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Comment by gcheong | Hacker News Reader

“ He believes businesses exist to serve society and contribute back to people in the community. That they make profits are merely a side effect and that somewhere along the line the side effect became the main goal.”

That change came about in 1970 with Milton Friedman’s ideas about the purpose of a corporation being solely to maximize shareholder value and we’ve all been paying the price ever since: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2019/08/19/why-max...

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Actually it happened way before 1970 when Dodge sued Ford.

Dodge v. Ford Motor Company, 204 Mich. 459, 170 N.W. 668 (Mich. 1919) is a case in which the Michigan Supreme Court held that Henry Ford had to operate the Ford Motor Company in the interests of its shareholders, rather than in a charitable manner for the benefit of his employees or customers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

There is a general mythology that business greed is a new thing, and that it is an American invention. This is not the case.

I'd specifically like to call out the ancient slave trade as an example of business existing for profit at the great determent of communities. I'd also like to call out that the Europeans explores immediately starting exporting tobacco around the world when introduced to it, even though it clearly has negative health consequences. It was their learned behavior to make profits while harming the health of their customers.

I don't think the europeans of the 1500's had any clue tobacco was in any way dangerous to peoples health, in fact I'm pretty sure they thought it was a medicinal plant.

It was also probably too expensive for most people to buy and consume enough to be noticeably harmful.

Having said that, a European of the 1500's would know what smoke did to kippers.

Ok then. Replace 1500 tobacco with 1800 opium.

Smoking tobacco has clear negative health consequences today, but the association may not have been so strong when the predominant forms of heating households were open wood and coal fires. It's also worth keeping in mind that smoking tobacco wasn't always the predominant form of taking tobacco, chewing tobacco and nasal snuff are as old as tobacco itself to Europeans, and if Google's ngram viewer is anything to go by, cigars only overtook snuff in the late 19th century (bit of a dodgy data point, since snuff has multiple meanings).

Today some 500k-1m Swedes regularly take snus, and the association with oral and pancreatic cancers is tenuous at best, and the BMJ reported in the 1980s that there has been one case of nasal cancer linked to nasal snuff in the 300 years it has been used in the UK. Chewing tobacco is a little more harmful but not by much.

Cigarette companies have done a good job the past century of associating any harmful effect of smoking tobacco with tobacco and nicotine itself, despite cigarettes being 100x more harmful than either snus or snuff.

The East India Company, notoriously a servant of society and so effective in its service that the Crown actually assimilated its possessions so that the good it could do would be amplified by the Empire.

*servant to the British society.

I believe the fairly relentless pursuit of profit is moral and necessary to continue raising the standards of living of all people. In that sense Milton Friedman was very right. However it is an additional moral imperative to ensure the profits that originate from "land" (where land is taken to mean all the resources of nature, not just actual land) are redistributed equally to all people. Have you read Henry George?

Probably not invented by him but it was when it became an almost religious precept of capitalism and he became one of the most vocal preachers of that idea.

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