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Comment by brigadier132 | Hacker News Reader

This entire diatribe about stock buybacks makes 0 sense. It's just another way of returning money to shareholders, it's exactly the same thing as dividends but gives the shareholder the option to realize their gain. A business only exists for the benefit of its owners, if businesses negatively impacted owners, they would not own shares in the company. If employees want to enjoy the benefit of being owners of companies they can start their own companies or themselves use their income to buy shares in companies. They will quickly realize that starting a business is really fucking hard.

Before you mention monopolies, yes I agree and I think what Lina Khan is doing is great and she should be doing more.

Also, just because you don't understand or disagree with the logic economists use doesn't mean they are wrong. Stick to writing bad fiction please.

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> A business only exists for the benefit of its owners

And a business only exists because of its workers. Is every worker contributing equally to the business’ success? Of course not. Would the business exist if not for the founder? Again, of course not – and I am fully in favor of founders taking as much of their profits as they’d like, with the understanding that they may have to explain their actions to their employees.

I am not in favor of non-founder executives getting absurd multipliers on TCO. You’re just an employee, like everyone else. Why should you have a 200% bonus target, when the team building the product might have 1/10th of that?

Buybacks are incredibly stupid, and should not be allowed in nearly all circumstances. They exist because Wall St. focuses entirely on short-term profits.

I am a shareholder (of Airbus, I'd never hold Boeing). As a shareholder, I don't want to be dubed by a pump and dump orchastrated by a CEO to appear like a genius, get a nice payout and jump ship before the stock tanks, and I am left holding a now vastly depreciated share. Unless you are friends with the top execs you won't ever know when to buy and sell and in any case I am not into trading.

I think shareholders need more rights. A lot of the bullshit that is currently happening only makes sense because shareholders aren't actually in control of the companies they own.

Think about this, as a shareholder in Airbus, how were you involved in the selection of the current CEO?

We agree on that one. It goes along my top comment where I call for more democratic oversight of corporations. I think they are internally too corrupt and the top execs run wild doing whatever they want.

> This entire diatribe about stock buybacks makes 0 sense. It's just another way of returning money to shareholders, it's exactly the same thing as dividends but gives the shareholder the option to realize their gain. A business only exists for the benefit of its owners, if businesses negatively impacted owners, they would not own shares in the company.

I agree with you, but it all makes sense if you just change this:

> A business only exists for the benefit of its owners

to this

> A business only exists for the benefit of society

"Society" doesn't create businesses, individuals do.

And what supports those individuals? Society, with its shared costs for necessary infrastructure, education, EMS…

To your point, though, that’s also incorrect. Worker cooperatives exist, the best-known examples in the U.S. perhaps being Rural Electric Membership Cooperatives. The name is a bit of a misnomer these days, as even large suburbs are often on an REMC’s grid. REMCs were created because individuals didn’t see profit in running infrastructure to rural areas with low population density, so society decided to do so.

> And what supports those individuals? Society

You are missing my point which is that you will not get individuals to act against their own self interest. So all this talk about what businesses "should" do is beside the point.

The classic example of this is price controls, the government mandates that food can only be sold for $X but it costs $X+1 to produce it and get it on shelves. People stop producing food because it's stupid to work for negative money and then you get food shortages and starvation.

Here's another funny one, I'm starting a business and when I was in the ideation phase I decided against building an education or healthcare related business despite having some pretty interesting ideas in those spaces and I'm instead building a company in the entertainment space. Why? Because people ironically are more happy to spend money on entertainment than healthcare or education and there are fewer regulations in place.

The GP is rather implying, > A business only exists for the benefit of Wall St and traders

Not long term holder like myself, which is what I would define as "owners".

Yeah, don't put words in my mouth and create a strawman please.

I know that that's not what you wanted to say and didn't intend to imply that you intended to say that. I was just making a distinctions between the various owners of a share and how each would benefit differently from stock buy backs.

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