this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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What is it with the obsession with infinite growth for every company anyways? Why can’t they be happy with a stable, still extremely high, income? The people at the top already have more money than they need but still want more for no reason
Because capitalism is broken. It's predicated on increasing share price. This means a functional company regularly making good stable income based on consistent product is a failure, because share price becomes stable if income and production remain stable.
Not really broken if that's always been it's core tenet. It's working as designed.
It's broken because infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible.
Sure, in reality. Capitalism isn't designed around reality.
So it's broken. Because it doesn't work in reality.
It's functioning exactly as designed. That's not broken.
Wouldn't the share price follow inflation, and wouldn't the stock holders keep getting dividends that themselves follow inflation? I'd say that a stagnant company can still be profitable. But yeah, there's greed and people expecting to make fast, big earnings by buying low and selling high...
Infinite growth is also impossible as there are only so many people on this planet, and even less that are able to afford these services.
Because public corporations are absolutely beholden to one goal: (eventually) returning a profit to investors.
Shareholders. If you buy a share of a company for $5, you expect it to go up in value so you can make money from your investment.
Any publicly traded company must (by law!) try to maximize profit beyond what they're already doing, to satisfy shareholders. They could be sued if they don't.
It's capitalism. Driving the economy by profit means that each company has to race to obtain as much profit as possible, or risk losing to their competitors who are trying to do the exact same thing.