Re:Why Drug Prices Keep Rising Despite Congress's Efforts
by village-idiot on Monday April 08, 2019 @12:04PM
(#19606440)
Historically in America you could only make a joint stock company if there was some obvious common good component, such as the creation of a common canal to improve trade. The concept of a profit maximizing corporation is the creation of the late 19th century, at least in America. Prior to that most Americans held the independent worker in higher regard than the corporate salaried worker.
Re:Why Drug Prices Keep Rising Despite Congress's Efforts
by r00fus on Monday April 08, 2019 @12:04PM
(#19606443)
That’s only because the government removed the requirement of corporations to have a social benefit in their charter of incorporation.
If we reinstate this it would make that “something” be identified and other than just money.
Re:Why Drug Prices Keep Rising Despite Congress's Efforts
by emptysongglass on Monday April 08, 2019 @07:12PM
(#19610066)
This is news to me. I thought we created these monsters with their mandates to make only money from the beginning.
I'd like to see Social Purpose Corporations become the default but sadly it's non-obvious how to go about creating one. Stripe's Atlas defaults to the monster. Can we get an anti-Atlas that makes it easy to bootstrap ethical corps?
The biggest problems are: we don't properly regulate monopolies, and price signals are broken because we don't properly price in negative & positive spillovers.
As a society, we are MUCH better off having healthy and educated citizens. And as of recently, funding in these areas is being viewed as a cost center, rather than an economic multiplier. At the same time, we're destroying the environment with carbon and subsidizing fossil fuels.
Capitalism only works when price signals work. And price signals won't work without competition, and they'll be inaccurate without spillovers taxed accordingly.