Devil's advocate: Is their growth high enough? In our current system, you always have to be growing enough, not just profitable.

Maybe true, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a stupid system

It is certainly a stupid system.

That’s the big brain thinking that leads to the enshitification of products.

It’s also quite frankly impossible to grow forever. Market saturation is a thing, as is the number of atoms you can convert to paper clips.

I agree with you, yet here we are, investors expecting more and more meteoric returns QoQ, YoY.

That's just "shareholder value". Combine it with everyone who owns stock expecting it to go up all the time, and you get that mentality. Stocks were once a vote of confidence in a company and their long term vision, and now it's just hyper-analyzed gambling with as short a return time as possible.

Nearly everything that's wrong with the current economy and welfare of your average man in the US can be traced in some way to the stock market. Now we have the additional burden of lumping nearly everyone's retirement accounts into that same system. What could possibly go wrong, again?

I read an article probably 20 years ago, about the things that take down profitable companies, and one phrase that stuck with me was "the relentless pursuit of more".

Milton Friedman really did a number on people. Has any of his ideas stood the test of time? Everything I’ve seen has led to rampant inequality, and rot in both the corporate and government sectors. Even in the most recent economic crises, zero countries embraced his ideas, and those that tried austerity had a worse outcome.

>Nearly everything that's wrong with the current economy and welfare of your average man in the US can be traced in some way to the stock market

Just the basic fact that an economy that is good for workers, where they are more in demand and make more money, is bad for their retirement because the stock market goes down, is really all you need to know to understand why the stock market is a plague.