What a con it is, that everyday people have become convinced that the bound purpose of a company is to direct cash to its investors however it can.
People realized this was shitty when the colonial exploitation companies did it, when the robber barons did it, when the banks did it (1920s), and when the banks did it again in the 1980s, kind of; when financial markets did it in the 2000s, faintly; when banks did it again in 2008 to 2011, in vain, and when companies milk "inflation" now, nothing.
The misallocation of resources toward cryptocurrency and AI, neither of which are particularly useful in a utilitarian sense, leads us there again. "Out of money" is an abstraction of past waste of resources. "Economic downturn" is an abstraction of decreased efficiency in the labour market, AKA a failure of society to direct people to labour usefully.
Nobody making these decisions believes they are wrong, but the only check on it is that the economy implodes when they are in fact wrong.
The difference now, and probably the reason for this problem accelerating so, is this: faced with the consequences of the waste, our ancestors said, "those plundering rascals who put us here must be held to account; we will change the system to prevent this."
Now, socially, most of us do not believe change can be made, or that anyone can be held to account for the squandering, or that anything was even squandered. So they get away with it and they do it again.
Viewed outside the lens of the monetary system, this is absurd. It basically goes like this now: investors mis-allocated resources, in consequence of which as a society we are no longer going to use resources to incentivize labour, and also we are going to use force to prevent people from working, evict them from homes to make the homes empty, revoke promises of resources in retirement, and take some things they are using, especially transportation means, by force. What? Why? So destructive.
@falcon I’ve even seen people confidently assert that companies have a duty to break rules to maximize shareholder value, as if that’s some kind of law rather than simply an excuse.
@acdha it blows people's minds when they find out that a company's duty to its shareholders is roughly to do what it said it would do when it accepted investment, which is rarely if ever "pursue quarterly profit by any means and at any cost". And that a company who does that instead of what it should be doing could eventually be subjected to a shareholder lawsuit too when the chickens come home to roost.
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