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Comment by nonethewiser | 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.

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

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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.

"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.

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