Hacker News Reader

Comment by 3grdlurker | Hacker News Reader

Keeping up with the competition, if you’re talking about quality of product/service, isn’t the same thing as growing yearly revenues, which usually entails scaling up operations and product lines to more places and more customers, which no business has to do just for the sake of survival. See for example long-surviving small- to medium-scale family businesses. There doesn’t seem to be another motivation for chasing YoY revenue growth other than greed.

View on HN

// See for example long-surviving small- to medium-scale family businesses

Are these business in industries with fierce large competitors? If not, it's an unreasonable comparison - they are only not getting eaten because nobody's trying to eat them.

I love small and medium businesses but just making a game theoretical point - you can only chose to limit your competitive effort to the extent that nobody is increasing theirs.

There are family owned businesses where others try to beat them, but those businesses are so tied to their space that it is hard for others to step in and as these companies don't try to expand too much, they are free to cooperate with anybody, which gives them a beneficial network.

However that is heavily industry specific and in tech, where scales are very different only works for very small niches.

There are plenty of small family scale business in fields like alcoholic drinks and food, and they have large, fierce competitors.

These businesses have a natural limit to their growth due to the estate tax. If the company grows too large, the taxes on death can be crippling for families that can not plan decades in advance. Public corporations do not have to pay this tax, and therefore have an unnatural advantage in holding valuable assets over long periods of time. The estate tax is well-intentioned, but because it hits only family firms it’s essentially regressive despite being applied only to wealthy families.

The owners of public companies dont have to pay the estate tax when they die, as their children inherit the stock?

I thought it was for the total value exchanged?

The owners of public companies are irrelevant to the large public company’s continued existence. Owners for them come and go and pay their own taxes, but the company never has to pay the estate taxes itself, hence the advantage against those who must.

or simple corporate charter. if the company is organized around maximizing shareholder value, that's what they'll do.

that's why we have public benefit corporations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com