As soon as this sentiment prevails, not only during times of personal loss, but also in times of personal prosperity, we can start to think of most humans as part of the solution instead of the problem.
And yet here you are, painting everyone who disagrees with you as some sort of maniacal evil-doer because what they believe is different than what you believe.
With even the slightest bit of foresight or financial planning, they'll be fine for months or longer.
It shouldn’t be an individual family’s responsibility to plan for its massively growing, massively productive, massively profitable employer to treat them like a wrapper to be used and tossed in the trash when done.
It’s evil to treat being depended upon to provide a means of food, housing, healthcare, and continued residency as something that can just be shut off without warning, to no fault of the dependents.
To a certain extent it's true, and it's only failing in the case of Google/etc because we've allowed mega-companies to become a thing (which distorts the playing field). OTOH we're rapidly heading towards total planetary extinction, so something huge needs to change.
There are dynamics where profit chasing can be perverted (eg. monopolistic pricing, fraud, etc.) which is why we have regulations. But profit chasing in itself is the best signal of value creation we have.
I've lived in a post socialist country transitioning from socialist to capitalist system and I don't want to live in a world where politics define value, profit chasing can lead to pathologies, but political value system is based on flawed principles.
The holy goal instead, is to maximize shareholder value. A small, but important difference (and helps explain the existence of companies like Uber and Twitter who have barely turned a profit in the past decade).
For these types of business, there’s always someone next in line to buy, hoping for the same performance.
If you are an investor, activist or otherwise, you benefit from the current practice that managers have a fiduciary duty to shareholders.
That’s risk avoidance - social mission would be driving around town giving free rides to people
A car is exclusively a tool, and a company is a tool from some perspectives, but involves humans. Hence why ethics are involved and there is no clear answer.
If instead you replaced car with horses, or worse yet, with human powered transportation would your answer be any different.
Some, like Amazon, immediately reinvest the profits into their growth and avoid taxes on the profits.
Some, like Uber, seem to exist to only sustain an illusion of future possible profits. Most of startups in the era of cheap money were manifestly unprofitable, and spent more and more attempting to achieve growth and grab the market share.
Beside these, there is a number of barely profitable companies that just exist to sustain their business and give the owners and a few employees some daily bread. Most small restaurants and small stores are like that. They maximize not the short-term profit but the probability to keep earning something in foreseeable future, a bit like subsistence farming.
The only 'harm' in question is that the other evil profit seeking villains are losing their source of profit, left to go back to do wonderful volunteer work at charities or whatever it is that is considered more virtuous. Crushing 12,000 villains in one fell swoop, perhaps Google is the superhero here?
Feels like so many people in the US has taken the Adam Smith self interest sentiment to the extreme, to the point that people seem to forget we are living in a society - a very interdependent entity that functions poorly if we don't work together.
"Oh, corporations have to be massively harmful entities that crush people under their feet in order to enrich their investors" is a choice. It is a system created entirely by humans.
This is what people say when they talk about how capitalism has so thoroughly won. People speak about it like it is a force of nature or a property of physical reality itself. There is no alternative. If megacorps don't abuse their employees and vacuum up dollars from their customers in every possible way then the line will go down, and we can't have that.
Just because Milton Friedman claimed that it is the main objective of a company to maximize shareholder value[1], doesn't mean it is true. Milton Friedman was a bad dude, and part of a bad school of economics[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine
Rant: If most people in our society simply decided this wasn't true -- and that, no, the point of a company is not to maximize profit, we could solve so many harms.
And frankly, believing this is optional. It's like saying the point of a person is to live as long as possible. Sure, you can choose to think that, but if you do, it would be easy to paint you as a villain. And, of course, thinking that way is completely optional.
And...just because many people do think that way doesn't mean we have to. We can choose to apply a different meaning to the idea of a company.
As someone that helps run a company, I very much think our company exists to serve our customers in a very specific way. Most of our economic success, actually, comes from many of the choices that would seem to fly in the face of short-term monetary gain.
Companies don't exist to maximize profit. Villains do.