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I think in the US, national laws require corporations to maximize shareholder profits at all costs. It's disgusting, but Friedman economists still have the ear of Congress, so there's not much to be done about it.
Most business ethics stuff I’ve seen from the past 10-20 years directly rebukes stakeholder theory and the Friedman purist view of “profits are all that businesses should care about”.
Although… how many CEOs have read books on corporate ethics?
Business is not my specialty, but I do have the sense that the ethical viewpoint is shifting away from Friedman. Unfortunately, the law is not. Shareholder supremacy is still mandated in the US, by my understanding, and ethics be damned.
But the ethics arguments do get into that a bit. For example, if you want to maximize value for shareholders (note that is a distinct term from stakeholders), do you give employees more benefits? That encourages retention. Turnover is super fuckin expensive, so you can make the argument that higher pay and increased benefits add shareholder value.
Basically, it’s not such a black-and-white legal argument
Although everything you say is true, most businesses believe that it's better to hold on to that money, just in case they "need it more" than the people that make it for them.
There's business, and there's ethics.
Pick one.
It's not hard to run a business ethically. I own a business myself, and I know a number of small business owners that do the same. The problem is when you have shareholders, especially as a publicly trade corporation, then you're legally required to put shareholder demands above your personal operational philosophy.
Neo classical economics is a cult and this is a hill I'm willing to die on.
Can you elaborate? I'm interested to understand this better, both what neoclassical economics exactly is what characteristics make it a cult.
It's hard to summarise in a comment but I'll give it a go. I should also note that this is just my understanding and opinion so I encourage you to seek out more information and formulate your own views where possible.
Neo classical economics is the technical term I guess but you might be more familiar with a similar concept known as neoliberalism. As it's associated with Reagan and Thatcher it's also referred to as Reaganomics or Thatcherism. At the heart of neoliberal ideology is free market fundamentalism or the idea that unregulated, profit-motivated, markets are the best way to distribute resources. Doesn't matter what these resources are (health, food, housing, iPhones etc), neoliberalism tends to see things as products and not human rights. If you're in America this will sound pretty normal to you, but for us non-americans who have things like universal healthcare, it's a strange way to distribute a human right.
Another key part is this idea that when rich people get richer it benefits society because wealth trickles down (you may be familiar with the term 'trickle-down economics'). Therefore economies work best when those with the most capital (the rich) are left alone to do what they do best and government's role is essentially to facilitate this. There's a lot more to it than this and encompasses a range of issues.
Why do I think it's a cult? Because we have all the data now to show that trickle down economics is not a thing, that equality is getting worse, that people are suffering because their human rights are not being met. And yet we are still using this approach. Sure, this is a situation where the powerful don't want to give up power. But I also think the rich and their servants (governments) do actually on some level believe in the ideology. It's very much a church of capitalism. The pandemic rely illustrated this on such a visceral level.
Right there with you. I'd even go further and say that it's the application of lessons the rich learned from the failures of their ancestors in the Guilded Age. This time, they intend to keep workers in their place by any means necessary.
That’s not exactly true.
What is true is that the officers of the company have a duty to act in the best interest of the company, as they evaluate it. That might mean more pay hikes and stock grants. It might mean cost cutting and job losses while executives get bonuses. It might mean offshoring jobs or keeping them local. If the board disagrees with the leadership vision or execution, they can fire people. But there’s no law that governs what a ceo can or can’t do with regard to profit or success, as long as they can show they were acting in the best interest of the company. That’s not hard to do if they managed to not break other laws, like embezzlement.
For instance, if Musk answered to a board of directors at twitter, he would have been fired a while ago, but they couldn’t have him arrested for tanking the company.
This may be technically true but it doesn't play out like that and can't due to structural reasons. The situation arose from Henry Ford paying his workers substantially above what was deemed necessary because he wanted the workers to become consumers, preferably Ford consumers, and the shareholders instead wanted the extra bit in those pay packets to go to them instead. The shareholders took Ford to court and won. Now shareholders for the most part aren't even people or small groups who can be persuaded by things like growing a healthy consumer base in the economy, they're various large funds trying to simply maximize the amount of money they generate independent of any thought about overall economic health.
Maybe not accounted, but certainly they could sue him.
I think a declaration that corporations should be making money primarily is a good one. But it must be coupled with legislation that gives them guardrails and promotes competition. Without these things the economy doesn't function as it should.
Unfortunately, that latter part is full of disagreements.
I can see blatant disregard of the anti trust laws and big corps going monopolistic without any actual caps , idk when will it stop !