Hacker News Reader

Comment by darth_avocado | Hacker News Reader

The fundamental concept of ANY business is to make money. Businesses everywhere, not just America, don’t care about anyone or anything except making money. That is where the role of the government comes in. “Pure capitalists” don’t like regulation, but regulation done right, not only protect everyone from excessive greed, but also businesses themselves from excessive greed.

In case of Boeing, regulations exist but were left to be self enforced. If they were enforced correctly, Boeing would not have the opportunity to cut corners and would’ve been saved from the consequences of their own greed.

View on HN

Making money is required for organization to keep existing and do their job. But the job doesn't have to be to make the most money. We need to allow organization with other purposes or to make steady money over longer time period.

A good example are utilties, which should have the purpose to providing service, and make limited profit. Publicly owned utilities that try to make the most money are problematic because of the natural monopoly.

There are plenty of businesses that could make more money, but that don't want to expand. Lots of businesses come in units, like a single restaurant, that can be managed by one person. Expanding is risky and require more work than owner wants to expend.

The problem with current companies is wanting to make the most money in the short-term. Most investors have a long term horizon to retirement and need value in decades. Chasing short-term profits might end up risky and destroy future value.

While the basic idea of this is, of course, not new, its prevalence is.

For most of human history, "businesses" have been primarily about providing a service or producing a good—farming was about producing food, carpentry was about creating products out of wood, etc. The money was, of course, the incentive for them to produce this specific thing for that specific person, but the purpose of the business was still to produce the best damn wooden chairs they could make (or whatever).

Naturally, as I said, there have always been people who want to make the most money for the least effort. We have clay tablets from the ancient city-state of Ur, nearly 4000 years ago, complaining about a copper merchant who was (supposedly) fraudulently selling low-grade copper ingots as highest-quality ingots. But for most of human history, that has been the exception.

In the past few decades (I'd be hesitant to try drawing a bright line as to when), I feel that this has flipped, and people who think that the purpose of a business is to make as much money as possible (with providing a good or service being a necessary evil to that end) have taken over, at least in the US.

I also very strongly believe that this is an unhealthy, destructive mindset to have about the purpose of a business, and continuing to hold it up as the ideal is part and parcel of the problems of inequality and its effects that have plagued us in recent decades.

Nonsense… businesses are run by humans, and the goals and values of the business are whatever the leaders and or owners are.

Running a business often requires making hard choices to keep the doors open, but those choices, and the choice to stay open at all, depend on who is making them.

The modern publicly traded company (effectively owned and operated by Wall Street traders) is somewhat unusual in the history of business, in being structured specifically to require everyone to act solely for shareholder value or profit. But it is a choice to structure a business in this way, and things like B corps, co-ops, etc. are different structures designed to optimize for different goals and values.

Thank you. The modern usage of corporate structure as a complete get-out-of-consequences card, combined with the fact that every politician is just a warm body filling a suit at which corporations throw money to rubber stamp regulations...written for the lawmaker by the corporation are the problems. Problems. I'll say it again for the kindergarteners that still think Libertarianism is cogent. These are problems.

> Nonsense… businesses are run by humans, and the goals and values of the business are whatever the leaders and or owners are.

As soon as the business is publicly traded, the goals and values are just money.

If the goals and value aren't money, then eventually the people making decisions will be replaced with people who value the money.

True for the US and the UK, where finance is king and Chicago school economists dominate. I've always felt that economists here are the modern equivalent of soothsayers: they tell their patrons what they want to hear, massaged with enough mathematical nonsense to disguise that there is nothing there but raw self-interest.

By contrast, in Germany 1/2 of the seats on the board of a public company must be elected by workers. So there finance and money can't just replace engineering.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com