Hacker News Reader

Comment by mtsr | Hacker News Reader

Operating under the assumption that companies provide no value to society, maybe. Otherwise this is extracting value from companies and then leaving society worse off.

These PEs are the locusts of the financial world.

View on HN

> Operating under the assumption that companies provide no value to society, maybe.

If the company is going under, it's value to society is questionable.

That's what we need to assume: companies usually are a detriment to society. I am more and more starting to see life as "you harm the world when you make the money; you benefit the world when you spend it". Hard to see opposite examples. They seem to be more like exceptions than happen when things didn't go according to plan for the companies.

Chevrolet harms the world when they make bolts? Starbucks harms the world as they sell coffee? Plumbers harm the world when they fix clogged drains?

For the first two the answer is clearly yes, but the things are useful/enjoyable.

Fixing a clogged, depends on how they do it I guess.

Profit is value extracted from society. Sometimes it is used to create further value in other ways, sometimes it is used to extract further value.

It's almost as if the coming-together-to-complete-a-mission that is a business has a raison d'etre other than profit (and, particularly, returning profit to investors), or something.

Profit is a great incentive. All sides can profit.

Life is positive-sum.

Clearly not. This is wishful-thinking.

> companies usually are a detriment to society

Companies are all we have for a society in this country; decades of liberalization, mobile work forces, and commodification-as-identification have ensured that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com