What's wrong with corporations
Mar. 18th, 2022 12:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kengrI'd just seen a cartoon about health insurance and was thinking my usual thoughts about what really needs to change to fix them.
Then I had an insight. A slightly different approach would fix most of the major problems with *all* corporations.
As things stand, a corporations *sole* purpose is to make money for the owners/stockholders. This leads to things like the problems with insurance companies, perfectly good corporations being driven into the dirt for short term profit, and many other things.
My insight was that corporations need to have a declared purpose *other* than that. and that that purpose should be *just* as important as making money. That'd make the abuses a lot harder. Sure, the shareholders could vote to change the purpose, but it'd *still* have to be something other than making a profit.
We'd probably need a third requirement. That the corporation is required to act in a manner that doesn't harm "society". Not sure what the exact wording would have to be, but the idea is that they can't go around making the world *worse*.
Of course either of those changes would gore *so* many sacred cows. But I can't really see another way preventing the myriad disasters that the currents rules have led to.
Then I had an insight. A slightly different approach would fix most of the major problems with *all* corporations.
As things stand, a corporations *sole* purpose is to make money for the owners/stockholders. This leads to things like the problems with insurance companies, perfectly good corporations being driven into the dirt for short term profit, and many other things.
My insight was that corporations need to have a declared purpose *other* than that. and that that purpose should be *just* as important as making money. That'd make the abuses a lot harder. Sure, the shareholders could vote to change the purpose, but it'd *still* have to be something other than making a profit.
We'd probably need a third requirement. That the corporation is required to act in a manner that doesn't harm "society". Not sure what the exact wording would have to be, but the idea is that they can't go around making the world *worse*.
Of course either of those changes would gore *so* many sacred cows. But I can't really see another way preventing the myriad disasters that the currents rules have led to.
