[palish]

I believe the idea of "publicly-held companies" is a net negative for humanity. It encourages immoral behavior.

Obviously my thoughts are unreasonable. I wish the world were unreasonable. Because then people might empathize with each other to an unreasonable degree, resulting in far less grief and hate within our microscopic timeline of our universe.

[firemanx]

I have to disagree with you. "Publicly-held companies" don't encourage immoral behavior. People encourage immoral behavior. I know that some folks like to think of people as "basically good", but I don't think history has held that out. Humanity has proven time after time that regardless of the social structure or organization, their tendency for immoral behavior pervades each one.

"We did it for the shareholders" may be a unique excuse in the realm of organizations, but governments, churches, companies, school boards, communes, etc all suffer from problems like these. The difference with public companies is that folks can vote with their dollars, or in an adequately free economy, can band together and compete.

[pnathan]

A review of government and society prior to about 1600 (ie, the bulk of human history) does not suggest that people are inherently very nice.

A notable example is Ivan the Terrible and his society.

[wallawe]

What is the answer to 99 out of 100 questions? Money.

It is not the pubicly-held companies. It is the power of money to control, persuade, influence, or even empower.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. It is true that money doesn't buy happiness but even truer that not having money can cause unhappiness via stress among other things.

The problem is what people who have money decide to do with it and how they choose to influence the larger whole. Many of the people who have put their entire intellect towards making money, have desired to do so for the wrong reasons and therefore use it in a net negative way as you have put it.

I guess what I am saying, is that it falls on the individual to make the right decision, and not corporations, governments or societies as a whole.