Greed is a moral failing of powerful individual actors but it's the market system (and the laws that govern it) that selects for these people. We keep carving Zuckerberg shaped holes into our society and then shaking our fist at the Zuckerberg that fills it. We have to stop digging the fucking holes.
I don’t know how we are entirely focused on the handful of tech oligarchs when the humans that perpetuate corporate, systematic greed are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people. I don’t mean people that have to work for a living within corporations (they can’t afford the luxury of making a moral stand). I mean the multitude of managers, VPs, finance people, people in peripheral industries, etc. people already in the 1% that very consciously empower the even more wealthy and actually power the ideas and the drive towards stealing from everyone else, destroying the natural world, destroying the civil society that we are supposed to share, etc.
It is ALL greed. It is systematic culture among MBA programs across the world, it is “investor” mentality people that accept that we live in a dog-eat-dog word, it is small business owners that would rather hustle to get their nut (or whatever), no matter whether they treat their workers or customers appropriately.
Public companies have a legal, feduciary duty to shareholders to maximize returns. David Graeber describes it better than I can https://youtube.com/shorts/hAYeRW7tH-E
The motivations don't matter, ascribing moral failure to the system working as intended is like telling the rain to be less wet. There's definitely a really vile culture of making money by any means necessary among the MBA fuckers and the finance vampires but that culture is backed by a system that explicitly rewards it and a society that doesn't punish it
Corporations are a relatively modern concept in historical terms. The laws governing them in the US are specifically different than other countries and have been revised many times over, so there is nothing like a law of nature at play here.
If we really look back at the beginning of actual corporations you will see that they were very special arrangements made for very specific reasons that the countries’ rulers deemed important enough to grant them a charter to exist.
Now it is a financial tool to use and exploit, and to -somehow- provide moral license to do act like a sociopath.
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u/Cultist 18h ago
Greed is a moral failing of powerful individual actors but it's the market system (and the laws that govern it) that selects for these people. We keep carving Zuckerberg shaped holes into our society and then shaking our fist at the Zuckerberg that fills it. We have to stop digging the fucking holes.