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> A board deciding to financially harm the investors they represent for the "good of humanity" goes against the very concept of investment.

It does not. It goes against a very specific concept of investment, which is that I should be able to buy a thing and make money with absolutely zero regard for anybody else. It is not a rule of the universe that owning something should allow me to harm others.

I agree that ownership of a company does not entitle you to harm others. There are many laws which exist to prevent companies from harming others and we probably need more of those.

But this isn't about what rights a company has. This is about the obligations a board has to act on behalf of its shareholders within legal limits.

Please don't confuse my comments for an approval of public companies choosing financial gain over the good of others. This is one of the primary reasons why I am very critical of companies going public. Going public essentially means a company sells its soul for investment money. The owners and investors may see a big payout, but the potential long-term good a company can do is handicapped as soon as it goes public.

The concept of shareholder value really got started in the 1970s, pushed by Milton Friedman and others. And value seems to be interpreted as nothing more than the stock price.

Hence the idea that anything is justified as long as it gooses the stock price, and that a corporation has no social obligations whatsoever.

It's really just a silly common misinterpretation of a vague legal concept, the stock market equivalent of "correlation doesn't imply causation", in that it's the only thing many people know about the subject and that they consider this very complicated information that needs to be mentioned at every possible opportunity.

In reality, there has been more or less exactly one successful invocation of the concept in history, against Craig Newmark, when he explicitly said he was going to do something that would harm shareholders.

In reality, you do whatever you want and if anybody complains you tell them it's good PR and will therefore benefit shareholders in the long run. You can be as wrong about that as you want as long as you manage to avoid explicitly stating that you know to be wrong.

That's all very well and good but aren't you arguing in a circle? You're essentially saying "since shareholders have absolute power over an enterprise, therefore they have absolute power over the enterprise". Sure, but we're arguing that it's not a good idea to have companies be immune to any public accountability or and democratic control. In fact we already do this: there are myriad laws that constrain the behaviour of companies: rules about financing, transparency, pollution, taxes, etc.

I read the comment as being a complaint specifically about the rule that board members should have to act in the financial interest of shareholders. If the intention was to criticize ownership rights of shareholders or to argue for legal limitations on the powers of a company's owners, then my response definitely doesn't address that.

Fair enough.

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