We should go back to the world as it existed before profit motive existed, back when the wealthy and powerful only used their resources to help others.

I was thinking about war-profiteering and the private companies that lobby for endless wars lately (think Du Pont, Rockeller, Halliburton, etc). It causes untold damage to humanity. It occurred to me that this sort of thing is absent in the Chinese economy as far as I'm aware. Yay capitalism?

Endless wars pre-date capitalism. Western defense companies are hardly capitalistic. They are as "planned economy" as it gets. China is wildly capitalistic in many aspects.

Maybe Chinese companies don't lobby for war because they are so bad at war that they can't see a route to profitability?

pretty cool to assume that china must be “bad at war” vs. thinking that you can be a lot more profitable in peace :)

It's a valid question. Presumably a given company will do what is most profitable for it whether that's lobbying for peace or war. It's worthwhile to try to understand what the differences in either circumstances or policy might be that led to an alternate outcome.

Bad reading comprehension.

> Private equity is such a vicious foe to mankind.

The boogeyman we have made out of private equity is pretty silly. It's not like being purchased by a publicly traded corporation is that much different, or even just a private buyer.

You missed literally the whole point.

Ostensibly, those directing public companies are beholden to shareholders to create a valuable company.

Those directing private companies can do whatever they want, including extracting all the wealth for personal gain and leaving a husk.

On the other hand isn’t the driver for “enshitification” the ever present chasing of profits for the next quarter

Quite so. Like most things, balance is required. Short term vs long term profitability is underappreciated in today's CEO class.

You have to beat inflation. It's not long or short term profitability, it's taking an asset and making it return more than inflation. Treasury bonds or stocks or mobile home parks or monkey nfts, it's all the same thing.

Again, that's with the mindset that the reason to own shares is because they're an appreciating asset.

If you study the history of what investing in a company via shares has historically meant, you'll find that it's only really in the last half century that the "appreciation game" came to the forefront. Dividends yields (or equivalent) were the evaluation criteria for these investments prior to our current era.

You speak about inflation and stock as if the cause/effect relationship is crystal clear and unidirectional, I wouldn't be so confident about that.

Wouldn’t you want the returns represented by your dividends to beat inflation too? Assuming you’re not investing in something for non-monetary gains, if the dividends aren’t beating inflation at least most of the time, why would you stick your money into stocks when you could just by I bonds from the government?

Why wouldn't they? If the company is healthy the dividends paid will reflect macroeconomic inflationary processes.

I don't think "you don't want to beat inflation?!?!?!" is a good faith interpretation of what I'm talking about higher up in the thread - which is rampant speculation for the publicly traded companies, and behavior tantamount to rug pulls in the case of private equity.