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Comment by _Algernon_ | Hacker News Reader

Google is a public company. The money either goes to shareholders or to employing people. There is no conceivable world in which this money would have gone to any of those causes.

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Well there's certainly a conceivable one, and it's one probably many would agree would be much nicer one to live in. But accepted, not a realistic one any time soon.

Google has a large charitable arm called google.org, but your point is mostly correct, although the money they pay to employees (and to the government in the form of payroll taxes) isn't being destroyed. It's just cycling around the economy, and many employees donate decent amounts of their paychecks to charity (Google does 1:1 matching and encourages this)

For-profit companies do philanthropy all the time. There is no requirement to divert money to shareholders (further, Google's not payingany dividends right now)

Google does stock buybacks instead. The last yearly buyback authorisation was for $70b, so the "yield" is around 4-5%. It's very much in the blue-chip, return-cash-to-investors phase of its corporate life.

I know that you probably meant to express that Google is the opposite to a public (= governmental) entity, but "private company" is not the term to express that. Google is a public company (= listed on the stock market for anyone to buy and sell), so the opposite of a private(ly owned) company.

Probably mixed up private entity and public company. Fixed.

That's not true. Google makes money for stockholders, and they do whatever they want with that money. Some of them also certainly give money to charity, etc.

I don't know if we prefer a world in which Google itself made these kinds of contributions and not the people who own Google.

There's a conceivable world where we restructure incentives around our current form of capitalism and tax codes to encourage extra money going into humanitarian causes, instead of being spent on arbitrary capital maneuvers like stock buybacks.

Conceivable, but we probably won't get there anytime soon.

It’s very simple, that’s what the government should fund. That’s what our tax should pay for. If you really want to manifesto, then just read about land value taxes, don’t tax anything except what we want to disincentivize and land, which doesn’t distort the market. But this is entirely off-topic for this thread.

It sounds to me like you're explaining Tax Deductions through Charity which is already a thing.

No conceivable world you say?

That is indeed what I say

CEO would get outsed if the shareholders feel he’s not acting in the best interest to make returns.

Capitalism is a best that needs insatiable ever growing revenue and profits.

Vote-holding shareholders in a two-class share company, ie, Schmidt, Brin, or Page. Pichai just has to avoid annoying Sergey and Larry, really.

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