[Panzer04]

Maximising profits might come at the expense of the worker, but it benefits the economy as a whole. The reason maximising profits is such an excellent goal is because it indirectly leads to maximising profit per worker (especially in lean times, when there's less cash to go around and you focus more on efficiency as opposed to revenue). The highest net benefit to society comes from having the highest possible productivity per person. Layoffs suck, but they also improve business efficiency since in general the less productive workers are laid off. It's a bit harsh to say, but those freed-up workers eventually end up somewhere else, where hopefully they fit in better, be more productive etc.

A big reason other systems fail is because they don't focus on that metric. There's no feedback loop from per-person productivity, resulting in either stagnancy or even degradation in living standards.

[savingsPossible]

If the metric is important (and it might well be! -- I bet it is) it needs not translate into more profit for amazon.

Say you want to maximize efficiency, and you think revenue per worker is a good proxy. Then you can use the extra resources for: * charitable donations * keeping the employees and putting them in an open-source charitable division

I agree that market forces are powerful and can be used to do good things. I disagree that this fact should be used to justify evil behavior and greed

(also, laying A off and hiring B is ok -- they are not, they are reducing the workforce)

(also, the argument is symmetrical. If they had not hired, and were profiting too much, I'd think that almost as greedy and evil -- the difference is the disruption of the life of the person fired)

(also, firing A and giving the money away to some charitable cause is ok)

(also, profit maximization pure and simple is ok, as long as the government has the balls to take a lot of it and redistribute, to keep capitalists from concentrating too much money -- concentration leads to distortions, in the sense that the needs of the ultra rich are prioritized. The point of having a healthy economy is to have people in general live more and better lives.)

[Panzer04]

How is any of that different to just paying out the money to shareholders, who can individually choose to champion said causes themselves? I don't see why the company should do so.

I suspect the biggest difference in how I see this compared to the feeling I get from you is that most things are positive-sum games in capitalism. One man's profits is another company's capital is another employee's wages. The profits of the company don't disappear, locked up in a bank never to be seen again. They get invested by the shareholder somewhere else, or spent on something, and so on. There's nothing inherently "greedy or evil" in this process.

This process can be very indirect (how does an investment in Apple today help? By providing the incentive for many of these companies to be built and made public in the first place, sharing their profits across many people), but it is there. Some explicit redistribution may be necessary, as in many countries with public healthcare or strong welfare systems, but having a stable core of a private market helps generate the overall resources to run everything.

Maybe there's a better system that can distribute the wealth more evenly - but the best examples we've seen thus far come from welfare-state western democracies, which all grew up on the same basis (and are all poorer on an average basis than America, who has a much weaker welfare base). These aren't necessarily related of course, America is stupendously rich in a lot of other ways, but it's food for thought.