Comment by _yb2s | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _yb2s | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

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