. shareholders), by putting a lot of negative externalities on society as a whole (see for example the cost to democracy, societal cohesion, etc. that comes for Facebook and the like).