> Don't hate the player, hate the game.

...the players have a hand in ruling the game. Corporations and businesspeople lobby government bodies and politicians as a matter of course. You can't separate the one from the other. If you hate the game, and you want to change it, you're going to have to have beef with the players, too, because they will act to prevent that from happening.

That's fair. But the root issue is that the US government (who at least should create at enforce the system) is beholden to $ and not constituents. Lobbiest only lobby because they can. If we legislated lobbying to be equivalent to bribery, it'd stop (or at least change form).

My statement 'don't hate the player, hate the game' is just as much about an individual's agency as it is their feelings. We as citizens have more power to change our government than to change Microsoft.

Hating something you can't change is a waste of energy. There's already too much hate in the world. I'd rather understand Microsoft than hate them.

> They maximize profit, period.

This is a modern invention. Corporate charters post Renaissance did not solely focus on making money for shareholders. Go take a look at the history of the Dutch East India Company for example.

The reasoning behind the "corporations should maximize profit" thinking is that if a company doesn't just have one job, then the CEO is allowed to make up their job, and so can basically do anything - like colonizing Indonesia - and it's a lot harder for the board to tell how well they're running it.

However it's obviously not true that they have to maximize profit even today, since our biggest CEOs will simply tell you they don't do it.

https://www.businessroundtable.org/business-roundtable-redef...

I’m reading the Dutch East India Company’s charter and it pretty clearly states the purpose of the company is to “maintain and expand trade to profit the Company.”

You're completely right. But that doesn't change the fact that current publicly traded companies are legally required to maximize profits to shareholders above other goals.

That's 'the game' that's the problem. I want the most powerful companies in the world to be driven by more universally beneficial goals. We need different ways to organize and govern giant corporations. Fuck shareholders (please ignore my 401k), passive rent seeking is a cancer on the economy. Investment is a lubricant to grease the wheels of the economy. Too much lubricant, or of the wrong viscosity, gums up the works and moves energy from productive work to waste heat.

The East India Company might not be the best basis for a better corporation though. Using a private army to force unwanted drug imports into a sovereign state isn't something I want to see in this century. Though once the US cannabis industry reaches the power of big tobacco I expect it'll lobby the US to force imports into other countries. Which is hilarious because the US is responsible for lots of countries outlawing cannabis.

> But that doesn't change the fact that current publicly traded companies are legally required to maximize profits to shareholders above other goals.

This is a common belief but it’s a complete falsehood. Business officers are given enormous leeway to make decisions based on their judgment, and it’s exceedingly rare for those to be successfully challenged.

The reason is simple: you can’t predict the future and there isn’t a proven path to success. Maybe you think screwing your workers is good for profits now but bad for the long-term prospects, or vice versa: either way, the CEO will never face a penalty for that call since it falls squarely in the category of judgement and discretion. Everyone knows that sometimes you need to make a gamble - imagine where shareholders would be if Apple had followed the analysts telling them to license Windows or sell Mac OS to PC vendors at various points in the 90s, both things portrayed as safer moves than buying NeXT…

Yes, executives can and do excercise personal judgement. But if their actions are unprofitable for long enough, shareholders will vote them out.

You're right that legally there's little way to enforce the intent of CEO actions, that doesn't mean shareholders would let a CEO that puts public good above profits keep his job. Gambles like buying NeXT are more acceptable because they might pay out.

> Yes, executives can and do excercise personal judgement. But if their actions are unprofitable for long enough, shareholders will vote them out.

None of which is a legal requirement.

> But that doesn't change the fact that current publicly traded companies are legally required to maximize profits to shareholders above other goals.

There is no law requiring this. The principle that companies should maximize profit was designed to prevent CEO pay going up forever, because if the CEO can make up his own job then he can just pick whatever he's doing best at.

> I want the most powerful companies in the world to be driven by more universally beneficial goals.

I'm not sure companies actually stick to their charters, but anyway you're thinking of public benefit corporations.

I think it's simpler to just make bad things illegal though.

Yeah, public benefit corps are an example of a better way to organize an institution that has extreme power over humanity. Those aren't even legal in all 50 states. Are any giant multi-nationals organized as a PBC?

Illegal and enforceable are different things. Whether or not Microsoft violated tax law doesn't matter if they can bully the IRS with a big legal team. The concept of 'we can make your legal bills so high it's not worth it even if you win' gives big corps like Microsoft with internal legal teams a different relationship with the law than the rest of us. If our system equally enforced laws, I'd agree with just making bad things illegal, but first we need to fix the fact that it's possible to be above the law.

Benefit corporations don't have to be defined in your state to make one; after all, regular corporations are mostly in Delaware.

> Using a private army to force unwanted drug imports into a sovereign state isn't something I want to see in this century.

Fentanyl

> Corporate charters post Renaissance did not solely focus on making money for shareholders.

Many of them were focused on making it easier for their members to make money as individuals, but it was still about profits.